5 WAYS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) IS DISRUPTING CONTACT CENTRES

1. Customer interaction happens on many different mediums, including live chat, email, phone, and social media. In the past, companies relied on agents to manually document their varied conversations on a central platform. But condensing an hour-long conversation into a summary lost a lot of detail. Now, we have integrated systems that can collect all that data. It can log text data from SMS and emails and automatically transcribe voice data from video calls and voice.

2. Most agents can instinctively tell if a customer is happy or angry, satisfied, or frustrated, engaged or distracted. But it’s hard to measure and operationalize those insights. That’s where natural language processing (NLP) comes into play. With your new dataset of all customer interactions, you can deploy NLP to determine the sentiment of customer interactions and extrapolate the customer’s emotional state.

3. Everyone needs a coach. Coaching helps people improve everything—their outlook, their performance, and their results. But coaching is expensive, and it’d be ridiculously expensive to hire personal coaches for every contact centre worker. Because of the tremendous increase in computing power, we can now perform transcription in real time. Combined with strong NLP services, we can mine the live transcripts for coaching opportunities and deliver tips, advice, and corrections to agents in the moment. The AI-coach helps the agents improve their performance on every call, every day by collecting important data points. These metrics, such as a sentiment analysis, help agents improve their skills over time, helping to reduce human error.

4. Historically, knowledge management systems have not been very efficient. When clients can’t find answers on their own on a web site, they turn to contact centres, tying up agents with often simple requests. Thankfully, we are replacing dumb keyword searches with intelligent semantic searches that understand your question and pull in the relevant information. This goes much further than just smart knowledge bases. With effective knowledge management, we can free agents from monotonous and basic work and instead focus on the trickier, high-value questions.

5. Today’s clients want to interact with companies on their terms using their channel of choice and on their schedule. The practice is called omnichannel communication and it’s pretty much a minimum offering. While there are omnichannel communication platforms that simplify delivery, few support AI-powered conversations. But we’re starting to see platforms that allow you to design conversations centrally and deliver them to whatever channel you choose: Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, live chat and so forth. Not only does this deliver a better customer experience but it also helps companies collect more data.