Balancing the Excitement of AI with a Human-First Agenda
Upstream Works is transforming the customer experience by developing advanced contact center solutions that support its agent-first mission. Being an agent-first company ensures that technology solutions like artificial intelligence are embraced as a resource to make agents more productive, successful, and supported – not as a pathway to replace them. As such, Upstream Works advocates that quality customer experiences (CX) rely on the human touch. For the release of its own AI solution, Upstream Works and Escalate were challenged to position a message that would convey the nuance between AI and contact center agents.
In March 2024, Upstream Works released Omni AI Hub, a desktop application that allows customers to use any AI tool of their choice, like ChatGPT, to provide contact center agents with useful tools to aid functions like transcriptions, summarization, sentiment, intent, and escalations. Through automating agent tasks, Omni AI Hub provides virtual customer self-service, real-time AI-powered agent assistance, integration with AI-enabled knowledge and performance analytics and reports, to deliver personalized customer engagements and first-time resolutions, across channels and on-premise and cloud contact centers. For Upstream Works, the strategy of Omni AI Hub was a more intuitive CX with agents better prepared by understanding the customer’s mood and tone. For Escalate PR, the strategy was to educate the contact center community about the power of AI in combination with agents.
