Conversational AI is Now the Heart of Customer Experience

Conversational AI is Now the Heart of Customer Experience

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the shining star of contact center innovation and began gaining features, focus, and adoption in 2022. AI is enhancing capabilities across the contact center spectrum: from agent hiring and training, resource forecasting, and quality and performance management to process automation, workforce optimization, and customer self-service.

When people talk about the infusion of AI across the customer contact landscape, they reflect on the usage of numerous technologies under “the umbrella of AI.” This set of technologies is diverse and encompasses several subsets. For example, AI can include the use of speech technologies, such as natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP), automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and speech-to-text (STT) processing.

Conversational AI (CAI) pulls from the above pieces but is more narrowly focused on providing a conversation between a human and its digital counterpart. With multiple names, including bot, chatbot, agent assist, virtual agent (VA), or intelligent virtual assistant (IVA), CAI provides self-service options for customers and assistance to employees across the front and back office, creating a hybrid digital/human workforce.

This insight details the state of conversational AI in the contact center as it is today, highlights industry innovations, and outlines growth opportunities that solution providers can attain by taking advantage of CAI technologies. It also provides a sampling of use cases and the competitive landscape for CAI.