Is the CX industry ever not going through some sort of significant change? Our decades of experience say otherwise. But what’s different this time? To start, larger societal forces like the COVID-19 pandemic and increased worker mobility are shaping worker behavior. In our industry, this means that agents churn more frequently and are looking for reduced workloads. As we’ve been discussing, artificial intelligence can help improve agent satisfaction and potentially reduce attrition in the agent population. And in turn, that can help agents offer better customer experiences, which can translate directly into growth for your business. In other words, happier agents mean more efficient agents, and that’s good for your business.
As we’ve explored in our last post in this series, wrapup time is a key area to focus on for artificial intelligence enhancements to improve agent experiences. The most exciting part about what we’re going to discuss is that you can achieve positive ROI almost immediately by reducing wrapup time. And best of all, the barriers to entry to access these capabilities are lower than ever before.
So, how do we unlock the power of AI to get happier agents on day one? For this example, it starts with transcription. You may have seen this referred to as “speech to text” (STT), “automated speech recognition” (ASR), or just “transcription.” They all refer to the same powerful technology: transforming spoken audio into written text. Now, speech to text is not a new technology. It’s been around for a long time. You may have used it in a work or personal context. Traditionally, these STT systems struggled with accuracy, often yielding fairly poor results that misspelled common words. They were also expensive, which made it hard to justify the cost when performance was weak. And they were slow to deploy, which compounded the challenges of accuracy and cost.
All of that has changed. We’re now in an era with highly accurate AI-powered transcription that requires no specialized “training” (i.e., the configuration of the system to respond to your specific audio) and no separate vendors to access. Your CX platform can and should offer transcription in the application and make it easy to set up and use. These advances have been driven by innovations in the underlying AI engines that power these operations. You may have heard of OpenAI, or ChatGPT, in the news quite a bit. Interestingly, neither of them were primarily built for transcription! They have different focuses, specifically in text generation. Transcription is built on different language models. What’s even better is that newer, transcription-specific models are less resource-intensive. An additional benefit is that the underlying technology is available to many different vendors, which has increased competition, driven down cost, and improved performance as companies compete for market share in this AI-powered transcription space.
So, let’s recap before looking at the specific use case. We’ve got highly accurate speech to text transformation. We’ve got lower barriers to entry than ever before, where you can toggle these features on with a few clicks. The last piece is moving from post-call to near real-time transcription. With these new AI engines, you can get transcription back in your CX platform while a call is happening, often with a very short delay around 1-2 seconds. This means that not only can we help an agent with reducing wrapup time (like we discussed last time), but we can also help the agent during an interaction.
Once we get transcribed text back (whether real time or post-call), we can unlock some very powerful capabilities. One of those is summarization. Instead of an agent needing to remember the details of a call and then note those afterward, the AI-powered summary can be fed automatically into the agent’s screen. In this case, the agent simply needs to read the AI summary and make any minor changes before approving it. Since wrapup time can often take several minutes of note-taking by an agent, a strong AI summary can save time immediately. That agent can then take more interactions and help additional customers, which can reduce wait time and decreased abandon rates. This is a net positive and can be achieved almost immediately, since AI transcription and summarization should be able to be turned on with a few clicks in your CX platform. If it isn’t, we’d love to talk with you about whether Thrio is a better match.
So we’ve established the immediate ROI of AI transcription and summarization via reduced wrapup time. Based on your labor costs, you should be able to see cost savings immediately and across your agent population. And remember– happier agents = more efficient agents.
In our next post, we’ll look at several other use cases for real time transcription that can save your agents time and frustration and improve CX.
In our last post, we looked at why agent satisfaction matters so much.