CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4 - 31

THE CALL CENTER AS
STRATEGIC TOOL
Companies are starting to use this new
technology to connect all the dots. An
insurance company can, for instance,
mine all of its existing policy information
and call recordings, and then build
a body of policyholder information
around what factors look good and
what looks scary.
In fact, many companies are paying
much more attention to their contact
centers and exerting more control
over them. That's because they're no
longer simply a " call center, " they're
an interaction center. And they're so
important to brand management and
sales that the business side of the
equation has started to take more
control of their budget. It's similar to

becoming part of our lives. We have
seven of the devices throughout our
house, and for our children, it's very
natural for them to wake up ﬁrst thing
in the morning and say, " Good morning,
Alexa, " and have her tell them the day's
news and weather. (My wife, though,
isn't so chummy with Alexa yet. In fact,
she ﬁnds her creepy and calls her " Miss
A, " so she won't wake up when we're
speaking about her.)
A similar process has happened with
call centers. Take the case of a large
ﬁnancial company I know. They can
take three billion calls a year, and they
capture well over 80% of their calls
through interactive voice response. It's
the highest rate in the industry. They still
take a lot of human calls, but they've
built an incredibly easy-to-live-with
automation platform.

the evolution of IT over the last decade,
where we moved from IT having its own
budget to a client-funded model.
Companies are right to make that
change. The fact is that the amount of
speech analytics information captured
by most contact centers today is
breathtaking. Our ability to humanize AI
assistance is getting better and better
every day. You don't have the weird
disconnects, you don't have the slow
handoffs, the interaction is becoming
much more natural.

" The speed of technology
combined with the accelerating
speed of computation is
helping to humanize AI more
and more. You don't have the
weird disconnects, you don't
have the slow handoffs, the
interaction is becoming much
more natural. "

GETTING
COMFORTABLE
WITH AI
People are also getting more used to
these interactions. I'm amazed at how
quickly digital assistants like Alexa are

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CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4
