Dive Brief:
- Zendesk and Zoom each announced updates to their AI-powered contact center solutions last week, including automated agents.
- Zendesk introduced omnichannel AI assistants through a partnership with Poly.AI. The AI assistants, which are both employee- and customer-facing, can handle customer issues across any channel, including voice. The company also upgraded its AI-powered analysis capabilities.
- Zoom Contact Center’s AI agents can now handle multi-intent inquiries, adressing multiple customer issues in a single session. The company plans to extend its virtual assistant capabilities to phone calls later this year.
Dive Insight:
Voice resolution is emerging as the next frontier of generative AI advancements in the contact center.
The advent of large language models is essential for voice channel resolution that goes above and beyond what older forms of self-service can manage, according to Jon Aniano, SVP of product and CRM applications at Zendesk.
Traditional interactive voice response uses a limited set of hard-coded solutions that aim to match up with what the caller needs, according to Aniano.
The new generation of voice agents is designed to be much more flexible, Aniano said. These tools can take a contact center’s knowledge base and set of defined actions, use generative AI to identify issues and respond with instructions using natural language.
“It used to be completely hard-coded, very statistics-based in terms of, ‘Hey, maybe we can match 5% of these things and get them resolved,’” Aniano told CX Dive. “Now we're matching a much wider spectrum of customer issues, and we're getting resolutions faster. We're going from deflection to another tool for actual resolution and satisfaction.”
AI voice agents may be getting more powerful, but many consumers remain distrustful. Seven in 10 consumers said they trust voice agents the same or less in 2024 than they did in 2023 despite advancements in AI, according to a survey of over 500 consumers by voice AI platform Tenyx released in July.
More than two-thirds of respondents said they felt frustrated when speaking with automated voice agents. Another two-thirds said they would lose loyalty to a brand, or even choose to stop shopping with it, following a negative voice agent experience.
These negative attitudes could change if voice agents improve; 86% of respondents said they would be willing to use automated voice agents if their capabilities were the same as a human agent.
