Today, let's tackle AI readiness and “agentic” readiness, which I guess is the new buzzword in the contact center.
There's a lot of, I think, misguided but well-intended advice that the very first thing you need to do is figure out knowledge management or a knowledge base.
And while that is a critical component for a lot of reasons, it's not the very first thing you need to do. The first thing you need to do is ensure that the underlying technology you're acquiring—meaning your CCaaS, WFM, monolithic QA, or whatever applications or agent assistants you're implementing in your contact center—is open and extensible.
I talk a lot about this: APIs and the ability to move data and knowledge back and forth between those applications.
What will inevitably happen is that each of these use cases or applications in the contact center—whether it's an agent assistant, voice AI, or anything else—will have its own onboard knowledge management. Each one handles knowledge differently with memory and vector embeddings.
So, you need the ability to move your knowledge in and out of these systems in an open and easily facilitated way. This means you don't need a knowledge base; you need knowledge orchestration between these applications.
That starts with the ability to push out knowledge.
As an example, we deployed Zoom's agent assistant. It has its own knowledge base, which is very utilitarian in nature. The only thing it does is power Agent Assist, but it has to work that way because of how it indexes all the knowledge.
We have our own knowledge management platform that is open and extensible. You can create all your knowledge base articles in one place and, with just a few clicks, synchronize them directly into a Zoom knowledge base.
If we didn't have this synchronization capability, you'd have to administer knowledge separately in Zoom, in your IVA, and elsewhere. By the way, we synchronize everything out and back in.
The real point here is that if you're just going out to get a new knowledge management system, you're likely adding another tool in isolation. And if you're procuring and selecting your CCaaS, agent assistants, or any other system that doesn't have open APIs, you're just going to keep proliferating these applications without realizing their full value.
So, coming back to how we've designed this and how we guide our clients: it's about thinking through knowledge orchestration with document management and knowledge articles.
As we select partners to deploy voice AI, agent assistants, or even quality assurance, we can now perform deep quality assurance management. For example, we can embed a script directly inside a QA form or assess agent product knowledge right inside an evaluation using an LLM.
The only way to achieve this is by ensuring those vendors have published API documentation and that you can access and use it.
If you need help with that, let me know.
Share this post