Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in the industry for several years now with many touting what it can currently do but also the potential it has to change our industry as we know it, and in some cases, it has without end users seeing the results, such as fraud detection and intelligent network monitoring and fault resolution.
In fact, Gartner recently tipped it as a top strategic technology trend for 2022. But not everyone is convinced by what AI currently offers the end user market, particularly when it comes to SMB’s.
Robin Russell, MD of Xarios, expressed his doubts about whether AI in the contact centre space, such as chatbots and speech analytics, are appreciated as “AI” by the general end user.
“I don't know whether I agree with the way that AI is applied in chatbots as I don't think they use anywhere close to the computation power or have the intelligence that you'd expect AI to have,” he told UC Today.
“I think the sentimentality data from call audio and chatbot messaging provides a valuable insight. But people still need to interpret the data and match it with real world business aims”
As AI continues to gather momentum and become integrated into other technologies, Russell questioned how suited it is to the needs of SMBs, their budgets and expectations, adding that other ‘channels’ should be integrated into the equation so that SMBs see the full benefits of the technology.
“The vast majority of businesses in the UK are under 50 employees and sometimes that technology is out of reach for their budgets,” he stated.
“If you look at the applications in the market right now, SMBs don't necessarily see the huge business benefits to them. As we evaluate where we go with AI, we need to include in other intelligence aspects and use telecoms as just one of the channels into that customer’s AI mechanism to make it more beneficial to them.”
AI for SMBs should be able to pull in other elements of unstructured data from the customer experience, such as sales information and online brand commentary, and compare it with other channels of communication information to establish how the company is viewed outside of customers calling with complaints, this could provide value to all SMBs not just contact centres.
