Sixty percent of artificial intelligence (AI) deployments in the contact center are low maturity, according to a new AI Maturity Benchmark Report by UJET, a leading provider of AI-powered cloud contact center solutions. The data – which found low maturity deployments do not drive business value or solve customers’ problems – provides insight into why many organizations struggle to unlock results in their AI journeys.
“The majority of contact center AI deployments we see are disproportionately focused on deflection and containment through self-service with cost management and agent efficiency as key business priorities,” said Vasili Triant, Co-CEO of UJET. “This new data shows that more mature AI deployments emphasizing customer experience, revenue growth, and business insights correlate directly to better business outcomes. UJET’s new AI Maturity Benchmark Report helps leaders to strategically assess their AI maturity, and provides a roadmap for practical, phased AI deployments that deliver better overall contact center performance.”
While 75% of contact centers are prioritizing AI investments over the next 12 months, only 10% have high maturity AI programs in place today. As a result, most contact centers continue to struggle with high agent turnover and workforce shortages (42%), employee burnout and stress (39%), fragmented tools and data (31%), long customer wait times (20%), and more.
Higher maturity AI deployments move beyond stand-alone conversational AI and self-service tools, to power more predictive, proactive, and personalized customer interactions, while also improving the employee experience for contact center agents, admins, and supervisors.
UJET’s AI Maturity Scale classified contact centers within five levels, from cost center (simple chatbots and virtual agents) up to loyalty center (holistic, outcome-based applications of conversational and generative AI across operations). Other key findings from over 150 contact centers in the AI Maturity Benchmark Report: Opportunities & Gaps in Contact Center AI Adoption show:
- Contact Centers are Battling with Workforce Retention: 58% of contact centers report an agent turnover problem. In fact, 52% retained less than half of their agents in the past 12 months. Sixteen percent retained less than 20% of agents.
- AI is Emerging as the Solution against Rising Challenges: 98% of leaders believe AI will upskill agents – saving them time and preventing burnout by automating repeatable, simple administrative tasks (48%), providing next-best actions to agents (45%), and summarizing calls (41%). Plus, increased investment is helping contact centers improve on key KPIs like the number of interactions per resolution (79%), first call resolution (76%), and customer satisfaction (71%).
- Low Maturity AI Misses Critical Benefits: Although an alarming 13% of contact centers are not implementing AI at all, most active AI deployments are considered low maturity including leveraging AI in chatbots for self-service (47%), performance and call analytics (39%), and routing of customer inquiries (38%). The lack of maturity makes it impossible for 45% of contact centers to know if they’ve solved a customer’s problem on the first touchpoint.
- High Maturity AI Enhances Value Creation Across the Whole Organization: High maturity contact centers experienced moderate to high improvements in key revenue-generating KPIs such as upsell and cross-sell rates (68%), customer acquisition costs (66%), and revenue per interaction (64%). In addition, mature companies report more positive experiences with 100% AI interactions (59% to 44%).
“Perhaps the single greatest underlying challenge to transforming and modernizing CX has been the longstanding perception of the contact center as a cost center within the C-suite. This report clearly shows that with the proper charter and investment, CX leaders can drive substantial benefits to the organization, such as increased revenue, enhanced customer loyalty, and reduced operational costs,” Triant added.