Insight of the Week: The Big AI RESET.

By Kerry Robinson

Many customer service, IT and ops leaders I speak with lament the state of their systems:

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• Back end APIs are a mess, or non-existent.
• The CRM isn't as customer centric as the acronym implies
• The knowledge management system is not very 'systematic'
• Any AI they do have is not very Intelligent.

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They lust after the promise - and case studies - of beautifully crafted middleware, customer centric CRM, beautifully ordered Knowledge, and intelligent AI. But somehow they missed that wave of disruptive tech. They were too late in post. Budgets weren't approved. IT deployments got messy. Migrations were... migrations.

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But it's OK. The new wave of AI just changed the game. At many levels.

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Knowledge: You don't need a beautifully crafted Knowledge Base to get the right info into the hands of your agents and customers. We've got vector databases, knowledge graphs and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These three innovations - combined together - can turn a useless pile of documents, process flows and customer support tickets into a knowledge source more dynamic and useful that any shiny new knowledge management system. That Knowledge management migration you never did is a blessing, not a curse. You can start from the ground-up. AI first.

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CRM: You don't need a beautifully structured CRM to put customer information and interaction histories at the fingertips of agents and at the center of a customer-first personalization strategy. With generative AI, you can extract histories from raw data. Combine the outputs of multiple backends into a coherent picture, and store useful summaries of every interaction going forward. I'm not saying you don't need a decent CRM. You Do. But that CRM deployment you never did won't hold you back. You can start from the ground-up. AI first.

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Automation: You don't need a shiny new AI-powered IVR before you can deploy a generative AI powered chatbot. Classic Conversational AI like IVR and NLU systems still have a role in the voice channel. For now. But in chat, it's gen AI or the highway. Your customers have used ChatGPT and they're not going to be satisfied with a couple of irrelevant options. They want you to figure out how to solve their problem. Gen AI can do that. You can start from the ground-up. AI first.

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So lucky you. If you missed the start of the customer experience and customer service revolution, or your organization wasn't fit enough, strong enough, or brave enough to participate in the race, that's OK. It was a false start. A lot of money was spent and some marginal gains were had.

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But now the real race has begun. Generative AI is transforming customer service. Your contact center and customer service strategy has to be AI first.

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Go!

Kerry Robinson is an Oxford physicist with a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. Kerry is a technologist, scientist, and lover of data with over 20 years of experience in conversational AI. He combines business, customer experience, and technical expertise to deliver IVR, voice, and chatbot strategy and keep Waterfield Tech buzzing.

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