Is AI Doing Enough for SMBs?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in the industry for several years now with many touting what it can currently do but also the potential it has to change our industry as we know it, and in some cases, it has without end users seeing the results, such as fraud detection and intelligent network monitoring and fault resolution. 

In fact, Gartner recently tipped it as a top strategic technology trend for 2022. But not everyone is convinced by what AI currently offers the end user market, particularly when it comes to SMB’s. 

Robin Russell, MD of Xarios, expressed his doubts about whether AI in the contact centre space, such as chatbots and speech analytics, are appreciated as “AI” by the general end user. 

“I don’t know whether I agree with the way that AI is applied in chatbots as I don’t think they use anywhere close to the computation power or have the intelligence that you’d expect AI to have,” he told UC Today. 

“I think the sentimentality data from call audio and chatbot messaging provides a valuable insight. But people still need to interpret the data and match it with real world business aims” 

As AI continues to gather momentum and become integrated into other technologies, Russell questioned how suited it is to the needs of SMBs, their budgets and expectations, adding that other ‘channels’ should be integrated into the equation so that SMBs see the full benefits of the technology.  

“The vast majority of businesses in the UK are under 50 employees and sometimes that technology is out of reach for their budgets,” he stated. 

“If you look at the applications in the market right now, SMBs don’t necessarily see the huge business benefits to them. As we evaluate where we go with AI, we need to include in other intelligence aspects and use telecoms as just one of the channels into that customer’s AI mechanism to make it more beneficial to them.” 

AI for SMBs should be able to pull in other elements of unstructured data from the customer experience, such as sales information and online brand commentary, and compare it with other channels of communication information to establish how the company is viewed outside of customers calling with complaints, this could provide value to all SMBs not just contact centres. 

“Most SMBs don’t see themselves as a contact centre and they don’t see the fact that their four salespeople fielding incoming calls are a contact centre – they are, they just operate on a smaller scale, but the tools still apply to them,” Russell elaborated. 

“With SMBs, you must deliver a better business case and outcomes to get AI in the door, just having sentimentality reports on those agents’ performances versus the cost of it probably doesn’t register as something that they want. But if it’s delivering other business benefits – such as picking up on social media mentions of their products and trust pilot reviews – SMBs may see the value, because they get an idea of what people think of them outside of those who call to complain.” 

Xarios is working on having AI functionality suited to SMBs in its solutions, but Russell acknowledged that he is still evaluating where the technology can offer best value to customers and partners. He has engaged with several AI companies about integrating their offerings into Xarios’ solutions but he’s waiting to be sure that what Xarios delivers on the AI front meets their vision of what SMBs need. 

“Is AI mature enough to suit the needs of the SMB? It has its business case elsewhere with larger enterprise customers, who have been the earliest adopters of AI in telecoms,” he noted. 

“But it’s not quite there for the mass market yet, so I wouldn’t want to deliver something that doesn’t deliver substantial benefits over what is currently offered”