If you want to maximize the efficiency of your contact center, harness the power of AI to offer exceptional customer service.
Now, more than ever, customers expect a great customer experience from the companies that they interact with. In fact, it is a key part in their decision-making process when considering where to spend their money.
Customer service is a crucial part of creating a positive experience and provides the opportunity for businesses and brands to present themselves in the best possible light.
Human contact will always be an important part of a brand’s interaction with its customers, but when it comes to contact centers, you can help agents do their job better with the support of artificial intelligence (AI).
Contact center AI can improve efficiency and productivity, helping to resolve customer issues and meet customer expectations, all while balancing costs implications and preserving the happiness and well-being of your employees.
So what is artificial intelligence?
AI has been enjoying its moment in the spotlight, hailed for bringing incredible benefits to all different types of businesses. There are four forms of AI:
-
Reactive, which applies intelligence to react and reply to the world around it Limited memory, which stores data and uses it for decision-making
-
Theory of mind, which is still at the innovation stage and interacts with human thoughts and emotions
-
Self-awareness, a stage not yet reached where AI is aware of its own existence
What is an AI contact center?
AI has been applied to a whole variety of business functions, whether working as a personal assistant, categorizing data or automating processes. One area it can really excel is supporting contact center agents to enhance the customer experience.
Contact center AI is all about offering additional support. It enables smarter, data-driven interactions with customers and can serve to automate mundane tasks, unlocking greater potential for your human contact agents to complete more complex work. It can also deliver a more personalized experience for the customer, ultimately empowering everyone involved in the process.
Why should you be investing in contact center AI?
There are considerable business benefits for anyone looking to invest in contact center AI. Almost 60% of customers have said they would buy more from a business if they felt that it treated them better. Harnessing the power of AI will allow you to offer a faster, more targeted and better-informed contact center service.
AI can also help you fill the gap in employee satisfaction. A high number of employees across all sectors and industries are experiencing burnout. Keeping your contact agents happy and employing AI to ease their workload, particularly in more mundane and repetitive tasks, can lead to a happier workforce and increased productivity.
How can AI help ease their workload? The intelligent application of AI can make a contact agent’s job easier, either by being deployed as a self-service option to answer basic customer queries and freeing the human agent up for more complex tasks, or empowering agents by providing them with sophisticated customer data so they can better serve customers and enjoy increased job satisfaction.
How AI can support your contact center
Let’s go into more detail about the functions of contact center AI. There are a variety of ways in which AI can be implemented to provide well-rounded support solutions for your contact center.
Chatbots and conversational AI
AI-powered Chatbots allow customers to quickly engage with brands, using natural language understanding (NLU). It can adeptly handle simpler issues thereby reducing call volume. If the issue is more complicated, the chatbot can pass along collected information to the agent for a more seamless resolution.
Call routing
AI examines various factors to determine the agent best equipped to handle a specific query. As a result, customers are directed to the right agent to resolve their problem at speed and enjoy a smooth resolution of their issues.
Interactive voice response
Answering pre-recorded questions is a common AI feature, and is often disliked by customers. However, the technology is becoming more sophisticated and, like chatbots, AI-powered voicebots can provide intuitive customer service experiences while easing pressure on human agents.
Prioritization
If you feel like your human agents are becoming overwhelmed, AI can help prioritize tasks by tracking interactions and recording customer histories to inform the agent about who is most in need of their support.
Monitor agent performance
With the ability to track agent performance, measure resolutions and other real-time insights, AI can help inform you about which agents are exceeding their targets and which need further training opportunities.
Call analytics
In a similar way, AI is capable of providing analytics on call times, resolutions, and other key aspects of customer data to let you know whether or not a customer is having a positive experience. This can help you avoid churn and build customer loyalty.
The benefits of AI in contact centers
Now we’ve discussed what call center AI can do, let’s see what it can offer your company.
Providing 24/7 support
With AI, your contact center can provide round-the-clock support, building a reputation for responsive, available customer service and building positive rapport with your customers.
Greater efficiency
In total, 60% of call center agents have claimed that AI helps them save time on the job. For many of the reasons mentioned - cutting call volume, handling mundane tasks - AI can augment the work of your human agents.
Prioritizing needs
You’ll develop a better understanding of customer needs if an AI tool is there to provide agents with real-time analytics, the history of interactions with specific customers, or why this customer’s issue might be particularly urgent.
Greater self-service options
It’s reported that 69 per cent of customers prefer to solve problems independently or find out information without human interaction. A specialized self-service tool, like an AI-powered chatbot, can give the customer greater independence while still providing responsive, intuitive service.
Can artificial intelligence replace contact center agents?
There are always complex, human-led issues that AI cannot solve. What AI can do is give contact center agents powerful tools that help them streamline their work and empower them to work smarter, offering powerful hybrid solution for your business. In other words, AI is set to transform the work of human contact center agents with a new age of self-service options, personalization and responsiveness.
A significant asset of AI is its ability to handle mundane, repetitive tasks with ease, relieving the time and energy of human agents to work on other areas like ensuring faster response times and better first-call resolutions for more specific, complex queries.
AI is here to stay, and integrating the technology into your contact centers is a crucial part of maintaining technological innovation and boosting productivity, without compromising the happiness, motivation and well-being of your contact agents.
Contact center AI can reduce costs and transform your business’ digital engagement, increasing the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers, as well as boosting customer retention. So why not see how it can work for you?