RFP Questions to Ask About AI in the Contact Center

You’ve got your game face on. You’re prepared for the future of customer service. And you’re ready for your outsourced customer service RFP to hit the road and bring you some stellar options for a new contact center partner. But are you asking the right questions about artificial intelligence? While AI capabilities in the contact center are still evolving, AI offers powerful opportunities to drive cost out of your business and improve the customer experience (and let’s be real, a growing segment of consumers simply prefer automated or self-serve support) – so asking your potential strategic partners the right questions is critical.

We want to make it easy for you. Here’s the short list of the best questions to ask about AI in the contact center.

(Looking for more contact center RFP questions? Download our complimentary RFP template today – just click here.)

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CAPABILITIES & PROCESS

Let’s start at the foundation. A potential contact center partner should be able to articulate their particular capabilities and processes in regards to AI solutions. In their answers to the following questions, they should be addressing chatbots, self-service, machine learning, big data, and more.

Additionally, test the maturity of their AI solutions -  how they have evolved those solutions over time, and how they are prepared for future updates.  You need a trusted partner who knows what they’re doing and aims to stay ahead of the curve.

#1 Describe your current AI capabilities and services.

#2 How long have you been delivering AI solutions as part of your contact center services?

#3 How are you prepared for the future of AI?

BALANCING MAN & MACHINE

AI can be a powerful tool, but it is just one cog in the customer care engine. AI should enhance the customer experience through seamless, elegant integration with live agent support – allowing agents to focus on higher value or higher complexity scenarios requiring human intelligence and decision-making. Chatbots and other tools can handle straightforward transactional interactions – at large volume and with an impressive capacity for personalization – but when customer support scenarios get complex or things simply go sideways, humans must be there to take care of the customer.

#4 Provide a sample playbook (or process flow) for escalating a customer service interaction from AI to live agents.

#5 What KPIs/metrics do you measure in tracking the effectiveness of your escalations from AI to live agent? (Example: time to answer, critical alert wait time, transfer request accept rate, transferred chats cancelled in queue)

INTEGRATION & MIGRATION

You might be excited by the concept of adding AI to your omnichannel offering, but many companies are equally intimidated by the thought of implementing it into their business.

Migrating and integrating AI into your existing infrastructure poses some challenges, not least of which are inefficiencies, downtime, and duplicated processes. Your contact center partner must be prepared to tackle every possible challenge and set you up for efficiency and success.

#6 What IT resources can you provide to support the migration and integration of AI into our customer service solution?

#7 Provide an example of a successful implementation of AI into an existing customer care solution. Include implementation timelines and resources required on both the client/contact center sides of the equation.

MEASURING SUCCESS

AI for the sake of AI doesn’t automatically take your business to the next level of success. You need to ensure that your customer support solution is being measured holistically, particularly when you introduce AI as part of an efficiency initiative. Metrics like AHT and FCR are basic enough; find out how your potential vendor is also measuring customer experience and satisfaction – and how that is impacted by AI.

#8 What KPIs or other metrics do you use to assess the performance of your AI tools?

#9 How do you measure the impact and effectiveness of your AI strategy?

#10 What steps do you take outcomes of your AI strategy are falling short of expectations?

USE CASE

Let’s face it, you may not want to be the guinea pig when it comes to AI. Get some case studies from similar projects your potential vendor has worked on. If possible, even get some references from their existing client base. Ideally, their experience with AI is in a similar industry vertical or service type to your own.

#11 What similar projects are you currently using AI technology for? Describe the project and your approach for implementing AI tools. What results have you seen?

Asking the Right Questions About AI in the Contact Center

At the end of the day, contact center AI is about enhancing the customer experience. Knowing that a potential contact center partner has AI options in their toolkit isn’t enough. Your RFP process can go deeper, asking pointed questions about their capabilities, processes, success measurements, and real-life examples.

Source: https://blueocean.ca/rfp-questions-ai-contact-center/

2020 Buyers Guide

Get Listed

Analytics

 

1.)

Acqueon Technologies Inc. Acqueon's AI-driven conversational engagement software enables sales, marketing and service organizations to engage in emotionally connected dialogs with customers via their channel of choice for significantly improved results. The Acqueon suite adds multichannel campaign management, contact center analytics, desktop, and CRM connectors for your contact center software of choice, including Amazon Connect, Cisco, Nice inContact, and Twilio. Acqueon conversational engagement software leverages the Acqueon IQ platform to aggregate data from the various applications, assemble rich customer contexts, and drive next-best-action using powerful statistical and predictive models. PH: +1 888-946-6878 https://www.acqueon.com/

2.)

CUSTOMER SQUARE CROSSCRM.CX - CRM Dataviz Module CROSS-CRM manages daily interconnection with your CRM tools to centralize data and analyse CX on all channels, and is able to provide deep analytics insights. All the Kpi’S are here for precise control of your Customer Relationship : Interactions - Quality - Satisfaction - Campains forecast MyClient Filters, Data Extraction, Custom Views, dates sheets, email subscriptions, xls Extracts, images, pdf PLUS ! Automated extracts for integration to third party applications. https://cross-crm.com/index.php/en/crmdataviz3

3.)

Lieber & Associates Contact center Analytics and Metrics Lieber & Associates provides services to develop, interpret, and improve contact center metrics and analytics. The firm's experience spans forecasting, customer service, order-taking, lead-qualification, sales, segmentation, media-source-tracking, and testing design. L&A's president pioneered segmentation for telephone scripts and the tri-level service level metric. He brings broad analytics experience to contact centers. PH: +1-773-325-0608 https://www.lieberandassociates.com/Consulting/strategy-and-management-study-call-contact-center.html

4.)

Noble Systems Noble IQ Turn business insights into actionable intelligence. Noble’s IQsolutions provide you with rich and robust customer data that can transform your business. Automate decision making and campaign management and refine the quality of interactions with precision and efficiency. We have developed proprietary and patented tools to help you make sense of data on your current operations and then help you make strategic decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Identify who your best customers and prospects are and the ideal methods to reach them. Understand what types of campaigns work best for your business and how to optimize underperforming campaigns. And nake real-time decisions rather than looking back to see what went wrong. PH: +61 (0) 3.9008.1700 https://www.noblesystems.com/solutions/business-insights-analytics/

5.)

PRILINK SIP-Trunk Demarc Monitor Analyzes SIP signalling and RTP audio stream of every call passing through the network demarcation point. Provide a real time 24/7/365 network baseline database that contains the IP bandwidth, call traffic of up to 128 voice groups, Call Detail Record (CDR), call blockage and MOS voice quality. All information are displayed in SIP-Trunk dashboards and are used in many applications, such as Telco collaboration, UC/CC analytics, Work Force Optimization (WFO) and caller identification. PH: 905-882-4488 https://www.prilink.com/sip-trunk-analytics

 

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