A meeting of the minds – IntelePeer’s semi-annual Customer Advisory Board meeting

IntelePeer recently had the privilege of hosting a dozen C-suite level executives from businesses in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, utilities, FinServ, and insurance, as well as a major North American gymnasium chain as part of its Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. A lively discussion, we’re taking this opportunity to highlight some of the most pertinent topics discussed during the meeting:

The fate of the contact center 

The meeting began with IntelePeer addressing the current state of the contact center market, which represents a staggering $300B in annual labor costs. Today, almost two-thirds of contact centers are understaffed and, according to Metrigy, those not using AI are hiring 2.3X more agents than those using the technology. Important to today’s businesses, CEO Frank Fawzi stressed the innovation and change contact centers will see over the next 3 to 4 years.

Consumer preferences coupled with technological advancements are giving rise to the automation of communications driven by AI. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants will decrease labor costs associated with contact centers by $80 billion by 2026. (Gartner, 2022) Moreover, those businesses that use AI to automate customer service tasks can save up to $300 per customer per year. (Forrester, 2023)

What is generative AI? 

IntelePeer discussed the capabilities of generative AI and the various types of models, i.e., language and image models, including video generation and hybrid models. Our CTO, Sergey Galchenko, provided a detailed overview on how transformer-based LLMs work, the processes transformer-based LLMs use, such as tokenization, embedding, and positional encoding, and others like foundational LLMs, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning.

Additional topics covered during the presentation period included augmented data retrieval and security considerations for LLMs, such as model DoS (denial-of-service attack), sensitive information disclosure, and insecure output handling.    

Communications automation and AI 

Generative AI has incredible potential, but businesses must deploy it correctly to maximize that potential. To that end, IntelePeer recommends companies use intent study mapping to determine the most frequent use cases or requests that come into the contact center and implement automation accordingly.

Next, organizations need to establish a way to measure success. We advised CAB participants to use savings per minute of call containment as a main success criterion. IntelePeer’s SmartAnalytics gives you access to a results dashboards that displays all contained inbound calls and cost savings per minute.

After identifying use cases, IntelePeer demonstrated to attendees how we could help them achieve up to 70% customer interaction containment via conversational AI and rules-based automation. Likewise, we showed how we can help improve the productivity of enterprise workers through data integrations and built-in, best-in-breed AI solutions like Azure OpenAI, IBM Watson, Google Dialogflow, and AWS Lex.

Round table discussion 

One of the highlights of the meeting was a highly engaging conversation about the future of the contact center platform. With 80% of finance and 95% of retail interactions potentially getting automated with AI by 2025, is it safe to say that these platforms are going away? Many agreed, predicting that CRM platforms will take a more prevalent role with AI to displace traditional contact center platforms.

Another high spot was when we asked our CAB members how generative AI will impact their roles. For context, a poll by Rackspace found that 82% of CIOs believe that generative AI will rewrite their industry and how work gets completed. (Rackspace, 2023) Most attendees felt that generative AI would affect their role positively, eliminating tedious and busy work. Other notable topics discussed included investment priorities in cybersecurity, modernizing infrastructure, and upskilling and reskilling employees.

Thank you to those who participated

IntelePeer would like to extend an enormous thank you to our CAB attendees. Your insights, knowledge, and comments were incredibly beneficial for all parties. Moreover, your continued support and input empower us to refine our offerings, helping us help you overcome the most pressing business challenges.

Contact us today to find out more about IntelePeer’s AI-powered Communications Automation Platform.