Contact centers are at a pivotal moment when it comes to leveraging AI to enhance customer experience (CX) and operational efficiency. With AI's adoption surging, it’s crucial to integrate it into daily workflows to extract real value.

Let’s explore what it takes to operationalize AI in contact centers and beyond, focusing on the significance of workflows and how they can help your team drive ROI.

Whitepaper

How to Operationalize AI Workflows in the Contact Center

Gain insights into AI-driven conversation intelligence workflows and their impact on efficiency and effectiveness

What is an AI workflow?

Workflows are the backbone of successful AI implementation. They define the rules for AI output, ensuring the technology aligns with employees' daily tasks. The goal is to transform AI capabilities into tangible business value.

Many experts agree that workflows are central to making AI more usable in the workforce. According to The Forrester Wave™: Conversation Intelligence For Customer Service, Q3 2023 Report, “The true standouts are those that have gone beyond the basics, crafting enterprise-ready workflows that intelligently incorporate generative AI and ML. As buyers consider their options, they should prioritize vendors that not only incorporate AI and ML but also prioritize their role in augmenting human workflows, empowering frontline agents and operations staff.”

In another recent report, Menlo Ventures highlights the acceleration of generative AI adoption through context-aware, data-rich workflows, underscoring the necessity for enterprise-ready technologies that bolster AI's utility across departments.

Operationalizing AI: Creating value-driven workflows

For any successful AI implementation, organizations should focus on solving specific problems, around which workflows are then designed. AI-driven solutions like conversation intelligence base their workflows on attributes like categories and scores. The goal is to distill customer interactions down to the trend level, providing insights into agent performance, compliance, customer sentiment and emotion, and more.

Key workflow applications for the contact center include coaching, real-time agent guidance, quality management, summarization, and collections. These workflows are designed to enhance agent performance through effective coaching, improve compliance adherence, and drive more efficient after-call work.

Across the business, customer insights can improve outcomes in departments such as marketing, product development, and sales. To truly understand the voice of the customer (VoC), it’s important to combine unsolicited customer feedback obtained via conversation intelligence with more traditional, solicited feedback methods like surveys or solicited customer reviews.

Outside the contact center, workflows can be tailored to specific departmental needs, including CX improvements, sales effectiveness, product improvements, and marketing strategy optimization. For example, on the CX front, teams can use workflows to address customer effort, satisfaction, and churn risk. For sales, marketing, and product teams, workflows can provide a deeper understanding of what customers really think. This insight can be used to help improve sales outcomes, marketing campaign effectiveness, or product quality and safety.

Proving ROI and enhancing usability through AI workflows

AI workflows are critical to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of contact centers and beyond. By focusing on the desired outcomes and value for customers, organizations can identify and implement the necessary workflows to achieve practical results with AI systems like conversation intelligence and generative AI.

The adoption of well-designed workflows can help teams drive immediate value and demonstrate the ROI of AI technologies to stakeholders. If you’d like to learn more, our latest white paper dives deeper into the topic of AI workflows, giving specific examples of how they’re used across the contact center and other departments within an organization.