Agents view agent-assist technology as more important than a competitive salary – Interview with Gopi Polavarapu at Kore.ai

August 14, 2024

Today’s interview is with Gopi Polavarapu, Chief Solutions Officer at Kore.ai, a market leader in Conversational AI platform space. Gopi joins me today to talk about two reports that they recently published ( the Agent Experience (AX) Benchmark Report 2024 and the Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark Report 2024), why a bot must emulate a company’s brand and how to keep this authentic to your brand, the importance of building a multilingual bot and the importance of protecting vulnerable customers as the presence of AI in our day-to-day increases.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The Brand Connectome™ and why we are doing marketing all wrong – Interview with Leslie Zane – and is number 513 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Gopi:

Kore.ai is a market leader in Conversational AI platform space.
Gopi’s team goes and identifies the problems facing different industries and builds the right language models for those things so that companies can build solutions, whether it’s contact center or a pre-sale use case, for example.
We’re allowing them to build these use cases by pre-training the data for those particular use case.
We’re in about eight different verticals right now.
We’re also looking at functional applications like HR automation, ID automation, procurement automation etc.
Our models are trained to understand those situations up to 80-90% accuracy and then the next 10-20% is basically what the customer does with our partners and they customize it to suit their needs.
Kore.ai have recently published two different reports: the Agent Experience (AX) Benchmark Report 2024 and the Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark Report 2024)
One key finding was that customer service agents across the globe now see automated agent assist technology as more important than a competitive salary or hourly wage.
This is becoming an important factor in how agents evaluate their employers and if they want to work for them.
It’s also about whether the brand is helping the agent be successful, particularly in situations where they are being paid based on the number of successful calls they complete.
Give me the tools, the skills, the capabilities and the support in order to help me in the moment.
When it comes to brands, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re providing tech to solve the problem or humans to support the problem. From a customer perspective, they just want answers faster.
Often customers don’t want to talk to or interact with a bot and they want to talk to a human to solve their problem because they think they can influence the human with their persuasion skills. It’s a human thing,
It’s time to accept the AI thing and you need to take action now if you’re running a contact center. How do you help your agents get better, perform and get paid more, especially if they are Gen Z?
Your bots or automations have to embody your brand values.
You have to consider how they handle the customers from a brand building perspective.
Gopi’s best advice: Go and try and do a pilot of a small use case that has the least exposure.
Gopi’s Punk XL brand: Amazon

About Gopi

Gopi Polavarapu, Chief Solutions Officer, leads Kore.ai’s pre-built AI solutions business globally and is responsible for their P&L. He brings more than 20 years of experience in automation, software, IoT and mobile technologies. Prior to Kore.ai, Gopi held various product leadership roles at Zebra Technologies, Motorola Solutions and Globecomm systems. Gopi has an MBA from Cornell University and a Master of Science in Telecom from NYU.