BluIP: Augmenting In-Sourced and Out-Sourced Contact Centers with AI Virtual Agents

Today, customers—especially the growing number of millennials—demand a higher degree of awareness and adaptive communication methods when engaging with contact centers for support. Furthermore, this new breed of consumers strongly prefer the multi-channel (voice, SMS, chat, email, etc.) engagement process to rapidly establish familiarity with the caller to provide an intuitive and assumptive experience versus having the representative start at a “name please” beginning every time they call. Although these market or customer demands are growing, many contact centers are impaired with legacy technologies, thus making it difficult to modernized without a forklift intervention. Moreover, live agent training is time consuming and expensive. Because of this reason, Enterprise CIO’s need to routinely evaluate and analyze the cost benefit to either modernize their in-house contact center systems and staff, or to outsource the contact center and staff. Based on the business’ contact center customer alignment or support needs, this traditional binary cost benefit analysis often left executive management with tough and expensive business altering decisions.

But today, CIO’s are embracing and adding a new disruptive capability to the traditional contact center service cost benefit calculus. Although, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Speech Service technologies have been around for the last 20 years, leveraging the advances in these technologies, recent economies of scale, and pulling everything together to support multi-channel AI Conversational Virtual Agents is new. “To that end, CIO’s now have another augmentation evaluation lane to consider that could reduce the dependency on live agent in contact centers and make it easier to execute insource or outsource plans,” says Steven Norris, BluIP’s VP of Business Development.

From a contact center capabilities perspective, CIO’s have traditionally focused on improving and scaling the capabilities of their live agent. But over the last couple years, they are starting to evaluate advances in AI, cognitive service options, as well as cloud communications and system integration services to take back more control, whether the contact center is insourced or outsourced.