CONTACT CENTER PERFORMANCE
BY SINDRE HAALAND, SALESSCREEN
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
AI CAN BOOST SALES AND SERVICE PERFORMANCE …
BUT ONLY IF WE STOP AUTOMATING THE WRONG THINGS.
AI has been hyped as the silver bullet for customer service and sales, and nowhere more than in chatbots. The promise was simple: let machines handle customer contact so humans don’ t have to.
But the reality has been far less elegant. People can smell a bot from a mile away, and nothing kills trust faster than a canned AI response, especially in sales, where the goal is to ask customers to part with their hard-earned money.
The irony is that while companies pour resources into teaching AI to build
26 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE relationships( the one thing it’ s still objectively terrible at), they ignore the real bottleneck strangling performance: information overload.
Customer service and sales are execution-heavy jobs. Great teams succeed by talking to people, adding value, and moving fast: not by deciphering endless dashboards and Excel dumps.
Yet most organizations bury their teams in data while outsourcing the work they’ re actually good at to“ virtual agents.” By the time reports or KPIs arrive, they’ re already outdated or too granular to act on.
Faced with this flood of unusable information, both reps and managers tune it out and get back to what they know best: winging it. The result? Paralysis.
... NOTHING KILLS TRUST FASTER THAN A CANNED AI RESPONSE...