Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of ‘The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit’

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming customer service, shifting focus from call speed and deflection to resolving customer issues. This shift is altering how companies approach AI, moving from automating tasks to orchestrating interactions between customers, AI agents and human employees. The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit discussions centered on blending humans and agentic AI to deliver better customer service experiences.

Bob Laliberte, from theCUBE Research, highlighted contact centers as ideal proving grounds for agentic AI due to their large interaction volumes, high labor costs, and visible consequences when AI fails. Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst and founder of ZK Research, noted that historically, companies measured success through average handle time and first call resolution, but these metrics are less important now.

Agentic AI can enable richer customer service interactions, but relationship management should remain the focus, according to Vinod Muthukrishnan, vice president and general manager of Webex customer experience at Cisco. His company's AI Concierge aims to provide continuous conversational context across channels.

Customer success teams should evaluate their performance based on "conversation to completion," or how effectively they resolve customer problems. Ram Rajagopalan, head of product, AI for Zoom CX at Zoom Communications, emphasized that AI agents can preserve context during handoffs between AI and human agents, preventing customers from repeating themselves or searching for answers.

Joe Rittenhouse, co-CEO of Converged Technology Professionals, suggested starting with simple after-hours queries to gain immediate benefits from AI.

Amit Mathradas, CEO and board member of Five9, shared that 99% of business practitioners believe their contact centers improved after deploying AI, but only 66% of actual users agree. This discrepancy indicates that customers still want to access human agents, as only 50% of them are satisfied with the current level of human access.

Pedro Andrade, vice president of AI and generative AI business specialist at Talkdesk, proposed a new operating model called Customer Experience Automation (CXA) to coordinate hybrid AI and human workforces effectively.