WRITING WELL
BY LESLIE O’ FLAHAVAN, E-WRITE
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
WHEN GenAI SHOULD DO THE WRITING IT CAN HELP THE AGENTS AND THE CUSTOMERS.
The poets, newspaper journalists, and novelists may be weeping into their embroidered hankies about generative AI( GenAI) being the death of original writing.
But contact center agents- whose performance is measured in the number of emails or tickets they reply to- are, no doubt, celebrating all the ways GenAI can make their jobs easier and their responses to customers better.
Of course, writing with AI comes with risks: the tool can give incorrect answers; overuse AI-typical words like“ leverage;” and use a blandly positive tone that’ s out of synch with the topic or simply grating.
16 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
For contact center agents, using GenAI is worth the risks. Answering customers’ emails all day can be like working on a factory assembly line; it just makes sense to use a tool that automates some of the challenging tasks of writing well.
Here are five ways to use( and benefit from) GenAI in writing.
1. PROOFREADING
A GenAI tool is better at proofreading than the tools many agents use now: Microsoft Editor or the spellcheck built into their CRM software. Editor is a cursed tool that frequently gives incorrect advice.( Editor told me I’ d spelled“ novelists” incorrectly when I spellchecked this article.)
The CRM’ s built-in spellcheck will need customizing or it will flag product names and other brand wording as spelling errors. AI just makes proofreading easier.
Agents can prompt an AI tool to“ List and fix the spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes in this draft email …” and the AI will provide a corrected version and a list of the changes it made.
MS Editor makes the writer figure out how to correct many of the errors it finds; AI tools just fix the errors. For contact center agents who must churn out email responses, AI is a better option.