Don’t Get Burned By: Unproven GenAI Point Solutions

By Replicant
May 20, 2024

As the pressure to implement AI grows, success for most contact centers will be defined by their ability to navigate a complex environment where the wrong decisions can have long-term detrimental effects.

Our latest guide, How to Harness the Power of GenAI While Avoiding CX Risks, is designed to help contact center leaders sort through the intricate world of AI solutions, offering a detailed look at four of the most common approaches and illuminating the biggest risks to avoid with each.

By focusing on informed decision-making, this guide will empower leaders to harness the benefits of GenAI without falling into common pitfalls that can set you back years.

The biggest risks of purchasing an unproven point solution

Implementing GenAI through any number of recently launched point solutions can be enticing, especially when presented with flashy demonstrations.

However, these solutions often carry the highest level of risk that can quickly undermine their initial appeal. CX leaders must critically assess claims from point solutions to ensure they deliver stable and effective enhancements to customer experience and operations.

Lower performance across fewer use cases: Point solutions are often equipped to resolve simple requests like routing and authentication, but struggle to resolve complex calls that make a larger impact on ROI. Therefore, when evaluating a point solution, leaders should ask for their average resolution rate specific to the most complex use case they could foresee automating.

Without a high resolution rate, contact centers will see only marginal gains on their most important KPIs as agents continue to receive escalations and customers grow frustrated with an incomplete automation experience. A point solution should have a proven track record of resolving a majority of requests for complex use cases like appointment scheduling and FAQs.

A lack of reliable business process: Without the proper infrastructure, GenAI will interpret requests differently over time, leading to inconsistent responses or actions. And without the proper controls and integrations, GenAI is prone to determine business processes on its own, leading to the kind of mistakes that most commonly become headlines, like erroneously promised prices or refunds.

While demos can make solutions appear to be effective enough to be fully independent, no amount of perceived ease-of-use is worth putting your customers, yourself, and your brand at risk. Any solution that uses GenAI should feature a language layer or firewall between the input, the LLM and what is ultimately spoken to the caller. This is the only way to guarantee AI follows your scripts and workflows by validating every piece of data generative models return.

Unproven security: In the realm of AI, the line between accuracy and security can quickly blur. GenAI inherently harbors biases found in the billions of texts (essentially the entire internet) leveraged to train them.

Without the requisite guardrails, point solutions that are still in the process of becoming established have the highest risk of producing hallucinations, half-truths, and unsafe responses – all of which make them unfit for enterprise use.

In addition, solutions should be able to clearly demonstrate that personal customer data is never used as training data and that third-party Large Language Models can’t access sensitive data. These AI safety measures should of course always be supplements on top of standard certifications like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI and SOC 2 Type II.

Spotty long-term support: A proven approach to conversation design that serves every customer, minimizes escalations and handles the infinite ways callers speak is key to achieving higher resolution. This is only achievable through support and expertise.

With point solutions, contact centers are at risk of purchasing a technology that lacks the experience needed to maintain and improve performance over time. In addition, the nature of 24/7, always-on AI makes it that much more valuable to have a dedicated support team in your time zone to rely on.

Separating promise from peril

The primary risks of less proven points solutions center on unpredictability. For enterprise contact centers, not knowing how an AI solution will perform, what it will say to customers, and how it will decide the best course of action for each request makes many solutions in this category non-viable. To separate claims from substance, contact centers should ask pointed questions around performance metrics, conversation design, support and seek case studies during their evaluation.

Get the full guide

When done right, GenAI holds the potential to drastically improve both customer experiences and contact center operations. But when done wrong, there are countless ways organizations can put their callers, their brand and their bottom line at risk.

Download the full guide and learn how to harness the power of AI while gaining full peace of mind by building the right strategy for your organization:

📘 DOWNLOAD | Don’t Get Burned: How to Harness The Power of GenAI While Avoiding CX Risks