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AI: The Future of Cloud Contact Centre Technology

Contact Center technology has evolved considerably and is in a condition of consistent evolution. The challenge is often arming the contact center with sufficient resources and empowering agents to deliver an excellent customer experience. Nowadays, businesses are striving to enhance customer care services and customer engagement as it is the most crucial factor to ensure the success of any product/ service.

To keep up with the competition and ensure the customers' loyalty towards an organization, businesses are focusing on enduring the technologies for delivering remarkable customer services.

Cloud contact center technology's flexibility allows the contact centers to be more receptive to the customers' needs, though not an enchantment fix to day-to-day contact center challenges.

However, due to technological advancement, AI provides a much-needed boost to the cloud contact centers, starting from rectifying critical issues while introducing new customer service capabilities to enhancing the customer experience.

COVID-19 accelerates change

Before COVID-19, contact center transformation was on the radar of many businesses. The unexpected phase of COVID-19 has pushed everyone to go virtual and work from their homes, bringing these timelines forward by making a case for transformation much more robust and timely.

With the pandemic globally, the companies pivoted rapidly towards remote working models, but the crisis meant that many businesses and agents could not work.

For many organizations, particularly in sectors heavily impacted by the lockdown, such as insurance, travel, banking, and communications, demand for contact centers surged just as the capacity to service these enquired plummeted. This meant that many organizations were forced to adapt machines to fill in the gaps rapidly.

Artificial Intelligence and CC

AI, the latest buzz in the IT industry, has a transformative effect on countless technology applications – and cloud contact centers are no way out of the list. AI provides faster processing along with around-the-clock availability; it is mainly used in cloud contact centers to analyze historical records and call data to analyze and tell the customer behavior.

AI technology also enables the virtual call agents to handle more repetitive and more straightforward customer interactions by reducing the agent holding time and ensuring the call goes to the concerned agent according to the queries or previous conversation b/w client and agents.

Organizations and consumers will both increasingly emphasize customer experience and satisfaction as a tool of brand differentiator instead of as a support function. Although, the main part of call centers consists of two things, i.e., recruiting and training the agents to make the operations more effective and efficient, for which organizations are exploring more technologies.

The enormous growth of globally accessible machine learning tools and cloud services has put powerful new AI capabilities in possession of cloud call centers to improve customer experience, service, and customer engagement in all possible ways.

As per Forbes, AI-enabled conversational agents are expected to handle 20% of all customer service requests by 2022, which further indicates relieving human agents with huge burdens and time constraints. When customers talk to a live agent, AI tools enable them to understand the customer behavior in advance and ensure high chances of resolving the queries in no time. Virtual agents know in advance who their clients are, what exactly do they need, and, in most cases, how to get it for them.

As per the reports, the market for call-center AI technology is expected to increase from $800 million in 2019 to $2.8 billion by 2024.

Here's a look, how AI is revamping the call center and redefining the customer experience...

AI-Powered Customer Assistants:

Nowadays, most businesses and industry leaders in the cloud contact center software and enterprise cloud platform have collaborated to deliver AI-powered customer employee experiences.

AI and technology enable organizations to improve customer service and resolve basic issues with features such as chatbots, agent assists, and Insights. They provide real-time assistance and empower the agents for interactions that need a human touch.

They seamlessly automate the entire workflow and tasks by reducing the priceless minutes off each interaction and guide agents with the required information to resolve customer inquiries and improving the complete customer and agent experience.

Reduce cost and improved efficiency
Chatbots and voice bots
Empower agents to respond to the customer's queries in no time.
Orchestrate seamless end-to-end customer experience
Allows the supervisors to gain insights from the data, and helps to align, resource, and prioritize your customer experience strategy.
Increase operational efficiency by reducing the call volume, agent training cots, shorter handling times, making overall operations faster and more effective.
Provide personalized support, 24/7 service, and quick issue resolution, turning individual transactions into continued customer loyalty.

Predictive Call Routing:

Predictive call routing is a call routing technology that evaluates the interaction based on a customer's past behavior and previous conversations, product preferences, and other variables to predict the skills and personality traits an agent would need to serve the customers most optimally. After analyzing and evaluating the interaction, it then matches the agent's skill sets and automatically assigns the virtual agent.

Nowadays, customers want quick and accurate support from the call centers. Predictive call routing uses CRM system data and data stored in the contact center solution to smoothen the process. It also leverages the stored and gathered data to help agents and contact centers meet their KPIs.

Upgrade the routing engine
Eliminates the real-time queue monitoring
Increases the efficiency
Helps to prioritize critical tasks

Fixing Customer Frustrations with IVR:

IVR improves the customer experience and reduces the agent's workload by reducing the customer's frustration and abandonment. We've all experienced the automated messages that lead the customers nowhere. But, IVR (interactive voice response) is the solution to this problem. Voice recognition can help the customers to skip the tedious process and get queries resolved with voice-enabled IVR.

AI technologies, including machine learning and NLP, can better understand what customers want and helps to get it achieved with the IVR calls. It enables the customers to get the assistance they need and get transferred their calls to a contact center agent with the required expertise.

Live Agents get Better at Resolving Issues:

Artificial Intelligence-driven cloud contact center solution can also help live virtual agents and the customers while dealing with them by providing solutions/ recommendations in real-time – based on an AI-informed analysis of a customer's past interactions. It helps the agents to resolve the customer's issues instantly.

Similarly, AI can suggest the most valuable answers to customers' most commonly asked questions by aggregating customer interactions. These questions can be fed into the FAQ sections and used internally and externally by both agents and customers.

Stride towards the future

Companies that invested early in AI are well-positioned to lead cloud-based contact center transformation. Though other businesses must rethink what contact centers can do for them with AI, they should incorporate it to improve customer experience through contact center's services and data insights. In the wake of COVID-19, the contact center is changing into a different and much more critical business asset.

It enables the organizations to create customer-centric business approaches by incorporating open and agile innovation.

Virtual Agents- Replacing interactive voice response (IVRs) and the role of Tier 1 agents.
Agent Assistance– Using AI to guide and prompt live agents with the next best action throughout the customer interaction
Business Insights- Transforming unused voice recordings into valuable business insights
Agent Routing– Using AI to route customers to agents based on a deep knowledge of customer and agent profiles
Quality, Compliance, and Assurance– Using AI to automatically score and rate agent engagements for continuous improvement.

AUTHOR BIO:

Shruti Bansal is a tech enthusiast with a specialization in Digital Marketing. Currently working in a cloud contact center solution company. She finds enthusiasm in learning and writing about technologies that are transforming customer engagement through contact centers.