Artificial intelligence has revolutionized the contact center. Over half of all contact centers leaders have already said they’re investing in the development of a specialized AI strategy.
It’s easy to see why, as AI tools have the ability to streamline operations, make teams faster and more efficient, and greatly improve customer satisfaction rates. However, for companies making the transition into the new age of AI-powered contact centers, it’s important to look beyond the hype.
Here, we’ll explore real-world and practical examples of how AI is unlocking incredible opportunities for contact centers to become more profitable, cost-effective, and productive.
1. Improving Call and Contact Center Management
Managing a comprehensive contact center is becoming increasingly challenging in today’s world, as consumers connect with businesses through a wide range of channels. AI can help organizations make the most of their resources in a variety of ways.
With solutions like Engage by Local Measure for instance, companies can take advantage of skills based call routing solutions that assign customers to agents based on their abilities and previous interactions. This significantly reduces hold times, and minimizes the need for call transfers.
Additionally, with access to in-depth data about contact center performance, call and contact volumes, and historical trends, AI tools can assist businesses in resource allocation. Tools capable of predictive analytics can help companies forecast future contact center needs, and determine how to distribute their agents across different channels.
2. Optimizing Self-Service Experiences
The ability for AI solutions to optimize self-service experiences is one of the biggest benefits of embracing AI in the contact center today. The demand for intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants has skyrocketed. By 2033, the chatbot market is expected to reach a value of $66.6 billion.
AI solutions don’t just offer companies a way to deliver scalable, 24/7 service through chat-based platforms either. Conversational AI assistants enhanced with NLP technologies, like Amazon Lex, empower businesses to create more advanced voice-based self-service interactions too.
Conversational IVR systems can interact with callers in a natural format, responding to their spoken queries instantly, and helping to guide them towards the right solutions. Intelligent IVR systems and chatbots enhance the customer experience, and speed up issue resolution times, also acting to reduce the number of conversations agents need to manage each day, improving operational efficiency.
With AI solutions handling more repetitive tasks and queries, agents have more time to focus on valuable, strategic, and empathetic interactions.
“Even as recently as a few months ago we saw widespread apprehension with brands nervous about opening up GenAI-powered chatbots to end customers. Over the last weeks we have seen global banks, telcos and governments begin to pilot production solutions sometimes even starting with their own staff (who are also customers) before opening to real customers use case by use case” says Jonathan Barouch Local Measure CEO
3. Scaling Global Support
The digital world has empowered companies of all sizes to deliver services and products to customers all around the globe. However, delivering global support can be more complex, requiring companies to invest in dedicated teams to serve customers who speak various languages. AI can reduce the need to hire additional language support, with real-time translation options.
Local Measure’s Engage platform, built for Amazon Connect, comes with AI tools like Smart Translation, which allow agents and customers to converse seamlessly in their preferred language, with real-time translation functionality. Since transcripts are stored in both languages, companies also gain access to all the data they need for compliance monitoring and quality assurance.
With real-time generative AI translations, contact centers can deliver culturally nuanced and consistent support to customers worldwide, without additional costs.
4. Empowering Contact Center Agents
Thanks to evolutions in artificial intelligence and automation, virtual agents can handle more requests for customers than ever before. However, there are still instances wherein the empathetic and creative support of a knowledgeable human agent is still essential. In these cases, AI solutions can help live agents work more efficiently, and resolve issues faster.
For instance, the Smart Composer solution from Local Measure empowers agents to rapidly generate responses to customer queries, optimizing tone, grammar, and communication quality instantly.
Powered by Amazon Connect Wisdom, within the Engage platform, agents can rapidly surface valuable information about customers through a Knowledge base integration, to help personalize interactions. They can also access in-depth insights into how to troubleshoot and resolve common issues.
Copilot-style AI tools can even provide consistent support to agents throughout interactions with customers, coaching them on how to improve interactions, and providing real-time insights into customer sentiment and intent, driving better results from each discussion
5. Boosting Efficiency with Automation
AI in the contact center offers an incredible opportunity to automate various tasks that would otherwise drain employee productivity and efficiency. Local Measure’s Engage platform, for instance, empowers companies to rapidly summarize call transcripts with Smart Notes, reducing after call work time, and boosting productivity.
The Smart Tasks solution even allows companies to develop valuable automated workflows, to streamline processes like data entry. Team members can use AI to automatically extract information from transcripts, fill out forms, and reduce the risk of human error.
With the ability to automate routine tasks, from routing customers to the right agent, to managing common queries, agents become more productive in their roles. Amazon even found that AI-powered solutions like Connect can reduce call volumes by 60%, and minimize agent training times by a further 50%.
6. Transforming Decision Making
Finally, one of the key areas where AI excels in the contact center, is in processing data, and making insights more accessible to teams and business leaders. With the right AI tools, companies can collect valuable information about customer experiences, sentiment, and employee performance across every touchpoint and channel.
Using AI-powered analytics and optimization features, managers and supervisors can proactively identify issues with customer experiences, agent performance, and operations in the contact center. This empowers businesses to make intelligent decisions about everything from which customer service channels to use, to how to manage their workforce, and deliver training.
With both in-depth historical analytics and real-time dashboards, organizations can take a more data-driven approach to delivering exceptional customer experiences.
Embracing AI in the Contact Center
The potential for AI in the contact center is astronomical. Whether companies are looking to improve interactions with enhanced personalization and consistent agent support, reduce operational costs, or simply improve their decision making capabilities, AI is a powerful tool.
Companies like Local Measure, with their AI-driven Engage platform, and powerful generative AI solutions for Amazon Connect contact centers, are leading the charge towards a more intelligent future for contact centers.
With the Engage platform, companies can revolutionize their contact center experiences with intuitive solutions that augment agent performance, and improve customer satisfaction.
