AI adoption in contact centers has become standard for meeting today’s customer expectations, causing the pace of implementation to speed up. For contact centers that don’t keep up, the customer experience gap will only grow wider.
AI is transformative, and the impact on customer service will be substantial. Contact centers need a strategy for AI adoption to improve customer service and properly align with other AI initiatives occurring across the organization.
A contact center AI strategy needs to be based on use cases, and the best way to define them is to identify the benefits and outcomes that come from these new applications. To help contact center leaders do that, here are three transformative benefits of AI that all contact centers should strive for.
AI for Automation of Routine Inquiries
AI automation is a universal driver for AI contact center solutions, especially in terms of taking on tasks and processes done by humans. Manual effort can be tedious and labor-intensive, and most workers would welcome automation. For contact centers just starting their AI journey, the best approach is to apply AI to simple, routine inquiries and processes.
It’s not realistic to attempt to automate everything from the start of your AI journey. Not only is that too risky given AI’s current capabilities, but the logical extension is the elimination of human agents, something that contact centers and customers are not ready for.
To better understand the benefits, consider two basic applications of AI. The first would be forms of automation that make the agent experience better. Examples include automating internal workflows, such as accessing CRM data or submitting schedule changes to supervisors. Other forms include intelligent contact routing to ensure the right agent gets the call or automated conversation summaries so agents don’t have to input them manually after each call.
Similarly, customers will have a better experience when simple queries can be automated, such as requesting password changes, account updates, or address changes. Not only does this reduce friction with customers, but it also lightens agents’ workloads, allowing them to focus on higher-value and more complex interactions.
AI for Personalized CX
Using AI for routine inquiries applies mainly to operational needs that are largely transactional. These types of outcomes are related to efficiency, which results in faster resolution times and more streamlined workflows. However, efficiency alone does not drive customer satisfaction.
Agents can be very personable and empathetic, but ultimately, customers want their problems solved as expediently as possible. This means that agents must also have a precise understanding of customer issues and how to make the customer feel heard and valued.
AI in contact centers presents a more modern approach to age-old problems. Given AI’s native ability to process large amounts of data in real-time and at scale, it can provide highly personalized interactions for every agent and every customer inquiry.
Rather than guessing what customers want based on an incomplete data set, AI can empower agents with a much richer data set that leads to positive outcomes that customers never anticipated. When agents can perform at that level, customer experience, agent retention, morale, and performance will all improve.
AI for Better Customer Self-Service
The automation examples cited earlier do make self-service better, but there is a bigger benefit to consider. Even as contact centers embrace more advanced AI-powered self-service solutions, the quality of self-service remains poor. A Gartner survey found that only 14% of customer issues are fully resolved in self-service. The bar for self-service has been so low for so long that customers always expect a bad experience, whether it be from clumsy IVR or robotic first-generation chatbots.
Making self-service better isn’t just about technology. Given its strategic importance, contact center leaders need to use the best options possible, and that’s where AI leads the way.
The conversational nature of today’s AI – along with Generative AI – makes automated customer interactions more effective and more trustworthy with customers. AI-powered self-service is rapidly changing the landscape for contact centers. When customers have good self-service experiences, they will come to trust AI-based chatbots, making customers more comfortable with using them for more complex needs. As such, AI in contact centers isn’t just about making specific self-service outcomes better but also putting contact centers on a path to automate a broader range of inquiries.
This level of benefit impacts the entire contact center as agents deal with fewer routine inquiries. More importantly, when AI-based chatbots – also known as virtual agents – can handle more elements of an inquiry, fewer interactions will require an agent handoff.
Aside from making the contact center more efficient, this also means that when agents become involved in an interaction, the customer is likely in a fairly good state of mind, making it easier for the agent to add their personal touch.
Often, customers are fed up with being on hold for long periods after endless prompts that go nowhere and automated responses that clearly don’t understand them, putting added pressure on agents. This will lead to higher agent turnover and lower customer satisfaction.
AI in contact centers isn’t a silver bullet solution, but it’s a major evolution point beyond IVR, one that customers are already expecting when dealing with AI in contact centers.