What to Look for When Buying a Summarization Solution

What to Look for When Buying a Summarization Solution

Customers change fast. Contact centers don’t. That’s precisely where summarizations can help. The integration of generative AI summarization solutions into customer experience strategies represents a transformative leap forward for the CX industry. Here’s what to consider when choosing a summarization solution that aligns with your needs.

Embrace Generative AI Summaries

The myriad friction points inherent in traditional summary processes that significantly limit the value extracted from customer interactions can now be overcome with the advent of modern summarization solutions. The arrival of generative AI capabilities marks a pivotal moment for summarization technology. 

For the first time, businesses can automatically summarize conversations at scale and structure the resulting data in insightful and actionable ways. This capability was once a distant dream but is now an accessible reality, highlighting the importance of selecting a solution that leverages the latest generative AI advancements to deliver accurate and meaningful summaries. When the full potential of generative AI summarizations is harnessed, customer experiences are truly transformed.

Capture the Essence of Customer Interactions

Generative AI summarizations offer unparalleled benefits, especially when considering the demands placed on customer service agents. These people juggle numerous interactions and responsibilities, making it challenging to craft detailed, insightful, and meaningful summaries during or after customer interactions. An effective generative AI solution can alleviate this burden by automatically generating high-quality summaries that capture the essence of each conversation, ensuring consistency, reducing average handling time (AHT), and enhancing overall CX quality.

Key Features to Look For

When evaluating summarization solutions, consider the following critical features to ensure you choose a system that meets your business’s unique requirements:

Generative vs. Extractive AI vs. Manual

When evaluating AI solutions, you'll encounter whether they use generative or extractive AI for summarizations. While extractive AI is traditionally favored for summarization, generative AI solutions can provide more flexibility and higher quality.

CCaaS vs. Point Solution vs. DIY

Consider your goals and the flexibility of the summarization solution. Large CCaaS vendors might restrict you to their ecosystem, while smaller AI vendors may lack enterprise-level features and scalability. Small CCaaS providers, often using less advanced models, might be expensive and not fully support enterprise requirements.

Dashboards and Data Connections

All of the great data you are harvesting is only useful if the people who need to consume it and gain insights from it are able to. Make sure you can get some out-of-the-box in-product dashboards for common CX insights as well as the ability to connect your aggregated data to other BI tools like Tableau or Power BI.

Customization and Flexibility

How flexible is the model, and is it improving over time? Ideally the solution you select will improve over time to better serve the unique nuances and needs of your company. Also, it will ideally allow you to adjust your parameters and your lens to find new insights or answer new questions from future conversations and past ones.

Make sure it will be human-readable 

AI isn’t perfect, but there are solution capabilities to make AI as accurate and dependable as possible. When evaluating solutions, look for some of the following capabilities: 

  • Saliency models (to filter out unnecessary words or utterances)
  • Hallucination detection
  • Missing elements restoration
  • Redaction
  • Layers of resiliency

Robust structured data capabilities 

To maximize the value of your investment, look for structured data that allows for an easy configuration of what metrics customers would like extracted and allows you to do that from day one. Beyond the data itself, the solution should also be able to enrich the data available to technical leaders. This opens up a world where structured summaries generated become a rich source of insight into customer interactions. Technical leaders will have the valuable data to inform crucial decisions, from ensuring compliance to shaping strategic initiatives like service optimizations and new product introductions.

Multiple contact reasons 

Not every interaction is about a single issue. Your summarization solution should be able to support this so you can track the individual issues being addressed in a single interaction or over the lifetime of that customer.

Business Value Unlocked

Implementing the right generative AI summarization solution can transform your CX strategy by delivering:

  • Reduced AHT: Automatic summaries free agents from time-consuming documentation, allowing them to dedicate more time to customer service.
  • Enhanced Agent and Customer Satisfaction: With AI handling summaries, agents can focus on the customer, leading to improved experiences and outcomes.
  • Valuable Business Insights: Every conversation becomes a source of reliable data, offering insights into customer needs, agent performance, and service trends.

Choose Wisely

The decision to invest in a modern summarization solution is a step toward unlocking the full potential of your customer interactions. By carefully considering the capabilities, integration potential, and the specific needs of your business, you can choose a solution that not only mitigates the friction points of traditional summary processes but also propels your CX strategy into the future. 

Why ASAPP AutoSummary

ASAPP's AutoSummary stands out by harnessing the power of generative AI to deliver highly customizable, accurate summaries of all customer interactions. With its built-in Conversation Explorer, it provides deep insights into call transcripts and customer sentiment, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions without the need for complex SQL queries. AutoSummary guarantees comprehensive summaries on every interaction, ensuring consistent quality along with structured data that seamlessly integrates with BI tools for enhanced analysis. 

AutoSummary is designed to adapt, allowing for real-time adjustments to summaries based on evolving business and regulatory requirements. This focus on flexibility, combined with our ability to reduce average handling time and ensure data privacy, makes AutoSummary a leading choice for contact centers seeking to improve their operational efficiency and customer engagement with a powerful generative AI solution. 

Want more? Read our exhaustive buyer’s guide.

If you are sold on the need for automated transcription and summarization in your CX organization, then you need to know what to look for (and what to look out for) when evaluating solutions. Just “good enough” isn’t good enough when you are setting the foundation of intelligence for your CX organization. 

This guide will help you understand the features and capabilities you need to keep in mind when evaluating solutions and the reasons why they are mission-critical for your organization. Read on to ensure you aren’t adding to your technical debt and that you are building a solid foundation for your AI journey with the right solutions.

Author: 
Lane Hartman

Lane Hartman contributes to Content and Customer Marketing at ASAPP.

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