I’m a big believer in improving key business outcomes using an artificial intelligence (AI) solution approach — the benefits are numerous and many of my colleagues have blogged about topics like winning over prospects with predictive engagement, ways to drive better business outcomes with customer experience and the customer journey, and how to integrate real-time predictive engagement into your systems. This blog is for people who are sold on the value of AI already — and who have defined use cases for their contact centers. Let’s take a look at how to get there.

In this series of blogs, we’ll explore new technology and what it can do for your contact center experiences — and, in particular, we’ll look at what the path from A to B looks like. AI is top of mind for consideration these days, so let’s start there.

AI can be overwhelming if you don’t have a clear path to move forward. It’s easy to prove better outcomes, but it can feel intimidating to see the way forward. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here are three things to keep in mind on the road to AI.

  1. Start with data.

The first conversations will be all about data. The key is to ensure we are capturing enough data to allow a holistic experience to be provided. You’ll need to examine each phase of your customer experience and make a map of your data environment that includes:

  • What data you have today and where it lives
  • Where and when data needs to be delivered and captured — and to whom data should be available
  • How to ensure that data is available and continuously high-quality

To get here, we can conduct an audit to understand your current data status and advise you on what data is needed at each phase of the experience. For example, if your use case involves implementing predictive engagement, our AI-enabled solution automatically collects and stores various website visitor information. We’ll then work with you to identify all points of interaction with your site so we can track a visitor’s progress and then decide which conditions indicate the right time to reach out.

Data must be stored so that it can be reused across services and products. Planning that out from Day 1 is key. You’ll learn how to take advantage of a wide range of AI and machine learning services, data streams and data stores within your SaaS platform. That’ll provide building blocks for scalable, secure and feature-rich AI products. And by using industry-standard APIs and custom events, you’ll be able to communicate seamlessly with a customer’s other key platforms. Our public APIs enables business to leverage key events to drive personalized engagement with customers.

  1. Achieve agile delivery.

Roll out your new AI capabilities in phases, starting with the point in the customer experience where you have the biggest need. You might start at one of the following points.

  • Predictive engagement helps you find, win, and keep online prospects and customers by engaging with them at the right time — with the right resources and actions.
  • Conversational AI leverages chatbots and voicebots to unify and orchestrate native and third-party bots across all messaging and voice channels while optimizing the customer journey.
  • Agent Assistance provides context about the customer journey so far, live transcripts of the conversation and relevant real-time suggestions on the agent’s omnichannel desktop.
  • Predictive routing matches the best interaction to the best agent to maximize a given outcome (KPI).
  • Forecasting and scheduling capabilities tightly integrate with your contact center platform and routing, enabling you to leverage data to manage your employees and their skills from a single location.

We’ll help you pinpoint which starting point best fits your business strategy. Then you can use our workshops and design sessions to determine how to build AI into your ecosystem so you can implement and take advantage of the next AI capability.

  1. Integrate your business data events for real-time personalized engagement.

Next, we’ll discuss data and how to leverage your business system data to proactively engage with your customers. Using key information gathered about your customers can drive inflection points in engagement.  The Genesys CloudTM platform gives you the platform necessary to have real-time personalized data at all steps, which is critical to understanding and influencing the experience. Centralize your business data to streamline customer engagement and expertly handle those inflection points.

Genesys provides a range of services and strategies for setting up, deploying and optimizing AI in your contact center. Email your questions to our experts at consulting@genesys.com to get a clear picture of what your road to AI-infused experiences looks like.