AI in the Cloud Contact Centre

AI is impacting every area of service delivery, and customer service is no exception. Call centre work is sometimes repetitive, but there’s often no one-size-fits-all template for responding to customer queries and complaints. This means it can be a perfect use case for machine learning and automation. However, it’s vital that the use of AI and automation is done in a way that doesn’t deprive your customers of human contact at the time they need it most!

Customers calling into call centres have high expectations of the experience they will receive, and a low threshold for disappointment. For example, in the telco sector, research shows that 70% of customers place experience among the three most important factors when making buying decisions. In fact, 43% say that one poor customer relationship experience is enough to make them cut ties with a brand.

Automation can certainly help companies reduce cost when it comes to dealing with customer enquiries. But is that really helpful, if it’s also going to drive away customers? Today, though, thanks to advances in AI, companies are finding ways to automate call centre processes that not only avoid a negative customer experience, but also deliver an improved experience.

This is a huge driver behind the adoption of AI in call centres right now, in a world where enterprises in general are moving away from the idea that advanced technology exists merely to reduce costs, but instead is a driver of growth and new business opportunities.

Call Routing

Even with advanced natural language based processing (NLP) systems, call centres will, for some time yet, have to deal with questions that are too sophisticated for automated information systems. But NLP systems can certainly help direct callers to the right human that can answer the question.

Everyone who has contacted a contact centre will know that it can be infuriating to get put through to the wrong person, and then have to re-join a queue to be put through to someone else. If automated routing systems can reduce the instance of this happening by more accurately predicting the reason for a person’s call, they can certainly improve customer experience.

Early attempts at automating call routing often provided a poor experience, forcing humans to wait through lengthy menus before choosing the option they wanted, or offering poorly implemented, non-AI voice recognition. NLP can help companies tackle this problem today with voice recognition that is accurate and gets better as it learns from interacting with more and more customers. It can even predict which callers are best suited to which agents, based on personality traits or the agents’ success at solving similar problems in the past.

Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and head of AI at intelligent cloud contact centre provider Five9, told me, “AI has immense business value in the contact centre, an area where every minute matters – for the customer, for service agents, and for the organization. It is also an area that is dominated by people doing very repetitive tasks, and the combination of those two factors is a recipe for AI-powered transformation.”

AI also augments the abilities of human call handlers to provide guidance for questions they face on the fly.

Augmented Workforces

There’s a lot of talk about whether widespread automation will lead to large-scale human redundancy and unemployment. But today, at least, the focus within forward-thinking organisations is very much on using automation to enhance employees’ abilities to do their jobs, rather than replacing them.

Genefa Murphy, chief marketing officer at Five9, says, “Organizations are increasingly seeing the potential of AI and automation to work alongside their contact centre agents, rather than as a means of replacing them to cut costs.

“It has become clear that the future of customer care is an “and,” not an “or,” strategy and will be powered by human agents and a digital workforce.?With a digital workforce, AI is persistent. It’s used before, during, and after the customer interaction.”

In this respect, AI can act as a second pair of ears for the customer service agent – listening in on the communication and automatically suggesting solutions to the agent as to how the customer’s ?issue might best be resolved. When this is done in a way that reduces the need for the caller to wait while the agent manually consults a database of potential remedies to find the correct solution, this can also improve customer experience.

Rosenberg tells me, “These things have demonstrable ROI. If you can demonstrate that an AI solution can save 20 seconds out of every call for an agent, or allow customers to get self-service, you have a strong business case for investment. This is why AI transformation will happen first in the contact centre for many organisations.”

Accelerated Innovation

As with many things, the global COVID-19 pandemic has been an accelerator of innovation in the field of AI customer experience. Even today – a year and a half since the start of the outbreak – we often hear that we might experience a disruption to our service due to the various knock-on effects, such as staff illness or disruption to logistics networks. The UK Institute of Customer Service recently found that customers are getting “fed up with companies using COVID as an excuse for bad service.”Smarter companies had already recognised this, and had taken the opportunity to use technology and AI to differentiate themselves from those who have been slow to adapt.

This improved experience doesn’t have to be limited to just voice calls, of course. Many people prefer to make their first approach when looking for help via writing, and sentiment analysis can be used to parse email queries or chatbot interactions to ensure they end up in the right place. And automated transcription of voice calls into text can allow supervisors to speed up the monitoring of training calls and more quickly identify potential service issues.

For most companies, choosing the right combination of these services?is likely to provide the fastest route to ROI. As Murphy tells me, “The right mix of digital and live support powered by automation and AI will create a better experience for everyone, enabling businesses to increase customer loyalty, prevent agent burnout, and help manage costs and increase revenue.”

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The Five9 2021 CX Summit, covering all aspects of automation in customer experience, takes place on September 1 and 2, 2021. You can register here for the virtual event. Keynote speakers include Five9 CEO Rowan Trollope and former NASA astronaut, Columbia University professor, and television actor Mike Massimino.

For more on the topic of artificial intelligence, have a look at my book ‘The Intelligence Revolution: Transforming Your Business With AI’.

Thank you for reading my post.?Here?at LinkedIn?and at?Forbes?I regularly write about management and technology trends. To read my future?posts simply?join my network here?or click 'Follow'. Also feel free to connect with me via?Twitter,??Facebook,?Instagram,?Slideshare?or?YouTube.

About Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr?is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the field of business and technology. He is the author of 18 best-selling books, writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations. He has over 2 million social media followers and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK.