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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming contact centres. AI enables personalised and consistent experiences for your customers whilst deflecting customer queries away from support agents and so enabling them to address issues that require human intervention. AI allows you to automate repetitive tasks or use more advanced techniques such as, machine learning.

What is AI in Contact Centres

Artificial intelligence in contact centres automates and improves customer interactions through technologies such as chatbots, voice recognition, and natural language processing.

  • Rule-based systems use predefined rules to identify customer queries and provide pre-defined responses.
  • Machine learning uses algorithms to learn from customer interactions and improve responses over time.
  • Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses neural networks to process complex information, such as speech and natural language.

Using AI in the best possible way

In speech analytics, technology is used to listen to and analyse conversations. By using AI instead of people, large amounts of unstructured data is effortlessly analysed to detect emotions, monitor agent performance, and assess the quality of calls by identifying words and analysing audio patterns. As a result, your service and QA processes become efficient and consistent enabling you to replace people with technology and redeploy those people elsewhere.

The chatbot is a conversational commerce tool and is usually the first “agent” customers interact with. The chatbot greets the customer and collects some background information such as name, order number, and the nature of the issue. Chatbots quickly handle the frequently asked questions that consume your teams’ bandwidth and free up more time for support needs that require human intervention. Furthermore, bots can perform more advanced functions such as verifying a customer’s identity, providing a statement or other transactional document from the company.

Contact centres benefit from AI by operating more efficiently, while improving employee and customer satisfaction.

The benefits of 1Stream’s AI-first approach to Contact Centre Solutions

Intelligent call routing: Reduce wait times by analysing the customer query immediately and routing it to the correct agent.

Replacing the traditional IVR: Traditional IVR processes have pre-defined inputs and resulting actions which take up the customer’s time. By analysing customers’ verbal statements and routing them to the correct place, we help reduce long wait times and improve efficiency.

Big data management: Contact centres collect huge amounts of data daily, which is impractical and expensive to analyse manually.  The use of AI facilitates the analysis, management, and generation of accurate insights from this vast amount of data.

Obtaining specific customer details: By analysing customer behaviour and responses, chatbots can optimise future interactions based on detailed and specific insights.

Enhanced self-service: Virtual assistants and chatbots direct customers to a specific section of a website, FAQs, or knowledge base. Chatbots know when to route calls to live agents in cases where the request is difficult to handle.

Predicting customer requirements: Using automation and process automation tools, businesses can analyse and predict future needs and enhance their interactions with customers.

Efficient workforce management: AI enables efficient workforce management. Repetitive tasks are managed more efficiently, and internal staffing decisions are easier to make.

Handling customer complaints: The use of artificial intelligence improves customer service in areas where manual resolutions take a long time.  AI tools comprehend the tone of content so that agents can quickly assess the situation and respond appropriately. The responses are then saved in the system for future resolution of similar complaints, thus making the Average Handling Time even lower.

Sentiment Analysis: AI capabilities help in analysing and predicting the customers’ sentiments so that businesses can quickly adjust their offerings to create a more positive experience. They identify interactions that lead to a negative customer experience and rectify them in real time.

Error identification: Any deviation or issue is detected or predicted with AI’s strong predictive analysis – saving time.  If any internal issues are identified, AI can provide an alert in real-time.

Optimising routine tasks: Improve workflows, reduce mistakes and boost productivity by automating tasks that are repetitive or take a lot of time.

Intelligent assistance: When AI is incorporated into contact centres, AI performs the role of an assistant, optimising the agents’ abilities to resolve customer queries faster and efficiently.

Monitoring agent performance: Tracking agent performance helps supervisors improve agent coaching and training and introduce more robust hiring systems, saving time, money, and effort.

Reducing costs: Increase revenue and reduce costs for your business.

There has been a significant increase in customer demands over the years. Today’s digital customer expects your brand to be present across multiple channels. Your support agents need to be able to deal with queries across all these channels.

Moreover, customers want their issues resolved quickly, and you cannot afford to keep them waiting. Long wait times for high-touch issues can quickly affect your business’s bottom line.

While you could expand your team and train your agents to be more efficient and productive, this is a labour-intensive, costly and time-consuming process. Therefore, it makes sense to incorporate AI into your processes to continually provide a great customer experience.

Contact us to learn more.

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