Enhanced Client Self-Service via AI
Enhanced self-service through AI can generate significant cost savings within the contact center environment, as well as improve agent occupancy levels through driving down call volumes. Clients will note a more curated and fluid user experience, as they can interact via their preferred channel with the service center and continue that conversation in other channels with rapid ease if required to resolve their inquiry.
Utilizing AI, the contact center agent’s responsibility shifts to partly that of an SME (subject matter expert), as AI can handle simple activities that do not require human intervention. AI works best when operating in an environment where answers are primarily binary in nature or information can be queued accordingly to address client concerns.
The key benefit of AI in the contact center environment is that the software can deliver critical information in relation to customer concerns that may arise overnight, during holidays, and at other times when staffing can be cost more.
Driving Analytical Insights via Artificial Intelligence
Integrating AI features, such as predictive contact center call and message routing, can facilitate the effective transfer of clients depending on select criteria. These include age and income level, whether they have high or low spending patterns, or automating the classification of the inquiry type and client sentiment. This pairs them with the best agent/SME who can resolve their inquiry the first time.
AI can also be utilized to analyze customer sentiment through speech recognition and natural language processing during the call in real-time, as well as provide enhanced statistics and insights after the call. AI can detect sentiment in customer communication and provide intelligent analytics outlining whether the client was satisfied with the call. This can enable the evaluation of contact center agents for performance review purposes, as well as develop future use cases for AI client services functions.
Assisting Agents in Remedying Customer Inquiries, in Real-Time
While agents are actively assisting customers via phone, chat, and other channels, AI can operate in the background, scouring the agent’s knowledge base for content and answers to the customer’s concern. The agent can rapidly tend to the client’s inquiry while the AI agent develops chat transcripts and queues up critical information to address their questions.
With the agent analyzing the results of the knowledgebase search in real-time, they can decide which information integrates best in the current case and can most effectively solve the customer’s issue. The agent can then communicate this content to the customer, resulting in a highly satisfactory, first call resolution service. Particularly efficient in the COVID era of high call volumes and extended wait times.
AI can actively sort and filter information before presenting it to the agent in a manner that is easily digestible for both parties involved in the information exchange. This can facilitate more effective communication and mitigate any breaks in communication between the agent and the customer. Once the AI agent is trained via “first line of defense” exchanges with customers before routing to an agent in an escalation, the software can more easily interact with customers and handle a more significant degree of communication than when first taken ‘out of the box’.
AI can be easily implemented to streamline the verification process, traditionally confirmed within an environment where PII (personal identifiable information) and private client details will be discussed during the call. AI can utilize voice biometrics to analyze the client’s voice or other credentials in order to determine if the caller is actually who they say they are.
Using AI for the client verification process can strip minutes off calls requiring pre-verification, resulting in increased agent occupancy (available time during the day) and can allow agents to focus on more value-add activities, such as servicing high-value client inquiries. AI can also handle password reset inquiries, streamlining this process and, similarly to credentials verification automation, allowing agents who typically tend to these types of inquiries to focus on higher-value customer inquiries and issue resolution.
AI applications, once adequately deployed, can enable agents to automate manual workflow processes. Specific triggers which are set up by the agents and management for standard processes, such as CRM usage can be deployed, and applications can be launched automatically by the AI application once the agent performs specific actions on their computer.