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CX leaders recognize the potential of AI to improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of customer service and are planning to expand investments in it accordingly. However, the ambition of these investments has scaled back over the past year as organizations look to overcome challenges relating to core infrastructure, mindsets, processes, and policies.
The future of AI 2022: Progressing AI maturity in the contact center
TALKDESK RESEARCH™ REPORT
In this year’s Future of AI report, we found that the majority of contact center leaders believe that investing in AI is integral to customer satisfaction and agent productivity. With customer experience on the line and an increasingly tight job market for agents, AI solutions are a clear answer
—and most contact centers have begun adopting them accordingly. Despite recognizing the potential for AI, many organizations are slow to progress to more mature levels of AI technology.
Introduction
Contact center leaders and CX professionals report feeling less confident about their understanding of AI and the business results they expect.
This comes both from a quickly evolving AI marketplace and a lack of peers that have experience dealing with AI in their contact centers. More is needed from technology vendors to partner closely with leaders to understand how best to leverage the benefits of AI solutions now, while laying the foundation for the future.
1.
Security and IT risks and issues
A strong majority understand the value of AI and automation to accelerate self-service options, improve customer satisfaction, improve productivity, and help drive revenue for the organization. Both the value and the risks of not deploying advanced AI are recognized among leaders.
The need for AI is clear to contact center leaders.
Leaders are curbing AI ambitions to address implementation barriers.
Despite consensus around the value of AI, companies are hedging in their approach to it, with continued growth in investment but scaled-back deployments and maturity.
CX professionals cite concerns related to security and IT, organizational alignment and vision, and talent gaps as their primary barriers to further deployment.
85
%
89
%
85% of CX professionals believe it is important now to leverage AI and automation.
52% of CX professionals consider lower customer satisfaction and 48% see loss of productivity as top risks of not implementing AI.
of CX professionals believe it is important to leverage AI now.
believe it will still be important four years from now.
View the full report as a PDF.
79% of companies plan to increase total spending on AI
and automation this year.
60% of companies are using AI self-service for customers, compared to 69% a year ago.
Share of companies using or actively investing in AI capabilities:
2021
2022
Self-service features for customers
69
%
60
%
9
%
Top barriers encountered implementing AI:
Security and confidentiality risks
1.
CX professionals’ confidence in understanding the AI marketplace and the evolution of technology has decreased and they are looking at vendors’ expertise to help them make informed decisions.
87% of CX professionals feel moderately to extremely familiar with AI in the contact center compared to 93%
a year ago.
35% of CX professionals say their organizations are advanced in their application of AI, down from 41%
a year ago.
Leaders could use support in navigating AI decision-making and outcomes.
What do CX leaders think?
You need to have all of the right components within your company; you need rudimentary stuff that will work for everybody. It's a very simple process to actually make your company much more efficient and utilize the capabilities of AI and machine learning. But it has to be an organizational thing. It can't just be a department thing.”
— VP GLOBAL SUPPORT, TECHNOLOGY COMPANY
To learn more about AI I just scheduled time to speak with companies because
that's really ultimately where you're going to get your knowledge is speaking
to the experts themselves.”
— HEAD OF OPERATIONS, FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY COMPANY
Explore even more. Click here to download the full report.
Half of CX professionals feel their current contact center infrastructure is inhibiting their ability to deploy advanced AI solutions—an indicator that more contact centers need to move to modern cloud infrastructures to leverage all that AI offers.
75% of CX professionals agree that AI technology will allow customer data to be more secure than with a live agent.
50% also agree their company is limited to less effective native AI solutions in their current content center architecture.
Cloud systems can help overcome AI security and IT challenges
A third significant barrier is the lack of AI professionals who can build, train, and maintain AI solutions. Agents are increasingly seen as having the skills needed to leverage AI, presenting opportunity to involve them in its training and maintenance.
44% of CX professionals agreed that their agents had the skills needed to leverage AI technology, compared to 37% who felt the same a year ago.
Just 15% of companies are using agents and their supervisors in the training and maintenance of AI today.
Involving agents in AI management can fill talent gaps.
of CX professionals in 2022 agreed that their agents had skills needed to leverage AI technology, compared to 37% who felt the same in 2021.
44
%
+
IT infrastructure
issues
2.
Resistance to change
3.
Lack of quality data
4.
Lack of
understanding
of the business
potential of AI
5.
Insufficient
availability of
talent to use it
7.
Lack of
strategic vision
8.
Insufficient
availability of
talent to build it
9.
Uncertain
of return on
investment
10.
Insufficient
availability of
talent to maintain it
6.
Expected change in AI investment
in the coming year:
VIEW FULL REPORT AS PDF
agree that AI will significantly help companies improve identity and authentication
security in the next two years.
80
%
agree that AI technology will allow customer data to be more secure than a live agent.
75
%
agree their company is limited to less effective native AI solutions in their current contact center architecture.
50
%
agree their company is unable to capitalize on advanced AI by third-party vendors due to constraints of their current contact center architecture.
47
%
"
"
How organizations train and maintain their AI systems:
Click here
5
%
Other/don't know
Internal AI/machine
learning professional
32
%
30
%
Internal IT
professional
15
%
Contact center
supervisor/agent
15
%
Internal conversational designer
2
%
External firm/
consultant
1
%
Other internal
employee
The future of AI in the contact center
Download report.
Leaders cite three main categories
of implementation challenges:
0
%
Major
decrease
(greater
than -25%)
1
%
Minor
decrease
(-1-10%)
18
%
No change
34
%
Minor
increase
(1-10%)
36
%
Moderate
increase
(11-25%)
9
%
Major
increase
(greater
than 25%)
66
%
58
8
%
%
Analyzing data
for actionable discoveries/insights
63
%
56
7
%
%
Voice-to-text capabilities
67
%
60
7
%
%
Appointment scheduling capabilities
62
%
56
6
%
%
AI model training for contact center employees
63
%
58
5
%
%
Intelligent routing/IVR
59
%
55
4
%
%
Speech analytics technology
64
%
61
3
%
%
Tools to enhance agent performance
67
%
64
3
%
%
Automatic data entry
64
%
62
2
%
%
Real-time error detection/alerts
63
%
62
1
%
%
Speech analytics technology
Hover here to see all stats
Hoover here to see all stats
31
%
33
%
Novice
2021
2022
2021
2022
41
%
35
%
Advanced
Organizations’ reported experience level
in applying AI in the contact center:
Misalignment and resistance among leaders to forming a vision around business goals for AI
2.
Gaps in the talent needed to build, use, and maintain AI
3.
The future of AI in the contact center
Download report.