The coronavirus pandemic has compelled people to run their lives virtually from the safety of home. Never before the world has witnessed an anomalous peak in digital interactions and transactions as now! This is indeed a powerful precursor to the future of digital. It has also raised a question on the preparedness of businesses to handle such situations. At least the call center companies and their business clients across the world are feeling the heat. Gartner predicts that by 2022, CCaaS will be the preferred model of adoption for 50% of all contact centers. Let’s look at how AI based contact center can help your business boost revenues, become more agile and deliver exceptional customer support.

Challenges faced by Customer Service teams worldwide

Currently, the phones and chat boxes of contact centers are inundated with queries & support tickets from customers. A lot of them are routine & repetitive like ticket cancellations, banking and financial transactions, technical support for gadgets and appliances, order delivery status and many other issues. Contact center companies are also receiving requests from many government agencies and new clients to set up urgent citizen support helplines. They are struggling to manage this surge in demand due to multi-fold challenges:

• Their workplaces are either closed or operating for limited hours with reduced manpower to maintain the safety of their employees.
• Many call centers have promptly activated the rest of their staff, instructing them to work from home. However, it has been a major challenge to equip them with the necessary technology and support required to function efficiently from home. Moreover, attending calls from home raises security and privacy issued for business clients and their customers.
• It is not feasible to recruit additional manpower, even if temporarily. There are cost, time, training and many other variables associated with it.

All these challenges have added layers of complexity for contact centers. Their staff is working round-the-clock, probably on the verge of burnout and yet not able to handle the peak in demand. As a result, customers are experiencing longer wait and response time, resulting in their dissatisfaction and reputation damage to the brand.

How Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) based contact center help?

Businesses can deploy AI-powered virtual agents and contact center automation to meet the outpouring of calls in a timely and personalized manner along with the human agents on the frontline. They have in-built Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing features to deliver real-time customer experiences. Several call centers in the U.S., Australia, India and many other COVID-19 impacted countries have either implemented or in the process of accelerating the shift to AI based contact centers.
Let’s understand how AI can be instrumental in enabling contact centers to maintain excellence in its service standards despite the ongoing crisis:

• Provide real time and contextualized services to your customers.
• Prioritize the nature and urgency of calls through automated routing.
• Address non-critical calls and let the human agents handle the most critical ones.
• Redistribute the volume of calls between AI agents and human agents.
• Make faster searches for information sought by customers.
• Deliver a conversational experience parallel to human touch-points.
• Create an agile and responsive workflow for quick response time and higher productivity.
• Provide 24/7 services to your customers while reducing stress on your human agents.
• Log customer cases into the system to trace the customer’s engagement journey from the first call.
• Enable omni-channel support for your customers across voice, email and chat.

There is no doubt that AI-powered solutions will empower contact centers & augment your human agents to focus on issues that they may not be able to address today due to lack of time or unavailability. At the same time, it will also enable call centers to operate at their full capacity, maintain social distancing norms and most importantly, provide optimum customer experience.

AI is all set to become a strategic game-changer in the industry. There is no better time than NOW for businesses to transition to AI based contact centers to prepare for a digital future and get a first-mover advantage in the market.

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