AI is the name of the game in customer contact land. You may be starting to get a little tired of AI. But ignoring it is not an option, if it is up to AI expert and entrepreneur Job van den Berg lies. He will be speaking at the upcoming KSF Annual Congress. To reassure you: the contact center will continue to exist.

 

One of the most recent examples showing the speed at which AI is developing is the latest step of anthropic: taking over screen tasks. What is the difference with robotic process automation (RPA) where screen actions are imitated?

“Anthropic’s solution is essentially RPA with the addition of generative AI. You could say that this is how you go from RPA to IPA: intelligent process automation. Because this addition gives the solution the ability to look at the context. That’s where things often go wrong with RPA: if something changes in the context, the robot in RPA gets stuck. For example, this is the case if an RPA solution has to work with a customer number on an invoice, but someone gives that customer number a different place on that invoice. And IPA can handle unstructured information better than RPA. What Anthropic has now launched has been possible for some time.”

 

New or not, where could you use these types of applications in customer contact?

“At the moment, I think these types of applications are mainly suitable for the back office. They are good at quickly retrieving different types of information; they can also support the customer contact employee. In the US, it is now quite common to have AI agents communicate directly with customers - I will also show examples of this during my keynote at the KSF Annual Congress. In the Netherlands, we are dealing with the European AI Act, which will be implemented in 2026. If we are required to inform customers that they are speaking to a speech-controlled AI agent, I expect that many consumers will drop out. Where they take it for granted in the US, in Europe we mainly enter into discussion. That is not wrong in itself, but it is not conducive to the innovation rate. "

 

Many contact center managers are a bit fed up with the endless stream of AI hype and would rather look at what is feasible now, such as agent assist or automated summarization.

“I understand that contact center managers are sometimes a bit tired of AI. In the short term, you can already create a big advantage with the current solutions. If you don't start now, you run the risk of being too late. In three years, everyone will be using AI. That doesn't mean that everything will be AI. Quite a few companies have already failed with bad implementations of language models, think of DPD of Air Canada. Language models are good generalists and bad specialists: you have to train them very well and feed them with company-specific data. Not the technology, but the extent to which you have your data management in order will be the game changer in the coming period. That is why I would start small with AI - think of a solution such as automated summarization. That also contributes to the adoption of AI within your organization.”

 

Collaborating with AI is what the industry is now fully committed to. AI agents that support customer contact employees in all sorts of ways. But in the meantime, there are also voices that state that in five years three quarters of agent jobs disappeared is.

“A large part of the processes can be performed or supported by AI. The problem with this discussion is that many people think binary: 'it will either be AI or humans'. But customer contact agents will not become redundant. Humans can do many things that AI cannot and the reverse is also true. The work of contact center agents will change dramatically in the coming years and indeed fewer customer contact agents will be needed on the phone. But the contact center will simply continue to exist.”

 

Job van den Berg is an entrepreneur, speaker and author in the field of data and AI. He is co-founder of ai.nl and The Automation Group. He is one of the keynotes at the upcoming KSF Annual CongressFor the full program, please visit https://klantenservicefederatie.nl/ksf-jaarcongres-2024/.
Please note: Readers of have a 25% discount on a ticket. Use the discount code KSF25zip

Event, Featured, Technology KSF