Top 16 Ways Contact Centers Can Benefit from Artificial Intelligence

In a 2015 study by Gartner, it was found that 89% of the companies believed the customer experience shall soon become the foremost basis of competition. Years later, the study is proving to be accurate as most businesses and leading businessmen lay emphasis on the importance of customer service and customer experience.

Contact center, being at the helm of customer service, is the most critical touchpoint for the businesses to consider for improving customer experience. With the advent of digitalization and AI becoming sophisticated with each passing day, it is crucial for organizations to understand the power of AI and undertake call center transformation from their traditional setup and operations.

16 Key Benefits of AI for Call Centers

The concept of Artificial Intelligence and call centers together can completely change the customer service game, enabling hyper-personalization of customer experiences driven by deep data analysis.

To understand how do call centers benefit from Artificial Intelligence, it is critical to understand the various ways and use cases of AI in the contact centers. Let us share with you the top 16 ways in which AI can truly enrich CX for call centers.

1. Intelligent Call Routing

   

   The most frustrating thing for customers calling contact centers is to be on hold for longer periods of time as their calls are being transferred from one department to another in order to find the right agent with the required expertise to resolve their queries.

   AI and Machine learning along with Natural Language Processing take routing beyond proficiency queues by analyzing what customers say exactly and guide them to the right agent, depending on various factors like customer personality, the performance of the advisors against targeted KPIs, etc.

2. Replacing the Redundant IVR

   

   The other most frustrating or annoying part of contact centers is the traditional IVR processes with pre-defined input and output queue taking up a lot of the customer's time. AI can truly do away with it by understanding the customer statements and directing them to their desired result without the long wait and/or option selection time.

3. Analyzing and Managing Big Data

   

   The vast amount of data that is collected every day in a contact center is just overwhelming. Managing big data is one of the best use cases to understand the importance of AI in customer support. Analysis of such a large pool of data manually is practically unimaginable, let alone overtly expensive.

   AI, on the other hand, can help manage, analyze, and offer accurate insights through machine learning and other advanced technologies capable of sieving through copious amounts of data in no time to obtain required outputs.

4. Obtaining Specific Data from Customer Interactions

   

   The intelligent chatbots and AI agents have the capability to capture detailed data insights from individual customer interactions that are later transferred to analytics to optimize future interactions based on the customer behavior, response, and other variables.

5. Enhanced Self-service of Common Requests and Questions

   

   One of the fastest-growing areas of use for Artificial Intelligence in contact centers is the self-service capability to address day-to-day common questions and interactions. The continuous advancements in AI are trying to create more sophisticated and intelligent voice agents capable of better linguistic processing to fully comprehend the customer's request and give more cognitive answers making the customers feel that they are talking to a human.

6. Improve CX With Artificial Intelligence: Predicting Customer Needs

   

   Automated customer services and RPA tools leverage big data to analyze and predict customer needs. This can greatly help the businesses to personalize interactions and drive the customers to desired actions through better product/service offerings.

7. Predictive Analysis of Customer Behavior

   

   Along with customer needs, the advancements in AI will help predict customer behavior better. As the ML and NLP grow more sophisticated, they will be able to provide better insights into individual customer journeys and predict their future response and behavior to the business's course of action.

8. Greater Aid in Workforce Management

   

   AI can become a great planner for your internal staffing decisions. Call centers operate with a huge workforce and their management involves necessary but repetitive tasks that can be easily and effectively managed by AI tools.

9. Intelligent and Effective Handling of Customer Complaints

   

   Artificial Intelligence and call centers together can address a lot of customer issues, their complaints being one of the most pressing ones. An agitated customer is seeking immediate help and in the case of manual, human-led customer complaint handling, the whole process can eat up a lot of time, further adding to the fury of a consumer.

   This is where AI improves customer services immensely by enabling call centers to handle and auto-answer general complaints from various customers through OCR (Optical Character Recognition). There are many advanced AI tools that can now grasp the tone of the content helping the human team to just overview and quickly transmit the appropriate response to the customers. The ML also comes into play as it further understands and saves these responses in the system for further treatment of similar complaints.

10. Anticipating Issues through Real-time Error Identification

    

    The contact center with implemented AI tools are obtaining, processing, and optimizing loads of data round-the-clock, and with its strong predictive analysis capabilities, they can predict any deviation or issues within the contact centers too. Any significant deviation can flag off an alert to notify any internal issues, helping the team to take timely actions to resolve the same.

11. Optimizing Routine Tasks of the Contact Center

    

    The agents at contact centers can greatly benefit from the AI tools that can optimize the key performance metrics of day-to-day operations. For example, AI-led optimization can simplify agent effort by eliminating the search and browsing tasks to track or improve Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

12. Act as an Intelligent Assistant to the Call Center Advisor

    

    To improve call centers with AI, one of the roles that it can assume is that of an assistant to the advisors, augmenting their abilities to resolve customer queries faster and with greater efficiency. While some argue that the AI will snatch away the human jobs, one must understand that the human touch shall always remain of importance and AI shall act as an assistant to unburden the stress and repetitive efforts of the humans.

13. Improve Customer Engagement with AI-led Sentiment Analysis

    

    AI can effectively identify interactions that led to negative customer engagement helping project managers and team heads to monitor and proactively manage agent interactions, rectify the same in real-time, and improve customer engagement in future calls.

    Call centers can also use AI's capabilities to comprehend and predict the sentiments of the customers from analyzing data of lagging KPIs like NPS, sales survey, etc., to adjust their offerings to incite positive sentiment.

14. Comprehensive Understanding of Calling Agent Performance

    

    The effective management of call centers largely depends on the performance of its call center agents in terms of their success in handling easy to complex customer interactions, leading to enhanced customer experiences and further build customer loyalty in the long run.

    Machine learning can help a great deal in identifying the good and poor performing agents based on various factors. This enables the call centers to discover better tactics for agent training and build more robust systems of hiring the right personnel for the center, saving tons of money, time, and efforts, directly and indirectly.

15. Assisting Customers to Easily Navigate Around the Company's Website

    

    Chatbots and/virtual assistants may prove as a blessing, especially in larger multi-channel call centers that frequently face staff shortages. Virtual assistants can offer immediate support and direct the customers to the desired part of the website or FAQs and in the case where they cannot manage a request, they smartly route the call to a live chat advisor ensuring that the customer's time is not wasted.

16. AI to Reduce Call Center Costs and Drive Greater Revenue

    

    The biggest advantage of using AI for contact centers is the reduced operational, analytical, and other costs along with driving more revenues by acquiring and retaining customers, up-selling, and cross-selling guided by predictive analysis enabled by sophisticated AI technologies.

Conclusion

AI along with Machine learning and other intelligent technologies is poised to transcend call center silos and successfully transform the back and front end of the contact centers for the better. AI-powered contact centers will be at the forefront of driving better customer satisfaction and experiences through a thorough understanding of their needs and desires. The need of the moment, therefore, is to find the right partner who can enable successful AI-transformation suited to the scale, operations, and specific requirements of your contact centers.

O2I is a leader and a key disruptor of the traditional technologies to bring innovative and creative AI technologies to the forefront of their call center offerings. We are more than equipped and experienced to lead and empower your contact centers with superlative and futuristic technologies of AI. Get in touch with our call center executives today.