While many businesses are moving to cloud-based contact centre solutions, most are not yet taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
With the right solution in place, AI can reduce contact centre wait times, provide first-touch resolution and increase staff efficiency.
Here, we look at AI in more detail and explain how it can improve customer experiences.
With Intelligent Virtual Agents
Chatbots or Intelligent Virtual Agents are fast growing in contact centres. These AI-powered bots use machine learning to ‘learn’ from customer interactions and can respond to customer queries to provide an instant resolution, allowing live agents to focus on high-priority tasks.
This helps to improve the customer experience in a number of ways, from responding to customers instantly and 24 hours a day, to minimising if not totally removing wait times or the need to put customers on hold. They can be designed to handle this by responding to queries directly, which saves your agents time. If a query becomes too complex, they can seamlessly pass the customer and full context of their IVA discussion to a human agent.
IVA’s can also engage with customers across multiple channels to deliver consistent and compliant experiences. They are capable of speech recognition, voice biometrics, GDPR compliance, natural language processing and much more.
Build customer relationships
Contact centre AI solutions can help you turn every customer interaction into long-lasting, loyal relationships by exceeding on customer expectations.
An omnichannel, AI-powered contact centre can enable your teams to connect with customers on a much deeper level. With every phone call, webchat and email being fed into the machine learning process, AI can deliver a greater understanding of your customers.
You’ll then be able to provide personalised support and resolve customer issues quickly, through whichever contact channel they prefer to use. By giving your customers what they want, for example, a faster, smarter and more personalised service – AI can transform the customer journey and nurture relationships.
It’s clear that AI is a key contributor to building trust and loyalty with customers, so it makes sense that 51% of companies are now choosing AI to personalise the customer experience.
Real-time insights
AI can analyse usage data, keeping your contact centre running smoothly. This means it will give you real-time insight into each customer’s query, so agents can understand customer needs before they even pick up the phone.
Access customer feedback, engagement history and demographic data so agents know the best way to respond. On top of this, AI can undertake sentiment analysis – looking at the way your customers are typing (fast or slow), the type of language they’re using (aggressive/agreeable) and more.
AI can track customer sentiment during a phone call too – for example, when a customer is frustrated, their voice might raise or there might be a long pause in the conversation. AI can analyse the tone of voice and language in order to determine the caller’s possible mood.
Smarter call handling
Contact centre AI solutions allow you to handle customer calls more intelligently – this is sometimes called Intelligent Voice Routing. Instead of forcing customers through lengthy menus (press 1 for this, or 2 for that) AI can automatically route them to the right agent with the right skill set to help.
It does this by looking at communication habits and matching each query with the department best suited to deal with specific types of customers and queries (based on personality, communication style, and call history), ensuring that issues are dealt with quickly.
When that agent picks up they’ll already know the customer’s details and query, speeding up the process significantly.. This is important as over 40% of customers are most frustrated when having to repeat information multiple times because they are passed from agent to agent.
Improve business efficiency
When AI is introduced into contact centres, business efficiency improves. It lets your agents reach customers faster, improves handling times, reduces agent training costs and so much more. Plus, Accenture reported that AI has the potential to increase business profitability by an average of 38% by 2035.
Virtual agents can be utilised on a number of different platforms. They can speak to an AI chatbot on your website and with an advanced system, your customers may not even know they were ever talking to an AI.
AI has also added value in handling the huge amounts of data that contact centres deal with every day. We are creating more data now than ever before and businesses receive, process and store an enormous amount of data daily. AI has the ability to handle this data faster and more accurately than humans.
For further insights, read our Intelligent Contact Centre Services eBook. Or to find out more about introducing AI to your contact centre, talk to our experts and book a call here.