AI in contact center is all about anticipating needs, augmenting interactions, and automating tasks.
In today’s fast pacing world, where everyone is aiming for perfection, customer experience is the only parameter that can become a differentiator. Great experiences attract customers and bad experiences drive them away. Hence, if you are serving your customers better than others you are in the race, else you are losing business.
Though customer satisfaction is essential to every business – be it a pizza shop or a grocery store – things matter the most when it comes to the contact centers as this is the first point of communication between a business and a customer. Every conservation with contact centers is an experience that can either impress your customers or drives them to your competitor. That’s why companies are now focusing on new technologies to ensure top-quality customer experience and AI is the name that pops up above all.
How AI helps Contact Centers in Better Customer Experience
AI helps contact centers in quitting the brick and mortar ways of handling data and customers. An AI-integrated contact center stores its data on the cloud, predicts customer needs, and automates the tasks without creating a mess. Everything happens in such an organized way that neither the customer nor the agent feels trouble interacting.
Let’s learn how a modern AI-integrated contact center will attend a customer inquiry.
Caller information
Let’s say Emmy is a customer who needs a “roadside assistance service” as she’s stuck in her car. Since it’s too late to expect someone to come for help, she decides to call the contact center.
Since the caller id is associated with her account, the agent will get complete detail about Emmy even before picking up the call. The predictive analysis of the AI technology will show up the expected reason for the call. The location, time, and weather conditions will mark this call urgent and place it up in the queue.
Conclusion: AI helped the agent in gathering information about the caller and also anticipated the reason for calling. This way, the agent needs not to spend time on asking the user details, understanding the reason for the call, etc. It saves time, which is a top priority right now.
Attending the Call
The agent receives the call and Emmy explains to him that her car is not in a working condition and it needs to be towed. While she was explaining her situation to the agent, the AI software integrated into the agent’s system augments this conversation. It shows up nearby truck tow services on the agent screen. After confirming her location, the agent sends a tow truck and tells her the expected time to reach.
Conclusion: AI augments conversations and shows up solutions that might work. All these help agents in taking quick and better decisions and hence, serve customers better.
Capturing Data from Customer Interactions
Later in time, Emmy again needs a service but this time it’s about changing her contact details. Unlike before, she sends a text to the contact center number saying: “I want to change my contact details”.
Almost immediately, she receives a reply: “No issues Emmy. We will call you to confirm this soon”.
After a few minutes, she receives a call wherein a virtual assistant greets her. Using the voice print analysis, it confirms the changes and completes the task.
At the end of the call, it asks Emmy if she wants any other help to which Emmy says a Yes. She also wants to know about current discounts associated with her account. The call is transferred to an agent who takes the conversation ahead.
Conclusion: AI helps to automate tasks whenever possible. The virtual assistant took up the call and interacted well with Emmy. However, when it felt that agent can answer this call more proficiently, it transferred the call to the agent. This saves times and manages resources better.
What’s more with AI?
In addition to Emmy’s case, there’s a lot that AI can do for contact center and its agents, such as
- Replace IVR, as AI has Machine Learning techniques and Natural Language Processing to understand caller’s tone and guide them accordingly.
- Help customers navigate through the website and direct a visitor to an agent in case of queries.
- Interacting with customers via Robots for assisting agents and meeting the reduced count of employees.
- Faster and accurate insights into customer needs with the help of often asked queries.
The Bottom Line
AI in contact centers can do wonders and at many places, it is already playing its roles. As of now, only a few contact centers are leveraging the benefits of this outstanding technology but in the coming years we will see almost all contact centers joining hands with AI. However, we won’t say that the AI in Contact Center would be a machine only thing in the future. Instead, we would call it a Human Plus – Humans plus technology, an amazing contact center solution
AI will help contact centers automating tasks whenever possible but at the end of the day, it’s the agent who will receive the call, use the technology, and respond accordingly.
