There are numerous benefits of utilizing AI in your call center. It can streamline calls, helping customers resolve their issues quicker. It eliminates staffing issues and on hold wait times. It can collect data and predict customer intent. But as helpful as artificial intelligence can be, there are also some drawbacks and risks to implementing it in your call center at too large a scale too quickly. Here are four risks to keep in mind when you’re using AI in your call center.

Customer Service Errors

One of the biggest benefits of AI that proponents will point to is that it is smart and always learning from the data it collects from calls. Which is true—AI voicebots are always evolving. However, that doesn’t mean that AI does not make mistakes. In fact, an AI is likely to make mistakes the first few times it is dealing with a particular issue or type of call. Like human agents, AI systems are only as intelligent and complete as the data that is used to train them. If there is information missing, or if a customer calls in with a new or unique problem about which the AI has not been trained, it will not deal with it appropriately and the customer may be forced to take a different approach to getting help. If they were speaking with a real person, on the other hand, that person may be able to improvise and offer a potential solution or path forward that the AI may not be able to provide. 

Making a Short Fuse Shorter

It’s no secret that customers who call contact centers are often in a tight spot. They might be dealing with a problem that’s preventing them from using a product, struggling to make a change or an update to their account, trying to correct something that was done incorrectly, or looking for help fixing a problem that they have been unsuccessful in fixing on their own. In any of these situations, or in many others, the customer is potentially going to be frustrated or impatient and reaching an AI voicebot is liable to make that worse. It’s much easier to be patient with a real person who is telling you exactly what they are doing to attempt to help you than it is to be patient with a robot. Especially if your call center is handling a lot of frustrated callers, AI may only make their short fuses even shorter.

Privacy Concerns

As we mentioned above, the more data the AI has access to, the better equipped it will be to handle customers. In many cases, an AI call center agent will need access to general data and information about the company and products as well as information about the individual customers in order to best serve them. This can cause privacy concerns for customers who don’t like the idea of their data and information being used to train AI systems and then stored in them, potentially in danger of data breaches. While there are ways to mitigate these concerns, such as using data encryption and regular monitoring of privacy policies, it may still make customers uneasy.

Lack of Human Touch

In this age of near instant gratification in so many realms, it is more important than ever for call center agents to express empathy, engage in active listening, and work to build a rapport with customers. While agents may work hard on these skills in order to increase the satisfaction and improve the experience of customers who call their call center, an AI agent may be incapable of doing this—or at the very least, incapable of doing it to the same extent as a real person. AI cannot truly understand human emotions, which can stoke frustration in customers and make them feel like their emotional experience is not a concern of the company.

While AI may be the future, it’s clear that there are still many benefits to staffing your contact center with smart, well-trained human agents. One of things that will support their success? An easy-to-use call center platform, like CallShaper. For more information, request a demo today.