In the age of the internet, call centers don’t seem like they should still be relevant, yet companies continue to expand their facilities. What’s the secret? When it comes to customer service, people want an immediate response and a human touch to guide them through complicated problems. Fascinatingly, it’s AI that’s making it possible for companies to offer more humanized interaction around service needs “ and this new technology is designed to scale.
AI Enters The Call Center
A variety of AI systems are ready to take over customer service, and while that was previously confined to the voiceless world of chatbots, Google recently released human-sounding AI that’s ready to answer phones in call centers. The fact that the system sounds human is particularly important because callers tend to reject overtly robotic phone systems; they’re fine for directories but inappropriate at the service level.
Call center technology also feeds off of the growing voice search market. As more people use varied, spoken commands to find information, tech companies have been pressed to create software that can handle natural language processing smoothly and respond to a greater variety of requests and phrasings. Though voice search was largely designed to work with smart home devices, it works equally well in the call center and is transforming the entire industry.
Scaling Successfully
One of the primary advantages of using AI to answer the phone in call centers is that the technology is ready to scale “ no hiring needed, and that makes it a perfect for companies using a cloud PBX with unlimited lines. Like many other cloud-based systems, cloud-hosted phone lines scale effortlessly, whether they’re paired with human workers or AI answering systems. And the odds you’ll need to scale quickly with AI are far greater than they are with human staffers who need to be interviewed and trained.
Using AI answering systems isn’t just about scaling quickly, though; it’s about demand for jobs. Most people don’t want to work in a call center, which is one of the reasons many have been sent offshore. AI answering systems take over grunt work, leaving only more skilled IT staff and high-level customer representatives as the human element in the building.
The Importance Of Analytics
When individuals are staffed with answering the phones in a call center, it’s not just boring “ it’s also a broadly disseminated system. In other words, the only way to identify problems with a product is by culling data from each interaction. When AI answers the phone, however, even if it’s dozens or hundreds of separate lines, it’s all fundamentally one system. As such, the AI can identify keywords in customer calls and use that information to create high-value data sets regarding customer concerns and product malfunctions. These systems can also transcribe calls for easy searches and maintain a level of quality control that is impossible for human employees.
We all know that computers and robots will replace humans in a variety of roles over the next few years, but when it comes to running call centers, AI isn’t the future “ it’s the present. Next time your customers call for help, they’re going to find Siri and her compatriots on the other end more often than not.
