Customer service

How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Contact Centers?

Enreach 20/05/2020
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The customer experience and contact centers are excellent starting points for implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, since they are a great source of information for users, generating large amounts of data, impossible to process manually.

Additionally, the giant leaps in voice processing technology and natural language processing (NLP) are opening up great opportunities to improve call center accuracy and promote cost efficiency.

Natural language processing, a branch of AI, deals with the interaction between computers and humans using natural language. NLP makes sense of human language in a way that is valuable and contextual. If a customer says, “I’m free on Friday at 9:30 am,” PNL understands that you are available to speak to an agent during these hours.

Artificial Intelligence has been an area of scientific research for decades and the latest advances in computing capacity, data collection and transmission, and NLP have generated much speculation on how this technology will evolve and what can be accomplished in the coming years.

The Future Of AI

The future of Artificial Intelligence is posed brightly for AI technology and its applications in almost all industries and sectors, including retail and e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, travel and tourism, among others. The AI cloud contact center is no stranger to this new world, full of opportunities that come in many forms:

1) Automation

It follows pre-programmed rules for handling simple and often repetitive tasks. You can automate them and let agents focus on delivering greater customer satisfaction.

2) Discovery

Relying on Artificial Intelligence to cultivate data from billions of interactions leads to actionable discoveries and customer insights that drive predictive recommendations and optimize the efficiency of agents and contact centers.

3) Improvement Of Prediction Models

Many call centers already have prediction models, but the new frontiers in AI can make them better and more accurate.

4) Prescription

AI should recognize new patterns and suggest the best based steps to take. Today, you can train agents with smart guidance, recommending optimal actions to quickly resolve complex customer problems.

5) Alert

A call center is constantly accumulating, processing and producing mountains of data. When something goes wrong, the AI must send an alert about specific data points. For example, you can reduce short and long-term training efforts by identifying errors in real time.

6) Recommendation

The AI ​​engine has to recommend the next steps, or the best action to take, proactively delivering information in a simple interface, thus preventing agents from dispersing between various data sources.

7) Optimization

The AI ​​recommendations lead to the optimization of the main metrics that define the performance of the daily operation of the contact center. For example, you can improve Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to reduce agent stress by eliminating search and navigation tasks, thereby simplifying your effort.

8) Assistance

Directly or indirectly, each person in the call center should be able to benefit from practical AI assistance for the tasks they perform. Contact centers should reduce manual supervision, taking advantage of automated assistance to reduce agent-supervisor interactions, giving supervisors more time to focus on workforce engagement activities and agents more quality time with customers. 

Where To Implement AI Software In A Call Center?
1) People And Operations

You can enhance the end customer experience by infusing Artificial Intelligence software to assist all key people within the call center: providing AI users and information to agents and supervisors with key performance indicators. Automation (also marketing), optimization, outlier detection, routing, and virtual agents are all stages of the business operation where AI can also help.

2) Technology

An Artificial Intelligence technology platform is needed for contact centers if you want to capture quality data. There’s no point in adding a virtual agent or chatbot if you don’t have the right call center AI technology to capture and process that data. AI works on a good data platform and for that you also need intelligent infrastructure architecture.

What Are The AI Layers For Call Centers?
1) Customer Intelligence

It is important to know as much as you can about customers, even before they call. When you have a lot of information stored in the CRM, this allows you to know more about the users. This information should be able to be analyzed to understand what customers need, and what their preferences, demographic, sociographic and even psychographic characteristics are. 

2) Conversational Intelligence

It occurs the moment the customer calls and means the extraction of each information taken from the interaction. It can be voice, voice transferred to text and text. AI should be able to handle all of these elements, as there is a lot of voice information that cannot be transcribed into text, such as emotions. This takes place within the voice channel and not in the text channel.

3) Interaction Intelligence

It consists of a comprehensive analysis of the customer experience from the moment he/she calls. Do you know what the estimated waiting time for the call was? Sometimes simple numbers can shed light on a conversation by learning the full customer experience. For example, if the estimated wait time was only two minutes, but the actual wait time was 10 minutes, the customer was probably not happy when the conversation with the agent started. These data points should not be ignored as they can enhance your CX.

4) Contact Center Intelligence

Every interaction with the customer, conversation, email thread and text needs to be analyzed. Examining these data allows us to ask and answer questions such as: Is the call center working correctly? How can I improve performance?

AI is transforming call centers to achieve excellence in customer experience. The implementation of Artificial Intelligence software in all its different layers can bring improvements to agents and supervisors, operations and technological systems.

The implementation of Artificial Intelligence in customer service centers is the perfect opportunity for CX leaders to be the first to adopt cutting-edge technology that brings the contact center to the forefront of an AI-powered revolution.

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