Call centers are transforming their strategies, service delivery models, and leveraging advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cloud Computing to expand their capabilities and better support their agents and customers.
After all, contact centers are the first point of contact where customers resolve their problems. That’s why business leaders are looking for advanced solutions that can deliver agility and cost effectiveness by lowering operational costs and helping to simplify workflows for agents.
According to Statista, the call center Artificial Intelligence market revenue is forecast to reach $2.8 billion by 2024. This forecast reflects the growing popularity of AI-based customer service solutions, including chatbots, in the business. of contact centers.
AI-based cloud solutions provide a common platform for call centers to collect customer data. These are analyzed to extract demographic, behavioral and location-based customer information. By harnessing the power of analyzed data, contact centers can align customers with the best available resources. For example, AI-based chatbots can be used to answer repetitive questions instead of an agent, minimizing support costs and giving customers access to self-service options.
Benefits of AI and the Cloud for Call Centers
1) Improved Agent Performance
Using innovative AI-based solutions, contact centers can manage day-to-day operational tasks such as team reports, file creation, annotations, and agent performance tracking, among others. Agents can leverage AI and advanced analytics capabilities to drive engagement and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
2) Workflow Automation
Gathering information and analyzing reams of data before providing the solution is time consuming. Today’s customers don’t like to sit on hold, which makes the customer experience (CX) difficult. Using AI and cloud solutions, call centers can eliminate workflow latency and easily integrate with other CRMs, gain performance views, aggregate data, and streamline cross-platform workflows. Additionally, these advanced solutions help extract real-time information that helps agents make confident decisions and respond to customer inquiries faster.
3) Meeting Changing Customer Demands
As the world moves further into digitization, customer behavior and demands have also changed, forcing companies to shift their strategies and focus on delivering customer-centric experiences. AI and cloud solutions bring much-needed flexibility and agility to call centers, enabling them to work in concert with changing customer demands. Delivering seamless First Call Resolution (FCR) is what every contact center strives for. AI-powered contact centers offer remote visual support, improving FCR and achieving higher customer satisfaction.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for call centers increased and most companies implemented remote work. Agents struggled to provide ongoing operational support to customers while working from home. However, data security was a major concern that all call centers struggled with, and advanced tools allowed agents to stay connected with their customers in such difficult times.
Today, contact centers are adopting AI and cloud-based software solutions to increase operational efficiency, improve customer service, enhance management reporting features, and meet emerging demands for omnichannel experiences.