Running a business is all about winning customer experiences, which is best done by being available to them anytime they want to connect. In the era of instant gratification, customers want immediate response to their queries and resolution for their issues. You cannot expect them to wait for getting an answer to an email or queue up with a ticketing solution. They want response and they want it now. No wonder, contact centers have become an essential touchpoint for all businesses that want to win on the availability front. Over the years, their value has grown immensely as they substitute the in-person help that was historically provided at a typical in-store experience. Understandably, businesses are taking all the measures needed to improvise contact centers so that they can stay competitive. The adoption of technologies like cloud and AI are just a few steps in this direction.
Let us learn more about the evolution of contact centers before understanding more about the role of Artificial Intelligence in taking them to the next level.
Evolution
of Contact Center solutions
Contact centers have come a long way since their inception and technology has always been vital to them. During the initial days (when call centers preceded contact centers), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology empowered them with self-service features. Callers could resolve their own issues themselves with the press of a button. Such is the popularity of IVR that it continues to be an integral part of a majority of contact centers even today.
The emergence of the internet later opened a new channel for businesses to interact with customers, whereby they could be available via new touchpoints such as email and live chat. Next was the era of social media, which democratized customer service. The most recent milestone was marked by the adoption of cloud telephony, which unburdened businesses from on-premise platforms. The benefits of embracing cloud communication are many, from expediting software updates to reducing the setup and infrastructural demands.
The
era of AI begins
As the complexity of questions and customer expectations grow, agents need to be resourceful so that they can find the right answers and deliver them in a variety of ways. Since contact center happens to be one of the key post-sale customer touchpoints, businesses cannot afford to deliver anything but the best when it comes to customer experience. They need to think beyond the ordinary, beyond IVR and cloud telephony when it comes to modernizing contact centers. Empowering themselves with artificial intelligence (AI) is the best way to do it.
AI, as the name suggests, is an extension of human intelligence whereby systems become intelligent enough to understand and interpret interactions and perform resultant actions just like humans do. Data lies at the core of AI and in the context of contact centers, data relates to call records and recordings of every contact with the customers. The recent advances in technologies like automatic speech recognition and Natural Language Processing enable businesses to use voice recordings as a significant source for training machine learning models.
How
AI is poised to revolutionize contact center experiences
Now it is clear that the era of Artificial Intelligence is here, so you would want to know how AI and cloud can transform customer experiences and why businesses should embrace it as a part of their contact center solutions.
AI-powered
virtual agents to replace IVR systems
Live agents will now be augmented by AI-powered virtual agents that will replace the conventional IVR systems. These smart virtual agents are capable of delivering human-like, voice-enabled conversational interfaces. Moreover, they can work standalone or can be guided by a live agent, based on the complexity of the interaction. Another form of utilization of the technology is as agent assistance, which prompts and guides human agents with quick and relevant action throughout the customer interaction.
Intelligent
Interactive Voice Assistants with AI
The next evolution of IVR systems comes in the form of Interactive Voice Assistants (IVA) and Artificial Intelligence makes a significant contribution here as well. The backbone of IVA lies in a system which is just like an IVR, but almost indistinguishable from a human agent when it comes to the abilities to listen, comprehend, analyze and converse with customers. Obviously, this is a smart way to engage with your customers and enhance their experiences so that you end up satisfying them and ensuring that they stay with your business.
Capturing
data from customer interactions
AI-based voice agents are capable of capturing a lot of granular data around every single customer interaction. This data can be fed into analytics engines for enabling the optimization of the call center process. Further, AI tools such as sentiment analysis can be leveraged for speeding up the process of query resolution. They open the potential to enhance customer experience by quickly identifying trends such as dissatisfaction or anger within large and disparate data sets, often faster than a human agent can.
Predicting
customer behaviour
With the identification of new trends in customer behaviour at initial stages in their development, it becomes possible to predict their behaviour with speed and accuracy. Obviously, this reduces the possibility of human errors and enables the agents to handle the emerging needs and expectations of the customers more effectively. It has a positive impact on customer retention and facilitates up-selling to the ones looking for information about a specific product or topic. Predictive analytics also let managers to model best practices and derive the outcomes of a particular course of action.
Enabling
smart automation of routine tasks
Routine processes such as forecasting and skills-based routing can be automated with AI. Even if there is a need for human intervention, the number of people required is fewer. Automation of routine tasks makes managing call centers much easier, saves time and enhances the productivity of customer support teams. Businesses that achieve self-learning algorithms gain a competitive advantage because it makes them capable of getting the most from their voluminous data. Such cognitive systems allow intelligent prediction and reaction, which reflects as immense improvement in customer experience.
Improving
self-service capabilities
AI can be used to improve the self-service capabilities for management of day-to-day requests and simple interactions. Sophisticated linguistic processing, for example, can be leveraged for enabling voice-based interactions in the preferred language of the customer. This makes them feel as if they are speaking to a human agent rather than a virtual agent and improves the quality of interactions.
Monitoring
agent performance
Real-time speech analytics (RTSA) is a form of AI that can be utilized for analyzing the agent and customer speech to monitor the agents’ performance. This translates into actionable insights for the team leaders and quality assurance teams, which they can use for providing feedback to agents and training them for improved performance. Additionally, this technology is capable of listening to the call content and effectively searching for and providing the agent with the missing information that they need to give to the customer.
A
final word
Seeing the incredible potential that Artificial Intelligence can unlock for contact centers, adopting this technology does not remain a choice for businesses. The best approach is to do it sooner rather than later because organizations that are early adopters always have an advantage over the others. Driving change is always a challenge and agility and adaptability are the key differentiators. At the same time, you need to choose a technology partner that is capable of making innovation simple and easy to embrace.
