Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How AI Helps Improve the Customer Experience
When automation first debuted in the contact center in the form of interactive voice response (IVR) and other self-service technologies, customers weren’t exactly sold on it. It required a lot of tiresome button-pressing, and listening to irrelevant menu options. If you missed your option, you had to start all over again. When customer support went to the Internet, it resulted in being directed to a lot of FAQ pages that may (or may not) have solved our problem, it became clear to most people that automation wasn’t for their benefit, it was for the contact center’s benefit.
Contact centers are now re-optimizing themselves for more automation, but this time, the goal isn’t to drive customers off the phone. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), contact center platforms are getting better at anticipating customer demands and helping agents fight the right solutions – personalized solutions – faster.
Too Much Data for a Human to Process
Business solutions in the contact center collect a great deal of data, which can then be used to tailor the customer experience for each customer. Increased computing power coupled with large quantities of data from sales, marketing and the call center mean that an AI is necessary to draw the right conclusions. Thanks to application programming interface (APIs), contact center solutions can be linked to share data to automate processing across the entire customer experience, from browsing to billing.
AI Assists, It Doesn’t Dominate
AI technology in the form of chatbots can assist with the human-agent interaction by, for example, determining the customer’s intent and directing the call to the right human agent, or completing a transaction (payment, a survey, etc.) after the human agent finishes the call. In cases where the transaction doesn’t require a human, it can talk a customer through a simple process in the form of a natural language chat. This frees up agents to resolve more complicated issues, and allows the business to reduce wait times and increase customer satisfaction without hiring more agents.
In the case of RBA (robotic process automation), the AI may not even “speak” to the customer, but instead will automate the workflow for the human agent, bringing up the right knowledgebase when an agent needs an answer, automating data entry to speed after-call wrap-up or processing customer voicemails to extract the pertinent data so agents don’t need to waste time listening to the whole message.
To learn more about the Future of Work and how AI will drive the contact center forward into the twenty-first century, plan on attending the Future of Work Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from February 12 to 14, 2020. For more information and to register, visit www.futureofworkexpo.com.
Edited by Maurice Nagle