For years, contact centers measured success by containment: how many calls never reached a human agent. That metric increasingly misses the point, since a call can be contained and still leave the customer without an actual answer. The shift underway is toward conversation to completion, tracking whether an interaction actually resolved what the customer called about, not just whether it avoided a live agent.

Ram Rajagopalan (pictured, right), head of product, AI for Zoom CX at Zoom Communications Inc., has spent the past year building that idea into the company’s virtual agent platform. The industry spent much of the last two years fixated on containment rates alone, a metric that undersells what AI agents should actually be measured on, Rajagopalan said.

“Many customers, even about a year, 18 months ago, focused on purely measuring containment,” he said. “Where I see conversations these days going is not just looking at containment, but end-to-end resolution. This is what we are calling within Zoom conversation to completion, where we are not just answering the basic inquiries, deflecting the call from going to a human agent, but actually completing the task that the consumers are calling in for.”

Rajagopalan and Joe Rittenhouse (center, right), co-chief executive officer of Converged Technology Professionals Inc., a Zoom implementation partner, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte and ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala at “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how enterprises move AI pilots into measurable production value. (* Disclosure below.)

Why ‘conversation to completion’ means picking the right first use case

Rittenhouse picks up that same thread from the deployment side. Getting to a real resolution starts with choosing the right first use case rather than the most ambitious one, he said.

“Usually where we try to start is, where’s the low-hanging fruit?” Rittenhouse said. “Just a simple question of what do you do after hours? We’re usually staffed, we follow the sun from the East Coast to the West Coast, but then after hours we just have a general mailbox. And the answer is typically, I don’t know.”

About half of the clients Rittenhouse’s firm works with have a formal AI committee in place; the rest are often still deciding whether the strategy should be dictated top-down or coordinated across departments, he explained. That same governance question is one Zoom has been navigating internally, scaling its own AI Companion across customers running thousands of seats.

“These tools work. You just can’t boil the ocean,” Rittenhouse said. “We use the analogy of eat the pizza piece by piece. You don’t fold it in half and scarf it down. It’s one bite at a time. Start small, and it’ll grow.”

That same incremental logic applies to handoffs between virtual and human agents, where the full context of a call needs to move along with the engagement, Rajagopalan noted.

“You want to transfer the full context, the reason why they’re calling, the collected variables that you need to pass on to a human being so that human being can get on with the job and get it done without having to repeat themselves or look at 10 different places of record just to answer a simple question,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit”:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit.” Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE