4 Ways Contact Centers Can Leverage Artificial Intelligence To Enhance Customer Experience

AI in Contact centers has been at the nascent stage until now with a promising growth trajectory. According to pre-COVID 19 statistics, the global Call Center AI market size was expected to reach a value of $2,990.1 million in 2024, three times it was in 2018 at $914.5 million. It was estimated to grow at 22.6% CAGR during the forecast period 2019-2024.

However, the ongoing pandemic has changed the rules of every industry, and contact centers are no exception. With mounting business pressure in terms of a high volume of customer queries and inadequate manpower, contact centers are struggling for business continuity. Having said that, this is also the best opportunity for contact centers to upgrade their traditional business model to an AI-augmented platform and enhance the quality of their customer services with a clear focus on rebuilding their revenues and win back customer loyalty.

This article further elaborates the four main use cases of AI in contact centers to help understand its importance in the business workflow and performance.

A contact center receives thousands of messaging requests a day. But, customers care only for their queries and how fast the contact center has responded. Period.

AI-powered bots with intelligent automation skills can not only take over handling simple and frequently-asked questions but also address many other complex customer queries without human intervention. Such intelligent bots also leverage their Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing abilities to interpret the language and context of chat with the customers. This further enables them to transfer only exceptionally complicated chats/messages requiring quick resolution or empathy to human agents if at all the need arises.

Nothing is more frustrating for customers than to go through multiple prompts or menu-driven, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system on their handsets and wait for an actual response for what seems like ages. This adversely affects the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score with the contact center.

AI can take voice call experience of customers to the next level through intelligent call routing and Cognitive Voice Response. It can process customer’s personal details, previous call history and nature of queries, and provide resolution for over 75% of their queries, enabling live agent transfer for complex queries which need human cognition and empathy. This will also help contact centers to avert long hold times and transfer customer calls to and fro between several human agents.

Highly-advanced AI system can also deploy predictive analytics and speech recognition capabilities to understand the urgency or complexity of customer calls, take emotional cues and prioritize it accordingly for transfer to human customer representatives. AI can also analyse conversations between the human agents and customers to provide live guidance in terms of accurate answers and recommendations on next steps to agents.

Contact centers also receive hundreds of emails everyday which makes it manually challenging to sort and organize them, and respond appropriately on time. While AI can’t draft manual responses like the way human agents can, it can provide intelligent solutions in some other ways.

AI can automatically scan emails according to the nature of queries, filter out the spam, put them into the right buckets and tag the concerned human agent or department for further action. It can also automatically respond with pre-set answers to repetitive or frequently-asked questions. It also makes smart recommendations through predictive texts to agents when they are drafting the response to customer – something similar on the lines of Google’s Smart Compose feature.

The capabilities are not only limited to smart responses but also processing of unstructured documents received on a daily basis. The documents include vendor invoices, customer purchase orders, claim forms, KYC forms and personal IDs including passports or driving license. Processing these documents is a mandatory but time consuming process for businesses like banks, insurance, wealth management, manufacturing,  retail , CPG, healthcare & other industries and usually outsourced to back-office shared services centers.

Implementing AI in contact centers for Email management can unlock a great value for businesses by speeding up processing time and reducing costs by over 80% freeing up their human teams to focus on more critical tasks.

Your human associates are the most important asset of your contact center operations. Hence, it is crucial for contact centers to focus on the productivity, performance and happiness of their human capital instead of focusing simply on the customer service.

AI can collect data from chat, call or email conversations between customers and agents, and draw actionable insights into how agents behave or respond. These insights can be useful to plug the gaps in customer service, formulate learning and training needs of the agents or reshuffle the staff to different departments as per their experience and personality.

As you can comprehend from these use-cases, AI-powered support can go a long way in raising the standards of customer service excellence in the following manner:

• Reduce customer wait time.
• Improve the average handling time.
• Lessen the workload on your human customer support teams.
• Enable human agent to focus on more complex, strategic and creative tasks.
• Get real-time business insights.

If contact centers manage to embrace AI swiftly, especially in the current scenario, it will set a pace for the new technological beginnings in the industry. It will also hopefully revise the market size and growth numbers (as mentioned in the introductory paragraph) in the upwards direction post-COVID 19.

Now is the time to act! Learn more about supervity.ai Contact Center Automation solutions here – CX Ninja.

More resources:

1. How CX Ninja reduced average response time by over 98% managing 30000 interactions per month – Download Case Study
2. Top 12 Use Cases For AI-Based Contact Centers To Improve Customer Experience – Read here

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