In the contact centre, there is talk of little else than AI as it completely reshapes the vendor landscape, deepening the capabilities of the biggest vendors whilst a burgeoning array of upstarts and disruptors with AI native skills have entered the game. If that wasn’t confusing enough, CRM giants have parked their tanks on the lawns of the CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) vendors and every UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) provider in town is hanging their hat on their newfound CX credentials.
As organisations navigate this rapidly evolving market, they are increasingly looking for platforms that embed AI across the entire customer experience lifecycle — from customer engagement and agent assistance to analytics, automation and workflow orchestration — rather than treating AI as a standalone add-on.
Modern customer experience (CX) platforms, such as Colt's solution, are already bringing these capabilities together through integrated AI-powered voice and digital interactions, agent co-pilot tools, quality and compliance management, advanced analytics and automation orchestration, helping organisations turn AI from a concept into measurable business outcomes.
Here’s a practical guide to where AI is positioned in contact centres right now. There are use cases abound – and that’s another write up– but in these five spaces, this is where the magic happens.
1) The front door
At the front door (aka the autopilot) the customer can get what they need from a contained, conversational IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or chat assistant. Agentic AI will support fully automated customer engagements, be they voice or digital, and deliver a personal outcome. This super-smart space exists independent of the current ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) and provides new opportunity for customer engagements that don’t involve having to unseat the favoured incumbent.
2) The co-pilot
Here we supercharge human CX agents with real-time assistance. AI surfaces the information in real time, provides suggestions for follow actions and auto-wraps the call. If you need a ROI case for AI, multiply the time it takes an agent to write up a call and times it by the number of calls per year. Business case done.
3) The control centre
AI native to the vendor will analyse call recordings, offer 100% quality assurance, recommend training to a component level and even schedule it for when the agent isn’t busy. The reporting is smarter and offers insight not data. This is simply available and isn’t an add-on feature. Consider compliance in a regulated industry and being able to guarantee 100% of calls are monitored, checked and action taken…
4) Business intelligence
Every call, chat, email and wrap-up note becomes a source for business intelligence. This is the data that AI relies on. The brain of the organisation is now the contact centre where context rich data provide deep insight for CX leaders, marketeers, financial planners, facilities management and product developers. You can ask AI whatever you like or just ask it to tell you what you need to know when something interesting happens.
5) Orchestration
The newest and logical next step is orchestration. If the contact centre is where customer conversations happen, use it to automate the actions that follow a call and police the outcome. By mapping out the path to these activities and integrating the CX platform with the ordering, scheduling, messaging, provisioning systems etc. there are big efficiency gains to be made. The contact centre can tell you what events or processes happen most regularly, calculate whether the steps can be automated and write you the workflow to pilot test it.
When you start your AI journey, consider what problems could be solved, which offer the biggest (not necessarily the fastest) gains; and think about how automation can help. These are my five categories for AI in the contact centre that you might find useful. What, where and how to deploy is bigger conversation but it’s a necessary one. But, if you have a mandate to “do something with AI” and don’t know where to start – CX is a practical place to deploy AI because the uses cases are obvious, benefits are clear and the technology is proven to work.
Speak to your Colt Account Executive or contact our sales team to discover how AI can enhance your customer experience and deliver measurable business value.
