Comparing The Gartner Hype Cycle for AI & Customer Service
The Intersection Of AI & Customer Service
Last year Gartner released a Hype Cycle report for:
1️⃣ Artificial Intelligence (AI) &
2️⃣ Customer Service (CS)
💡 What makes these two Hype Cycles particularly interesting is the intersection of AI and CS.
⭐️ A general area of overlap is Contact Centre AI (CCAI). Gartner has identified 18 use-cases where AI can be implemented in the Contact Centre.
⭐️ A specific area of overlap is Digital Assistants (Chatbots / Voicebots).
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Chatbots & Contact Centre implementations
Considering the image below, within the AI Hype Cycle report, chatbots are in the trough of disillusionment with a < 2 year period to reach the slope of enlightenment.
However, in the CS Hype Cycle, virtual assistants, or chatbots, are already on the slope of enlightenment, with < 2 years in reaching the plateau of productivity.
This discrepancy might be due to the fact that the CS report is only considering specific use-case and does not take into consideration any wider implementations.
Whilst with the AI report the complete ambit of CAI implementations are considered.
One reason might be that Chatbot implementations are more successful in Contact Centre implementations due to:
- Live agent assistance being readily available and standard
- Highly contextualised and domain specific implementations are possible
- The prevalence of relevant data for Conversation Design and NLU Design, like customer conversations, live agent chat transcripts, IVR call-flows, agent workflows, etc.
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Orchestration
An interesting item on the Hype Cycle for CS is the Customer Engagement Hub (CEH) concept.
Gartner sees the concept of a customer engagement hub (CEH) as the following:
- An architectural framework
- Orchestrating multiple systems to proactively engage customers and ensures contextually relevant interactions at every stage of the customer journey.
- Spanning across departments and synchronise marketing, sales and customer service processes.
- With an array of digital touch-points to reach customers anytime and anywhere, CEHs are critical for organisations to execute their multi-experience strategy.
I’m currently the Chief Evangelist @ HumanFirst. I explore and write about all things at the intersection of AI and language; ranging from LLMs, Chatbots, Voicebots, Development Frameworks, Data-Centric latent spaces and more.
