As AI development accelerates, so too does contact center innovation.
Indeed, over the last few years, advanced algorithms and models have augmented and enhanced agent workflows, transforming customer experiences and unlocking valuable insights for business leaders.
But that’s not all. There’s lots more that contact center AI can do, as evident in the following top 20 use cases.
1. Capturing Customer Intent
With NLP (Natural Language Processing) models or generative AI, contact centers can automatically identify a person’s reason for contacting their team. These tools can pinpoint keywords in conversations and apply tags to service requests and tickets, streamlining the routing process.
The ability to rapidly capture customer intent can help with everything from tracking a customer’s interaction history to building more granular contact center forecasts.
2. Reinventing the IVR
With AI, the frustrations of old-fashioned clunky IVR systems are a thing of the past. AI-powered IVR systems can understand caller requests, analyze their needs, and automatically route them to the right agent or department in seconds. With AI-powered IVRs, customers can express their needs more clearly and even complete simple tasks without speaking to an agent.
3. Improving Contact Center Routing
Since AI-powered tools can more accurately identify customer intent and sentiment, they can also streamline the routing process. AI tools can pinpoint the ideal agent for an interaction based on agent expertise, availability, query complexity, and even customer value. What’s more, they can distribute conversations across a range of channels, empowering omnichannel service.
4. Automating Customer Conversations
One of the most common use cases for AI in the contact center is the automation of customer conversations. Generative AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can deliver personalized and engaging responses to customer questions, complete tasks without human input, and even determine when to transfer a customer over to a human agent.
5. Transcribing and Summarizing Conversations
Converting call recordings into searchable transcriptions and summaries can be a time-consuming process. AI-driven solutions can offer real-time or post-call transcriptions of every interaction. Some generative AI tools can even create intuitive call summaries, highlighting important topics and action items for customer follow-up, and training purposes.
6. Streamlining Quality Management
With AI-powered monitoring tools, companies can automate the quality management process, rapidly scoring conversations based on pre-set criteria. Some solutions can even send instant alerts to business leaders and supervisors when issues emerge to help proactively improve the customer experience.
7. Feeding Agents Live Knowledge and Data
In the standard contact center, employees often waste significant time searching for relevant data to solve a customer’s problems. An AI-powered assistant can boost agent productivity, surfacing information from databases and other applications, based on identified keywords.
These tools can even integrate with CRM systems to offer personalized insights into a customer’s purchasing history or previous conversations.
8. Mechanizing Time-Consuming Agent Desktop Tasks
AI is an important ingredient of effective workflow automation. Intelligent tools can automatically update customer records, fill out forms, schedule follow-up calls, and even manage proactive outreach on behalf of agents. This gives contact center reps more time to focus on answering customer calls that need more attention and focus wholeheartedly on addressing customer needs.
9. Suggesting Next Best Actions
For both new and existing agents, AI agent-assist can act as a valuable guide, coaching them through the process of delivering amazing customer experiences. These tools can leverage both real-time and historical data to suggest next best actions to agents. They can even personalize these suggestions based on a customer’s profile or history.
10. Identifying Coaching Opportunities
Consistent coaching is crucial to boosting the productivity and performance of your contact center team.