In the contact center, generative AI has emerged as one of the most valuable tools for enhancing performance, experience, and efficiency. Though LLM-powered solutions are still in their infancy, the demand for these intuitive AI resources is growing.
In fact, according to Salesforce, 84% of IT leaders believe generative AI will help to serve customers more effectively. The right tools can streamline and accelerate contact center workflows, improve employee engagement, and boost your chances of customer loyalty.
If your contact center hasn’t considered investing in generative AI solutions yet, here are some of the top reasons why it might be the right time to join the Gen-AI revolution.
1. Contact Center Generative AI Creates Better Bots
Bots have become a commonplace part of the contact center in recent years. Whether it’s a simple chatbot or a voice-enabled virtual assistant, these tools are excellent for delivering interactive, engaging, real-time support to consumers 24/7.
Plenty of excellent conversational AI bots out there can leverage natural language processing and sentiment analysis tools to enhance the customer experience. However, generative AI takes these solutions to the next level. Designed with large language models, generative AI solutions can automatically generate human-like responses to questions in a fraction of a second.
They can understand human language more effectively than any standard bot, and many solutions can be customized with data and connections to your CRM and customer data platforms. This makes it easier to create personalized self-service experiences for consumers.
2. Enhanced Self Service
Research shows that 59% of consumers prefer using self-service tools to address simple issues. Contact center generative AI solutions are excellent for creating more intuitive self-service experiences. We’ve already mentioned the option to create powerful, creative chatbots.
However, generative AI can help create other self-service resources too. Intelligent tools can scan your existing business data and help you generate knowledgebase articles, FAQs, and guides for your customers. They can even give you step-by-step scripts to design onboarding videos and webinars.
Contact center generative AI can generate more personalized customer articles, drawing information from case notes and messaging histories. This gives companies an excellent way to expand on the help center solutions they offer customers.
3. Summarization for Insights and Training
To deliver excellent customer experiences, businesses need in-depth insights into their customers, purchasing journeys, and preferences. Much of the data required to optimize customer interactions already exists in previous conversations with buyers.
However, transforming vast amounts of conversational data into actionable insights is time-consuming. Contact center generative AI can help with this. These tools can summarize calls, chat conversations, and emails, highlighting key action points and data.
This doesn’t just save agents time on wrapping up calls and makes it easier to draw insights from every conversation you can use to personalize and enhance customer journeys. Plus, the data you collect can help you create more powerful training and coaching strategies for team members.
You can even create bots with generative AI that deliver step-by-step coaching to new employees, helping them get up to speed with standard operating procedures.
4. Improving Customer Experiences
Perhaps the most obvious reason to invest in contact center generative AI is that it has the power to enhance customer experiences significantly. The right tools can help you serve consumers faster with self-service tools and make it easier to personalize each interaction.
Generative bots can adjust their language and recommendations to customer preferences with data from your CRM and customer data platforms. They can automatically translate content into a customer’s preferred language. Plus, they can deliver personalized suggestions based on contact history.
Additionally, these tools make it easier for agents to deliver more comprehensive, consistent experiences. They can guide team members on when to follow up with customers or reach out to provide proactive service. They can even draw insights from previous interactions to help develop more accurate customer journey maps.
5. Contact Center Generative AI Improves EX
It’s not just customers connecting with the contact center that benefit from generative AI. Initially, many employees in the contact center worried that generative tools would make them obsolete.
However, as companies continue to adopt these new technologies, we’re discovering these fears are unfounded. Generative AI doesn’t eliminate the need for human agents but makes them more efficient and productive in their roles.
With access to a contact center generative AI assistant, agents can get step-by-step support with the entire customer journey. Bots can surface customer information and knowledgebase articles in seconds based on keywords mentioned in a conversation. They can track customer sentiment and suggest next-best-action guidance to employees.
Plus, they can automate many repetitive tasks that consume agent time, from call wrap-up and summarization to knowledgebase article generation and follow-up message creation.
6. Reduced Costs and Greater Efficiency
Finally, when generative AI soared into the spotlight at the end of 2022, many business leaders assumed this innovative technology would be too expensive. Now, however, we’re discovering that generative AI isn’t just affordable and delivers an excellent return on investment.
As contact center leaders continue to build generative AI functionality into CCaaS platforms, businesses of all sizes are seeing the benefits. For a low upfront cost, companies can access intelligent resources that fill the gaps in their contact center teams, eliminate the need for extra human resources, and streamline business efficiency.
Generative AI solutions help agents find information and solve problems faster. They boost your chances of retaining and delighting customers, increasing long-term revenue. Plus, they make supporting and training new team members easier without unnecessary downtime.
Ready to Invest in Contact Center Generative AI?
Contact center generative AI is more than just a new trend in the customer experience landscape. Around the world, business leaders from all industries are discovering how valuable LLM-powered tools can be. The right solutions can transform your team’s performance, enhance business outcomes, and improve customer satisfaction.
If you’re not exploring the opportunities offered by contact center generative AI yet, now could be the perfect time to start experimenting.