The AI Implementation

Guide for Call Centers

Everything you need
to actually start using AI now
Introduction
AI has countless benefits for call centers. It helps increase employee productivity, customer
satisfaction, revenue growth, and more. Not only that, it has become an essential part of
keeping up with the competition.

But despite its importance, actually implementing AI is a serious challenge for call centers.

Which is why we’ve created this guide, which has everything you need to feel confident in
understanding, implementing, and harnessing the benefits of AI for your business. You’ll
learn:

● The consequences of not using AI

● How to solve for the top implementation challenges
● Clear steps to take with your first AI tool

And more. This is the action plan you need to stay competitive in the AI world. So let’s dive
in.

Table of contents
● Why get started with AI?
● How to implement AI in business: Top challenges
● How to implement AI successfully: 7 steps
● Getting started with AI: Questions to ask before choosing an AI tool
Why get started with AI?
There are three core reasons why implementing AI is important for your call center: its
benefits, the additional value it brings, and the consequences of not implementing it. Let’s
take a look.

The benefits of AI
The most obvious reason to adopt AI is for its benefits. It saves time, improves the customer
experience, reduces employee turnover, lowers operational costs, and more. Learn more
about these specific benefits in our guide to AI.
The added value of AI
“Added value” is not the same as “benefits.” What we mean by that is, automation has the
benefit of saving you time, but it will only ever do the task you program it to do—nothing
more. It still requires a mind behind it to command the task.

AI, on the other hand, can come up with tasks on its own, perform them, and get better at
them over time. And in some cases, it can do things that humans can’t, like surface insights
from large data sets. That is the added value.
The consequences of not implementing AI
Not implementing AI doesn’t just mean that you won’t experience positive benefits. It has
negative consequences. AI is becoming the standard, just like automation already has. If you
don’t align with where the landscape is headed, you’re going to fall short of your customer,
employee, and technology needs.

Increased prevalence and accessibility, cost reduction, and competitive pressure are among
the top reasons businesses are implementing AI. Data source
How to implement AI in business:
Top challenges
While most call centers understand AI’s ability to improve customer satisfaction, enhance
employee productivity and retention, and ultimately drive revenue, there are just as many
concerns and barriers to implementing it. Here are some of them:

● Data security. AI relies on large

amounts of data, which has
implications for the security of the
data AI is relying on as well as the
accuracy of the information AI is
putting forth. For call centers, the
main concern is customer data
breaches. It will be important to
have proper encryption and regular
audits to mitigate these risks.

● IT limitations. Many call centers

don’t have the infrastructure in
place to support AI. In fact, many
are still working on their transition
to digital. The challenge with
replatforming is the initial
disruption it causes, but a
temporary disruption for the sake of
long-term performance
improvement is a far better path
than gradually declining in
performance through the use of
deprecating platforms.
Data source

● Understanding how to use it. AI is not only new, but it also has infinitely many use
cases and everyone is coming up with solutions. Decision makers are having a hard
time wrapping their minds around the best way to use it, who to trust, and how much
to invest in it.
 ● Resistance to change. Implementing AI means changes to infrastructure, processes,
and individual roles and responsibilities. It is not easy to get organization-wide
alignment on
● Talent gaps. Although AI is becoming more accessible to the everyday employee, it
still requires particular skill sets. Leaders need to determine the scenarios for
upskilling, replacing, and bringing on new employees.

This guide aims to help you break down those barriers so you can feel confident in
implementing AI for your call center.

How to implement AI successfully: 7 steps

Hopefully, the above-listed challenges either validated your concerns or brought to your
attention the considerations you hadn’t thought of. Either way, the steps we’ve outlined
below will help you address those challenges so you can experience more benefits of AI
than risks.
1. Educate yourself on AI
Everyone is offering AI now, and without the proper knowledge it will be hard to determine
your needs and who to trust. Our guide to AI can be helpful here, but there are plenty other
resources available. Make sure you understand how AI differs from automation, as well as
the common types, use cases, and terms within your industry. For example: generative AI,
sentiment analysis, agent assist, and predictive analytics are all concepts to familiarize
yourself with.

2. Identify your use case

AI can do a lot of things, but you’re not going to implement it everywhere all at once. To
identify where to implement it first, consider what it would look like to implement AI in each
department—not just level of impact but also level of effort—and look at how the impact
would tie back to your overall business goals.

Currently, sales and marketing are the top area in which AI is being used. Data source
3. Set your goals and benchmarks
Once you have your use case and department, you can then determine which KPIs the AI
will be responsible for improving. Identify your baseline metrics so you can clearly see
whether the AI is working and what kind of ROI you’re getting from it.

4. Be prepared to adjust KPIs

For call centers especially, AI is empowering employees to shift away from the quantitative
and toward the qualitative. For example, you can train your Hatch AI bot to handle the initial
conversations with inbound leads. The bot will qualify the lead, then either book an
appointment or route to a rep if needed.

In this case, the number of conversations handled per day and response speed would be the
quantitative KPI that the AI would be in charge of, while your humans can focus on the
qualitative metrics like appointment set rate, close rate, and customer satisfaction score.

This also may open you up to address new KPIs like employee satisfaction and retention
rates.
5. Assess your IT infrastructure
Make sure your current tech stack can accommodate not just new AI technology, but also
any influxes that may result from better performance. For example, you may have a higher
volume of messaging going back and forth, or your messages might require more
bandwidth if they contain images and video. Now is a good time to conduct an audit of your
tech stack to ensure it is as lean as possible, and then assess its ability to integrate and
scale.

6. Educate and train your employees

Before you even begin to train your team members on using AI, it’s important to first educate
them on its purpose within your business. They’ll need to understand things like:

● The benefits of the tool within their department

● How the tool will augment their performance—not replace their jobs
● What will change in processes and platforms
● Your projected timeline
● New skills and expectations
● How you will equip them

Aligning everyone on the above will reduce resistance and fears, and will make training that
much easier.

7. Refine your transparency and ethics principles

AI has come into the world and evolved rapidly, so there are security and ethical concerns.
Having full transparency and awareness around these topics as you move to implement AI
will reassure your customers and your team moving forward.
Getting started with AI: Questions to ask
before choosing an AI tool
The above steps will help you to implement your AI tool successfully, but what about
choosing the tool you’re going to use? The questions that follow will help you, when vetting
AI tools and vendors, to identify the right solution and gain confidence in getting started
with AI.

1. Are you an AI-first company?

By AI-first, we mean that the company started off as an AI product. If it’s not AI first, it
means it started off as an automation or software platform and now has an AI component
to it. There is no right or wrong answer here, as both situations have pros and cons. AI-first
companies are new and will be experts in AI, but there is greater risk here as the industry is
still new. Non-AI companies may not be fully focused on AI, but their legacy product is tried
and true and you can ensure value no matter what happens with the AI component.

2. What type of AI do you provide?

Make sure you understand the type of AI that your provider uses (whether it’s generative,
prescriptive, or predictive, for example.) You may also want to go a level deeper and ask
which type of technology it uses, such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, etc. If you
don’t understand the answer, ask them to explain it to you on your terms. If they are an
expert at what they do, they’ll have no problem with this.

3. What data does your AI require?

This will help you understand whether your current tech stack and data will be adequate
enough for the bot to work optimally and deliver the highest returns on your investment.

4. How does your AI product achieve and measure ROI?

Find out exactly how the AI feature delivers return on investments —not just on the platform
itself but on other investments across your tech stack and call center. And more importantly,
ask how the ROI is measured. A good AI provider will have metrics that make the AI’s
performance and ROI fully transparent.
5. Can your AI product be set up, managed, and
optimized by anyone or does it require certain skills or a
team representative?
Ideally, your AI product can be configured without any coding or complex rules. This is part
of the value of AI. If you have to rely on IT specialists or software engineers at your call
center, or customer success reps at their business, you lose the value of the AI, which is
designed to save time and alleviate resource-heavy burdens. You need to be able to
configure quickly as well as adapt to changing customer needs and business goals.

6. What are the customization options?

AI learns and refines itself as it goes, but it’s important to be able to have control and
customization options. Find out what the “out of the box” solution entails and then take
some time to think through scenarios where you’ll want to customize. Ask about these
scenarios and to the point above, find out if that’s something that can be done on your own
or if it requires assistance.

7. What kind of support do you offer?

A good AI solution will provide support throughout your customer journey. This includes
choosing the right solution for your business, onboarding, and training, and then any
ongoing support. Find out how support is provided—is it through phone, email, live chat? Do
they have a knowledge base? Are they regularly publishing content? Regular meetings?

8. What is the total cost of ownership of your AI system?

AI vendors typically charge more than just the initial buyer’s expense. Ask about ongoing
costs like support, updates, subscriptions, or package deals.

9. Can you provide references from other clients in our

industry?
Ask for case studies and references applicable to your business and industry. References
especially are a great way to determine the reliability of a vendor without bias.
10. What are you doing to stay innovative
and responsible?
AI is constantly changing. Make sure the vendor is aware of trends and proactively
considers security, ethics, and social impact in its AI product. You may also want to ask what
their approach is around staying on top of larger trends and incorporating them into their
product roadmap.

Start using AI to optimize your call center

As you evaluate where AI will fit into your business and comb through the AI tools available
to you, consider how it will contribute to your team processes, overall revenue, and how
you’ll measure the success of your selected tool. We’ve given you a starting point, now it’s
time to start your AI journey.