Simon Black, CEO, Awaken
Artificial Intelligence (AI) might be considered by many as the buzziest of buzzwords but it’s getting harder to escape the fact that those deploying it across key areas of their business are already reaping the rewards. A recent study by Accenture found that AI technology can enhance business productivity by up to 40% and with an estimated 7 billion devices now operating with AI-powered voice assistants (IHS MARKIT) if you’re not already using it in your contact centre, it’s time to make that move.
In an industry where person-to-person contact and communication is paramount and highly valued by both agents and customers, there is an understandable suspicion around employing AI to handle customer enquiries, concerns and issues. But there is so much more to it than just using an automated voice!
At a time where agents are working from home, budgets are under greater pressure than ever before and customers’ expectations are at an all-time high AI could be the key to streamlining your contact centre processes and taking your customer service to the next level. When integrated with contact centre systems and databases, it empowers operators to predict customer behaviour and make proactive decisions that deliver competitive advantage. By analysing historical customer data, it can also be used to forecast how customers will behave in the future and anticipate their needs to ensure a good experience when interacting with your business.
AI delivers significant benefits for contact centres, enabling organisations to develop a well-informed strategy that results in competitive advantages, including:
- Turning customer interactions into useful data
We all know that contact centre systems capture a wealth of data, and while many operators already use business intelligence analytics to understand trends, it can take significant time to process and analyse accurately. By the time those reports are fed into your business strategy, the information may no longer be relevant, or a new, more urgent issue could be emerging.
AI can expedite the analytics process, promptly identifying trends within a large data set. That’s particularly helpful for labour-intensive jobs like quality checking voice calls. Tools such as sentiment analysis and voice analytics can review recorded voice calls in a matter of minutes, recognising signs of anger and dissatisfaction and identify the cause. Enabling centre managers to quickly identify any issues (for example, agents giving customers incorrect information) means that you can quickly make amends all while ensuring your business meets regulatory compliance and improves upon quality assurance standards significantly.
- Predicting what customers want
The ability to identify and extract insights across phone calls, email or web chat as trends emerge is critical. It means that your agents can respond to customers’ changing expectations faster and ensure that they capitalise on opportunities or mitigate potential negative outcomes.
AI will also help call centre managers to improve strategic resource planning, staff training as well as sales and marketing campaign planning. You can use it to predict the outcomes of implementing business decisions or new processes. In the longer term, AI allows call centre managers to model best practices based on a more accurate understanding of the voice of the customer, their preferences and behaviour.
- Reducing recruitment costs
Beyond automating and speeding up analytics processes, AI also helps to reduce the burden of training requirements and the need to keep refreshing training. Voice analytics reveals what customers are really thinking and feeling. At the same time, it helps contact centre managers to monitor agent performance over a period of time, AI can measure how the agent is feeling and whether they need any support in their role. By automating the intensive process of monitoring agent-customer interactions at scale, AI can identify agents that might need further training, which is proven to reduce agent attrition. Since the average cost to recruit a single agent can be up to £25,000, this offers significant cost savings for businesses where contact centres play a key role in their organisation.
According to Statista1, the AI market grew by 154% last year and with 41% of consumers already believing that AI will improve their lives in some way (Strategy Analytics) you might be wondering what’s holding you back. Meeting customer demands and creating a frictionless experience has never been more important. AI can help your agents and centre to turn unstructured conversations across multiple channels into structured and contextual data, delivering insight that can be utilised to improve customer service. It also enables you to take a strategic view to plan as well as support your agents in real time during live customer interactions.
Leveraging behavioural and emotional analytics has never been easier and enables you to truly understand your customers and more than ever meet their needs. AI can truly deliver this for you, if utilised effectively.
Press targets:
- Contact centre press
- Tech press
