Investment Dilemma

Most contact centers generate costs but not profits, so they are not high investment priorities for most businesses. Traditionally, centers have been slow to adopt new technologies largely due to budget constraints: Labor costs absorb roughly 70% of a contact center budget, and given the obvious need to invest in employees, there is little left for investment in technology—whose ROI is difficult to measure and whose benefits may take years to have an impact.

Read: Amazon Drivers Will Lose Jobs if They Don’t Consent to AI Monitoring

This labor vs. technology investment dilemma is self-perpetuating: Contact center attrition rates are notoriously high, as inefficient processes cause agents to feel overworked and underappreciated. Many agents turn over each year and onboarding a replacement can cost up to three times an agent’s salary. As a result, short-term budgetary concerns prevent businesses from investing in the very tools that could help solve their main long-term cost problem.

Technology as Transformer

How can businesses break this logjam? By freeing up more investment resources for innovation.

Clearly, those additional resources can only come from reducing labor costs and addressing chronic issues like agent attrition. A technology able to free significant financial resources for innovation by reducing labor costs would transform the contact center. Intelligent automation is that technology.

When it comes to improving handle time, it’s impossible for humans to manually track and proactively address instances when agents spend too much time in after-call work or leave customers on hold for too long.

But with intelligent automation, business rules are put in place to monitor these metrics and remind agents when they cross specific thresholds. This helps them stay on track to meet their KPI’s and also helps maintain consistent customer experiences.

When an agent takes a call right before a lunch break it delays the break and creates extra work for the workforce management (WFM) team, which must manually enter the exceptions across the entire agent population. With intelligent automation, ACD and WFM metrics are evaluated so that automation can proactively send agents to lunch early. This helps maintain agent engagement and eliminates manual work for the WFM team.

Read: Cybersecurity, Customer Service Should Be Top Priorities For IT Help Desk Staff

When agents select the wrong AUX state—whether by mistake or as a call avoidance tactic—manually identifying outliers is challenging and coaching agents on this behavior weeks after the fact is not effective. With intelligent automation, agents are notified in real time and the savings derived from reducing inappropriate use of AUX state is significant.

One financial services customer leveraged AUX state alerts to realize $16.8 million in annualized savings. When added together, these gains from intelligent automation can reduce labor costs in a modern contact center by 5-10% in the first year; and soon, this technology will be robust enough to make contact center agents 20% more productive.

Reducing the cost of labor from 70% to 60% or even 50% of contact center costs will free up money that is desperately needed for innovation. Improving customer experience is the ultimate goal and giving customers back those 43 days spent on hold is a great place to start.

Automation

Intelligent automation finally offers organizations a way to reduce labor costs and free up additional resources to invest in innovation.

It also provides a consistent work experience to both remote and in-center agents; this unique ability to ensure location-agnostic consistency will be a major advantage as pandemic restrictions fade and businesses move part of their customer service teams back on premises.

Intelligent automation acts as a “virtual manager” to frontline agents. By linking multiple systems and monitoring agents and center activities, it supports service-level continuity (e.g., by recognizing extended handle time problems and supporting agents with prompts for help) and agent development (e.g., by prompting agents into coaching or training when call volume dips).

This helps agents maintain focus on delivering consistent, empathetic experiences to each individual customer.

The best of technology (speed, accuracy, efficiency) and the best of humanity (creativity, flexibility, empathy) work together to reduce labor costs and solve customer issues more effectively.

The post Why Focus on People in the Age of Automation? appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Apparently, that list could soon include the meat industry, as cultured meat meat is expected to become the norm in just a few short years as scientists have developed methods and technology that can bring the production cost of cultured meat down significantly to a price that’s easy to digest for consumers.

However, the industry needs to scale up to make those prices attractive to consumers. That will require large manufacturing facilities that rely heavily on automated machines and systems to overcome the industry’s largest barrier so far.

The food industry is already heavily invested in automated systems, and it shouldn’t take long for this new industry to figure it out.

While this new industry brings with it many advantages — like a softer environmental impact, a more humane way of producing food and a healthier product — it could result in severe impacts to several industries.

Read Next: Economists Predict the Automation Takeover Will Be Bleak

Who stands to lose the most from a rise of automation in lab-grown meat?

• Cattle ranchers and chicken farmers. In the U.S., there are about 900,000 cattle ranchers with a combined annual revenue of about $70 billion.
• Livestock feed producers. This industry employs more than 900,000 jobs and accounted for about $300 billion in 2016 sales.
• According to the North American Meat Institute, the industry is responsible for 5.4 million jobs and $257 billion in wages between more than 500,000 workers.
• Refrigerated trucking. Meats need to be transported in cold units, but since lab-grown meat can be processed anywhere, the industry won’t need to rely on transportation as much.
• Leather and rendering. Unused parts of the animal are used to make several products, like pet food, glue and leather. Fewer animals killed means the scarcity of those other nonmeat products.

The post Automation In Lab-Grown Meat Could Strongly Impact The Food Industry appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Just this morning, my iPhone told me how long it would take to get to work without me even moving a finger. Thanks to my spam filter, I don’t even see the very legit emails offering me a fast $15,000 personal loan or a $100 Visa gift card.

Those artificial intelligence technology applications are small potatoes in the greater AI world, but tech companies are pushing the technology’s limits and the field is rapidly advancing — sometimes at the expense of society.

Please do develop applications and technology that make our lives easier, but we should be smart about it and not release technology that has to constantly be updated before it actually works the way it was intended.

Autonomous Vehicles

There have been dozens of documented cases of so-called self-driving cars causing accidents. Google, Uber and of course Tesla have all made headlines for their test cars or on-the-market vehicles being involved in accidents due to a reliance on self-driving technology.

Most recently, that has manifested in Tesla’s new “smart summon” feature that allows select car owners to use a smartphone to tell the car to pick them up while in a parking lot.

So, @elonmusk – My first test of Smart Summon didn’t go so well. @Tesla #Tesla #Model3 pic.twitter.com/yC1oBWdq1I

— Roddie Hasan – راضي (@eiddor) September 28, 2019

Facial Recognition

There are numerous cases of facial recognition software flat out not working at all, like in London where a controversial trial of the technology by the city’s police force to spot suspects failed 80% of the time.

Researchers from the University of Essex said the police should stop using the technology immediately. Over six trials, the tech made 42 matches of people walking around Westfield with people on a watchlist. Researchers said just eight of those matches were correct.

Read Next: IBM Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Technology Helps Agriculture Industry

Last year, the American Civil Liberties union released a study that found Amazon’s Rekognitiion system —which it markets to law enforcement across the U.S. — confused photos of 28 members of Congress with publicly available mugshots.

Healthcare

Artificial intelligence technology has found a foothold in healthcare, and most of the results have been positive, with machines and applications finding new links between genetic codes and diagnosing diseases.

However, it hasn’t been perfect.

Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, recommended unsafe and incorrect treatment for cancer patients, according to internal documents reviewed by medical news website Stat.

The company said the erroneous recommendations were the fault of training of Watson by IBM engineers and doctors at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

The post Three Verticals Where Artificial Intelligence Technology Needs To Be Better appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The new Blue Planet INS solution reduces order-to-service fallout by up to 40% and speeds up the trouble-to-resolve process by up to 30%, according to Blue Planet estimates based on customer data.

Ensuring greater alignment across IT and network operations, INS helps service providers realize the vision of a network that can quickly adapt to ever-changing end user demands, driving greater efficiencies and faster time-to-market for 5G, video, IoT and more, the company says.

Testimonial for inventory automation solution:

“Across the globe, service providers are turning to intelligent software tools to eliminate fragmented and manual processes so that they can improve network operations and quickly roll-out new services. An accurate view of inventory will play a key role in helping providers to operationally transform and reap the full rewards of software-based networks. Blue Planet INS addresses this issue through a minimally-disruptive approach to discovering, federating and reconciling network/service and inventory data to create a single source of truth.” — Dana Cooperson, Research Director, Analysys Mason

Read Next: Sealed Air Corporate Headquarters Collaboration

What it does

• provides dynamic view of network assets and services across layers
• synchronizes resources with operational support teams
• discovers network equipment
• federates data into a unified view
• reconciles discrepancies and collects that data into reports
• interfaces with OSS and management systems
• adapts and takes actions when inventory changes are needed

Learn more here.

The post Blue Planet Inventory Automation Solution appeared first on My TechDecisions.