Guide for using Artificial Intelligence in Call Centers

From being just a buzzword, Artificial Intelligence is now a key enabler for disrupting and optimizing critical business processes. Artificial Intelligence empowers call centers in multiple ways, such as real-time monitoring, customer experience analytics, data-driven insights, effective customer engagement, etc.

Technology helps organizations improve customer loyalty and customer experience, without compromising operational efficiency. Contact center agents are the front line of defense for brands and bear the responsibility of delivering remarkable customer experiences on their shoulders.

How does technology assist in consistently improving agent performance and streamlining call center processes? What is the correct way of implementing AI solutions for contact centers? Here are some key considerations for effectively using AI at your contact center.

1. Building an Integrated Call Center Technology Infrastructure

The first step towards the success of an AI transformation project is to establish an integrated call center technology infrastructure. Integrating technologies such as CRM, IVR, VoIP, Speech analytics, learning management systems, etc., resolves challenges of evolving business dynamics and providing benefits such as:

• Resilient & flexible call center operations
• Superior adeptness with smart call routing
• Improved productivity & contact center efficiency
• Personalized experiences with integrated CRM
• Reduced customer churn
• Improved agent performance
• Overall improvement in customer & agent experience

An integrated infrastructure ensures confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical data. Therefore, critical insights are visible across systems that empower call center agents to effectively serve their customers.?

2. Align Cross-Functional Teams for Effective Change Management

Many digital transformation initiatives fail if you don't get buy-in from your team members. It is critical for the success of any AI initiative that the team aligns with your goal and understands the importance of the initiative. Therefore, you must involve your team members, train them on the new technology and processes, let them get hands-on with it, and then roll it out.

Adopting a new technology shouldn't be myopic and organizations must think of a long-term vision for a successful outcome. At the end of the day, it is all about the combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

3. Focus on Call Center Agents

While most contact centers focus on the customer, which is important; they shouldn't stop focusing on their frontline team. Being the first line of defense, consistently improving their performance, and utilizing their skills in the right way, is extremely important. Each agent communicates differently and has their own area of expertise.

First, listen to all your customer interactions. From those interactions, identify the strengths and weaknesses of all agents. Build a personality profile of these agents based on their experience in sales, managing negative callers, providing support, sales number, AHT, etc.

Based on their experience, connect the right customers with the right agents. If companies start focusing on agent profiling, along with customer profiling, the results can be groundbreaking.

4. Real-time monitoring and alerts

Artificial intelligence empowers organizations through real-time monitoring and alerts. With technology working for you 24*7*365, organizations can stay ahead of compliance violations and get updates on any critical or unusual behavior, so they can take proper measures should there be issues.

While AI is working for you to identify critical insights, organizations need to identify workflows and action steps for these alerts. Artificial Intelligence technology will generate a lot of data for you; however, it takes human intelligence to make that data actionable by strategically acting upon it.

To make technology work for you, it is necessary to feed it a lot of meaningful data. Is your organization planning to use artificial intelligence in your call center? We have recently released a Whitepaper that briefly discusses the impact of AI in different call center processes, the significant role it plays in today’s call center, and how to successfully execute any AI initiative.

You can download the Whitepaper here.

Etech Global Services has played a key role in crafting & implementing AI solutions for some of the world’s biggest leading brands. Our team of data engineers and scientists understands our customers’ key challenges and provides them with custom solutions. If you have thought about or are planning on implementing an AI solution to your call center, or want to fine-tune your existing AI technology, feel free to book a FREE CONSULTATION session with our industry experts.