Artificial Intelligence is certainly not a newcomer to Contact Centre operations but it is the power and flexibility of cloud computing that is really delivering advances in both Customer Experience (CX) improvements and a reduction in the cost per contact for service providers.
Here we will take a look at ways in which AI is reaching areas of contact centre operations and some of the most important considerations for any company looking to embrace this technology for the first time.
The Cloud Based Contact Centre Technology is driving Customer Understanding
Since the 90’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has been the key mechanism to provide skills based agent routing within the call centre. IVR is only effective in providing call centre efficiency and improved customer experience if we fully understand the most common reasons our customers need to contact us. Analysis of customer intent is just one key area were AI is providing valuable insights that can improve contact centre efficiency and customer experience.
However, there are still barriers that block companies from the results that might be achieved with effective AI deployment. These include the lack of visibility on benefits and applicable use cases, disorganized and scattered data approaches and the inability to adapt the workforce to new technologies, tools and job requirements.
Below are some of the key use cases areas of AI application available today from our leading CCaaS partners.
Real-time Agent Assistance: Using AI to transcribe live conversations and then push knowledge to the agent in real-time to help solve customer issues. Effectively a real-time virtual training tool that can also greatly help new hires get up to speed.
Speech Analytics: Listens and transcribes every customer interaction, using AI to identify key moments of the conversation, topics and sentiment. Allowing for easily identify business trends, agent coaching needs and ensuring call quality.
Virtual Agent Technology : similar to the principles behind IVR, Virtual Agent platforms require a period of training based on analysis of common customer support requests so we recommend you use this for internal employee service first, then deploy to your customers for after-hours support and then, as your organisation is ready, deploy it for those redundant service requests your agents routinely get that can be easily handled by a virtual agent. Our key advice aims to help you deploy AI in a way that protects your CX while enabling you to take advantage of the benefits of AI now
AI Powered Knowledge Base: Contact centres struggle to make sure agents can easily find and deliver the right answers to customers on a consistent basis. The reality for many companies is that information and data are located in a variety of places and maintained by different teams making it difficult to deliver to those who need it. The latest AI Powered platforms can connect to any external content source and enable any user to create, modify, publish and curate knowledge. The built-in AI assists administrators by identifying content gaps, suggesting improvements to existing content and suggesting better search queries to find the right answers. The AI knowledge base would typically provide the engine to empower the Virtual Agent and Real-time Agent Assistance functions previously described.
AS you can see, the application of AI in the contact centre is an exciting and rapidly evolving area of technology that is driving down the cost per contact, increasing revenue and most importantly improving CX for those companies would are embracing the benefits correctly. It is a vast topic but hopefully we have wetted your appetite with some of the key functions that you can start to implement today within the leading Cloud Contact Centre providers.
Contact us today if you would like to have a deeper dive into AI in the Contact Centre or better still to schedule a demonstration to see some of these functions in action.