Contact Center AI

More frequently, businesses are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their operations, along with a host of other use cases and applications. According to a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey, the most popular applications of businesses using AI include customer service, with 56% of respondents using AI for this purpose. Other notable uses include customer relationship management (46%), digital personal assistants (47%), and recruitment and talent sourcing (26%).

Contact center AI enables more efficient customer interactions, better agent experiences, and ultimately drives better customer experience (CX). This guide outlines the benefits of contact center AI and, more importantly, how to leverage AI in your contact center. 

What is Contact Center AI?

Contact center AI is a collection of tools or contact center software designed to enable smarter, data-driven, and more efficient customer interactions, with the ultimate goal of delivering better CX.

AI enables customer service organizations to:

• Perform routine tasks that are usually done by a human, improving productivity
• Automate basic requests that improve customer experiences
• Enable the workforce to efficiently handle more complex requests

Contact center leaders tend to leverage AI for task automation as the low-hanging fruit. From there, use cases have evolved and rapidly expanded – and it’s exciting to imagine the innovations from contact center AI that are yet to come. 

The Evolution of AI in the Contact Center

Innovation in contact centers has happened over time, but the pace at which automation and digital transformation has occurred over the past couple of years is remarkable. It’s hard to imagine the days of paper scripts for agents, managers running between workstations in call centers, and lengthy call wait times. 

Generative AI for digital transformation and omnichannel support have been game changers for contact centers. 

Contact Center AI and Digital Transformation

Early uses of AI and machine learning (ML) appeared in call centers years ago in intelligent routing solutions and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. These cutting-edge technologies at the time helped managers better distribute and manage voice calls more efficiently.

Fast forward to today, where businesses transform their digital agent and customer experiences. 

• AI-infused technology creates human-like, conversational interactions for customer self-service.
• Remote and hybrid agents need cloud-based tools and advanced technologies to support customers around the globe.
• A plethora of data is now available. Data from omnichannel customer touchpoints—calls, social media, email, online chat, and more—provide companies with greater insights into customers. Contact centers on digital transformation journeys are leveraging data as a competitive differentiator.

AI in Omnichannel Support 

As customers’ communication needs and preferences have shifted, contact centers today provide omnichannel support. As natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and conversational AI evolved, modern contact centers embrace AI-powered chatbots, virtual agents or assistants, voice recognition, and other tools to deliver self-service options to customers.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 62% of millennials and 75% of Gen-Z customers prefer self-service almost all the time, even when they have an option of contacting customer support. This compares to 19% of baby boomers and 43% of Gen X customers who report they would do the same.

But, the hidden gems of contact center AI lie in transforming quality management (QM) processes, improving agent engagement, and utilizing intelligent AI tools to assess customer sentiment and intent in various communication channels to anticipate and improve CX.

How Contact Center AI Impacts Customer Experience

For contact centers focused on transforming customer experience as a strategic priority, AI-infused solutions go the distance toward achieving business goals. 

Boost Customer Experience

With robust customer data and information easily at hand, AI-based contact center tools allow agents to answer questions more precisely and resolve customer issues for first-contact resolution—a key success metric. Likewise, AI can help cut the time contact center agents spend helping and responding to customer concerns and inquiries, getting to resolution faster.

Modern contact centers that focus on CX as a strategic priority reap the rewards. Positive customer experiences lead to increased brand loyalty and spending. A study by Deloitte showed that customers are willing to spend 140% more after having a positive customer experience. 

Decode Customer Sentiment

Sentiment analysis is the practice of assessing customer input or feedback to determine their attitudes, emotions, and opinions about a business. The practice more recently relies on natural NLP and AI to understand the feeling the customer had when a particular interaction ended. You can look at whether the customer interaction was rated positive, negative, or neutral by the words the customer used in their text-based interaction. 

Manual analysis has given way to automated sentiment analysis solutions for real-time insights. AI analytics tools can quickly transform customer sentiment into valuable customer insights and help them map the customer journey and even predict market trends.

AI can automate the process of detecting tone, intent, and feelings in human language. Using NLP and machine learning algorithms, AI-powered sentiment analysis tools go beyond words to interpret attitudes and emotions from text in addition to context.

How Contact Center AI Impacts Agent Experience

Leveraging AI to improve the agent experience is a great place for contact center leaders to start. Engaged, happy agents yield happy customers. There’s an opportunity to increase efficiency by automating the entire quality management process of a contact center — from assisted scoring to agent coaching.

For example, due to the sheer volume of data they ingest, most contact centers only analyze a small percentage (<2%) of their interactions. Because proper evaluation takes several minutes — or even up to an hour — to complete, there’s simply not enough time in the day to analyze every single interaction.

What if an AI-infused quality management system could analyze the sentiment in every single interaction and understand the topics discussed during every single encounter? AI can help surface the most pressing issues of agent performance and customer inquiries across a large sample and direct them to your quality analysts for a deeper look. AI can then assist the analyst in scoring and providing feedback.

But there’s more. Automating coaching based on a larger sample of quality issues will move the customer satisfaction needle further and faster. Powerful, right?

AI-infused quality management is enabling leaders to stop problems before they start. 

• Proactively analyze agent interactions to spot coaching opportunities to prevent costly mistakes and enhance employee engagement. 
• Automatically surface insight into customer sentiment across all digital interactions.
• Analyze more interactions and automate workloads for analysts. And the list goes on.

What are the Benefits of Contact Center AI?

Increase Customer Experience

Contact center solutions infused with AI improve self-service customer experiences and empower contact center agents to create more helpful, personalized interactions. This improves customer satisfaction and net promoter scores, a wide range of other key customer service metrics.

Boost Agent Experience

Boost agent engagement, retention, and employee experience – Empower your contact center teams with flexible change management and real-time visibility. Workforce management solutions that leverage AI make your capacity planning, forecasting, employee scheduling, and intraday planning easy, accurate, and far less time-consuming.

Improve Productivity and Efficiency

AI allows contact centers to minimize repetitive tasks for agents, provide better customer insight, and reduce errors. This frees up agents to focus on more complex issues and customer communications, reducing metrics like average handling time and other agent performance metrics. Likewise, AI helps managers with capacity planning, forecasting, employee scheduling, and makes intraday planning easy, accurate, and far less time consuming.

Reduce Contact Center Costs

Investing in AI allows companies to do a better job of supporting omnichannel contact center operations with fewer staff. AI-powered tools also allow you to intelligently forecast, schedule, and monitor your workforce in real time, saving hours on manual tasks.

How to Get Started with Contact Center AI

While AI solutions and use cases are rapidly evolving, the good news is these technologies are able to “meet you where you’re at.” Here are some strategies to help you get started and continue down the path to contact center AI.

Make a Plan 

Start by setting attainable goals and clear objectives, aligned with your business needs and focused on boosting the customer experience as the holy grail. Ensure your AI initiatives align lock step with specific goals such as improving customer satisfaction, reducing costs, or enhancing agent productivity and engagement. 

Evaluate Contact Center AI Options 

Carefully evaluate the various AI-powered quality management systems and other AI-infused software solutions, and choose the ones that provide ease of integration and powerful data-driven insights, and best aligns with your current and future business needs and objectives.

Train Agents, Analysts, and Leadership

Ensure your team is well-versed in the use of AI-powered systems by providing comprehensive agent training and ongoing support. This will help them effectively leverage the technology, mitigate potential risks of failure, and contribute to the successful integration of AI into your quality management processes and workflows.

Monitor and Evaluate Progress

As with any new process and technology implementations, take the time to analyze progress and gather feedback for improvements. This allows you to refine AI models, workflows, and processes based on feedback and changing business needs for continuous enhancement.

Contact center leaders have an opportunity to reap many benefits from infusing contact center AI to improve operational efficiencies, agent engagement, and retention, provide faster feedback and coaching, and,most importantly, move the needle faster to provide exceptional customer experiences. The key is to jump in and get started on your journey. 

Tune into our on-demand webinar “How to Infuse AI Into QM: What You Need to Know.”