When it comes to contact centres, the customer experience is paramount. Customer loyalty is key to a business, and communication with human agents at a contact centre level can really help to foster and grow those relationships.
With the advent of AI contact centre solutions, dubbed the ‘modern contact centre’, people are wary of the idea of diminishing human contact. But the reality is that AI offers enormous benefits to contact centres, without doing away with the human touch.
The modern contact centre
The modern contact centre enhances the customer experience through innovation, providing a level of personalised service that’s only possible through the application of AI.
Contrary to popular belief, the arrival of AI contact centre solutions doesn’t signal the death knell for human-operated customer service. In fact, AI and the implementation of new technologies is helping shape the future of the contact centre, making them both more productive and effective, enabling organisations to gather more information from customers quickly and easily, helping to boost the efficiency of their human agents.
Where customer service used to be hampered by traditionally long wait times and poor service, the modern contact centre is focused on putting AI solutions at the core of their communication strategy to empower everyone involved.
How AI is being used in the modern contact centre
Cloud contact centre solutions are a hub of customer information, and ensuring your organisation is able to both gather and use these vast quantities of data is crucial to modernisation. AI is useful in capturing and prioritising leads, which makes lead-nurturing more effective. Machine learning can also chart behavioural patterns of the people visiting your website.
Introduce an omnichannel service
An omnichannel contact centre solution gives your customer true freedom – seamlessly swap from a webchat to a voice call for instance, where the AI has already successfully gathered information on the customer.
As customer expectations evolve, your contact centre needs to be able to do the same. Having an AI as the first point of contact for your customer as part of your omnichannel service means streamlining your contact centre experience. By gathering data on the customer and their needs, AI bots are able to help you personalise the service you offer by directing that customer to an agent already primed to assist.
Optimise your workforce
Empower your human agents by utilising their talents where they're actually needed, on high-priority tasks. This improves productivity throughout and enables you to provide great customer experiences.
Contact centres need to operate at maximum efficiency and remaining in control of staffing schedules is key to an optimised workforce. AI-powered solutions can predict the best staffing schedules with great accuracy, with some producing schedules nearly 60 times faster than via traditional means. By having these schedules readily available, planners can make quick workforce changes where necessary when unexpected staffing changes arise.
Enhance your existing customer service offering
By removing your agents from the front line, they can be better allocated to deal with customers once you’ve gained a complete view of them thanks to the data the AI captures.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that deals with the interaction between computers and humans, helping AI to produce language that replicates a natural conversation in a way that’s both valuable and provides necessary context. By engaging in conversational language, your AI can act as your first line of defence, helping the customer take their first step onto your journey.
Aid your contact centre advisors, don’t replace them
AI must assist all the key personas within your centre, and can be used to provide customer information to your agents. At the same time, AI software is useful for keeping supervisors up to date on KPIs and agent performance.
Automated quality assurance checks help to ensure that the level of service within your contact centre remains high, with agents motivated to perform well and give the customer the best possible experience.
AI can provide services to your agents that other humans either couldn’t or would normally be incredibly time-consuming. For instance, a transcribed voice conversation may be full of unstructured data. However, an AI system can transform it into easily searchable, structured data.
The human element
AI should assist and enhance the customer service experience. At Onecom, we help you manage and deliver fantastic customer experiences through the use of innovative contact centre tools.
By digitising the customer journey, we’re able to improve the experience for both the customer and your agents. AI isn’t something to be feared – cloud contact centre solutions need to embrace AI software and use it to transform into something capable of even greater customer experiences.
Get in touch today to discover how to enhance your AI contact centre solutions.
