With the rise of AI in recent years, contact center leaders are facing increased pressure to implement conversational AI-based CX channels that will improve efficiency and reduce costs. However, while these innovative tools have the potential to completely transform the way contact centers operate, they also pose many risks that, if left unchecked, can have a lasting and damaging impact on your brand’s reputation and ability to operate.
Cyara empowers businesses to optimize their chatbots and assure quality through every stage of development.
Any businesses looking to integrate AI into their contact centers must take a proactive stance to mitigate security and compliance risks. Failing to take accountability and protect your brand could lead to severe consequences, including regulatory fines and a loss of customer trust.
By following AI governance best practices and performing regular contact center monitoring, you can begin to protect your brand and build long-term customer relationships built on transparency and trust.
What is AI Governance?
Simply put, AI governance is the practice of creating and implementing guardrails within your organization to manage AI usage and reduce risk. As AI technology continues to evolve and increasingly more companies begin to weave it into their infrastructure, it’s become more important than ever to contain risk and outline your company’s policies for developing and using AI.
As customers demand faster, more efficient CX channels, AI has become the go-to for many companies, offering affordable, quick, 24/7 support. However, any organization that uses AI is immediately vulnerable to a wide range of security and compliance risks, which must be properly managed.
For example, a healthcare provider may choose to incorporate a chatbot into their CX offerings, allowing customers to easily book an appointment without the need to call and speak with a human agent. However, to book an appointment, the customer will need to input their personal information including their name, phone number, address, and more. On the surface, this may seem standard, but opens your brand up to many risks. What would happen if the chatbot suffered a defect, allowing a hacker to easily access the information, or if the chatbot sends the information to the wrong place? In this type of incident, your organization would immediately be held liable and suffer from a loss of customer trust in addition to other fines and penalties.
Proper AI governance principles seek to protect organizations and their customers with several pillars:
- Security
- Accountability
- Transparency
- Organizational values
When an organization uses AI governance, it highlights a commitment to business leaders and customers to build a foundation of trust and safety. With AI governance in place, customers and stakeholders can be confident in the business’ ability to deliver exactly what’s promised, without any additional risk.
Building Trust with Your Customers
AI governance is about more than simply checking a list of regulatory requirements to meet compliance standards—it’s also about instilling trust and creating guidelines that will make it possible for your customers to trust your brand. As we’ve seen more cyberattacks and AI-related incidents in the news over the past few years, your customers want to be sure that their information is in safe hands, and that your business will be able to deliver quality interactions.
There are many options on the market today, and customers simply don’t want to invest their time and money in brands that aren’t going to protect their privacy. According to recent studies, approximately 70% of customers stated that they won’t purchase from a company that has poor security measures.
When you invest in AI governance, your customers and stakeholders will see that you’re putting in the time and effort to use AI responsibly and aren’t introducing any unnecessary risk into the equation. If an organization is using AI appropriately, there shouldn’t be any need to hide AI usage behind a wall of mystery. Instead, you should build trust with your customers by outlining how your organization uses AI so they can make informed decisions without assuming your brand is willing to risk their security.
The Role of Contact Center Monitoring
Compared to other CX channels, AI-based tools are incredibly complicated, with plenty of room for error throughout the development process, deployment, and beyond. That’s why continuous, real-time testing and monitoring is essential to your overall AI governance. By conducting regular and thorough contact center monitoring, you can be sure that your AI systems are always working exactly as you intended and delivering quality CX.
The more complicated your AI-based systems are, the more governance and monitoring that’s required to assure performance and safety. Just as you monitor live agent calls to confirm that your agents are meeting company standards and appropriately answering customer queries, so too should you be verifying AI performance in your contact center.
Cyara’s AI-Led CX Transformation Platform allows you to automatically test and monitor all your CX channels, including conversational AI, chatbots, and more. When your contact center leverages conversational AI, it stands in for a human agent to represent your organization.
Whenever something goes wrong with AI, there’s the potential for the situation to take a turn for the worse and cause lasting damage. But there are ways to mitigate the risk and protect your organization and customers before it’s too late. Invest in AI governance today or contact us to learn more about Cyara’s contact center monitoring solutions.
