Is your contact center AI going to be a concierge or a bouncer? That's the decision to make before you turn it on, said ICMI co-founder Brad Cleveland.
Contact center AI vendors sell automation, a vision of a future in which technology handles the bulk of customer inquiries and a lot of FOMO (fear of missing out), said Brad Cleveland, a founding partner and former president and CEO of International Customer Management Institute (ICMI).
Customer service leaders will assemble next week in Orlando, Fla., for ICMI's Contact Center Expo. We sat down with Cleveland to find out what is actually happening on the ground in contact centers -- where his consulting and advisory work leads him -- outside the vendor hype bubble.
Editor's note: This Q&A was edited for clarity and brevity.
What is the state of AI in contact centers right now?
Brad Cleveland: We're not seeing the wholesale transformation vendors are describing. We're somewhere between hype and reality. AI is delivering real value -- things like summarization, agent assistance, knowledge retrieval, translation in some cases and handling routine interactions.
Most contact centers are absolutely expected to increase use of AI in the near, medium and long term. However, most organizations are still figuring out how to integrate it into their operations and get their employees comfortable with it. They're working on processes to ensure quality and safeguards. Those unknowns aren't always anticipated well, so the technology is moving faster than most organizations are putting it to use right now.
ICMI co-founder, former president and current advisor Brad Cleveland
Cleveland: I do keynotes in front of broad cross-sections of contact center leaders, and I ask a simple question: Show a hand if your workload is going up, staying about the same, or going down. The overwhelming majority -- usually with chuckles and head nods because this wasn't supposed to happen -- say their workloads are increasing.
The more routine interactions that automation handles, the more complexity is left with our humans.
Brad Cleveland, ICMI co-founder and former CEO
Let me rattle off some reasons we're seeing this all the time:
Unmet demand: In many cases, customers couldn't get through quickly before. If you improve access, suppressed demand begins to surface.
Product and service complexity: Think of what's happening in verticals. I mean, financial services and changes there. Insurance -- talk about a vertical going through a lot of change! Healthcare and anything technology-related, all the connected devices. The issues that customers are bringing to us are getting more and more complicated -- and no, AI is not drawing from perfect knowledge and solving all those things for us. It's not happening.
More channels: Phone, text, email, chat, social media, video, all of that. Any contact center leader will tell you that if you add one, it doesn't take that much away from the others.
Then there's the self-service paradox: the more routine interactions that automation handles, the more complexity is left with our humans.
Security and fraud are another issue: Scams are becoming more sophisticated, and that's generating contacts as people double- and triple-check possible security and fraud incidents. That's its own type of work that's emerging.
There are so many things -- mergers, subscription models, new products, CX initiatives -- all these internal business changes. Our advice is: don't count your chickens until they hatch; don't count on workload reductions from AI until you actually see how things play out.
How are entry-level agents supposed to get jobs and learn what to do if AI is automating all the low-level work? Cleveland: I absolutely share that concern. If AI handles the easy stuff, where do tomorrow's experts come from? You can't eliminate the bottom rung of the career ladder and expect people to magically make their way to higher tiers and be proficient and ready to go.
Organizations will have to rethink how they recruit, train and develop employees. AI can actually help with that through simulations and coaching.
How does workforce management change when you have a mix of AI agents, humans and managers?
Cleveland: We've had multiple channels and self-service in all its forms for years now. Social media can create contact center demand in a heartbeat. So it's not like we haven't had some practice at anticipating new kinds of work.
Our encouragement is always to develop your customer access strategy, so you've got the components clearly laid out. Who are your customers, what needs do they have and what channels do you have? Lay out those components very clearly, and then know where change is happening as things evolve. Run scenarios -- play "what-if?" -- ahead of time.
Analysts tell me that AI will create a few jobs but eliminate many more than it creates. What do you see from your perspective?
Cleveland: Not to that degree. We're absolutely seeing new responsibilities in areas such as AI oversight and knowledge management, which are huge right now. We've got to have the right knowledge, AI capabilities, quality and governance. All of those things are absolutely new responsibilities, but most of the time they aren't new jobs. They're new dimensions of existing jobs in contact centers.
So contact center leaders need to understand technology, operations and customer experience more deeply than ever. But it's not like we're tacking on a bunch of new job roles.
Do you want AI to be a concierge or a bouncer? The answer is up to you.
Brad Cleveland, ICMI co-founder and former CEO
Cleveland: We're all customers. We're all experiencing the breadth of possibilities. I ask our clients: Do you want AI to be a concierge or a bouncer? The answer is up to you.
The experience you design for your customers is up to you. It's not about the technology; it's about how you use it. So the results are a mix. Some are trying to automate -- a kind of short-term approach. Others are using AI to develop richer, better experiences with their customers. Our advice is: If you want to do this right, test, test, test. Know that the implementations are iterative, so keep improving them.
What's the average ICMI attendee looking for this year, besides wanting to pull less of their hair out in frustration?
Cleveland: How do we make life good for our customers and our internal team? They're pulling their hair out in a lot of cases. They want to know where things really are, to separate the hype from the reality. They want practical answers. What's working? What's not? Where should we not use some of these new capabilities, and where should we absolutely prioritize their implementation? How do we prepare our teams? How do we talk to our senior leaders, and how do we distinguish vendor promises from what organizations can and are realistically deploying?
My sense is they don't want another conceptual presentation on the future. They want to know what will work Monday morning -- and how to prepare for the future. We're thinking about both things.
What's this going to look like in two years?
Cleveland: AI will be embedded in almost every part of contact center operations. Employees will have better real-time assistance. AI agents will be working alongside human agents. That's all going to happen.
But I also think the industry will rediscover the basics of accessibility and quality. Somehow, we've gotten off track in a lot of cases -- the foundation of customer accessibility and service quality. It's the foundation on which you build AI. AI doesn't deploy itself, and it doesn't know where you want to take things.
I think the most important change out of all that is going to be leadership. The best contact centers won't just use AI to handle contacts -- they will use it to develop better relationships with their customers and to use insight across the entire organization.
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.
