Artificial intelligence is having a transformative impact across different industries. According to a study by Accenture, for instance, AI has the ability to boost productivity by 40%. That in turn is leading to a huge impact on the global economy, with PwC expecting the contribution from AI alone to total $15.7trn by 2030.
It’s no surprise, then, that various artificial intelligence technologies are finding a natural home in the contact centre space, where efficiency and scalability are vital. To find out more, CX Today welcomes Martin Taylor of Content Guru to reveal the various ways contact centres can benefit from AI.
Cloud communications provider Content Guru is a leader in the contact centre technology field, having recently partnered with Google Cloud CCAI to integrate the latter’s AI capabilities into Content Guru’s contact-centre-as-a-service solution storm CONTACT. Being an official Google Cloud CCAI partner gives Content Guru access to Google Cloud’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) and conversational AI capabilities to bring enhancements across the spectrum of customer experience.
Fully-Automated Customer Engagement
The CCAI partnership is intended to help Content Guru customers make the most of AI technologies in their contact centre operations, whether to improve the customer experience, employee engagement or make time savings – with Google’s AI technology slotting into Content Guru’s popular Machine Agents.
“Content Guru’s Machine Agents, or intelligent chatbots, use Google Cloud NLP and WaveNet text-to-speech to allow organisations to deliver fully automated customer engagement, including extensive natural dialogue via voice,” says Taylor. “Machine Agents support live contact centre agents by automatically identifying and providing relevant information for each enquiry, while Google Cloud CCAI provides a wide range of insights, including sentiment analysis.”
Making the Most of Voice with Natural Language Processing
With voice continuing to be the predominant channel through which customers interact with organisations, especially the large enterprise and governmental bodies who make up Content Guru’s base, natural language processing comes into its own as a means of gathering data. That helps organisations transform contact centres into customer engagement hubs with comprehensive 360-degree views of each customer. By parsing meaning and intent from speech, calls can be categorised long before a human customer service agent answers a call if a human is needed at all.
As a result, contact centre agents are given information on the caller’s exact issue and, if a repeat caller, also their identity. “When integrated with an organisation’s internal CRM, this technology triggers automated screen prompts of historical data for that customer, their previous interactions across multiple channels, and any information relevant to their query,” says Taylor. “This enables the agent to resolve any enquiry faster and more accurately, allowing them to provide a personalised service since the agent is more prepared and won’t have to spend time searching for answers in real-time during the call. Looking up information takes on average 10 per cent of any call, so we’re delivering a major cost-saving and customer benefit right there.”
Looking to the future, image recognition is another form of AI that offers businesses new ways to engage with their customers – especially as a consequence of the pandemic, where online shopping has become a vital channel of engagement. Businesses cannot forget the associated data privacy issues that come with any discussion of AI, however. “Despite the obvious benefits to agent experience and customer experience, there is a stark public reticence for organisations using people’s data, cloaked in a language of privacy concerns,” says Taylor. “However, in order to make AI-powered NLP work to the best of its ability, secure and controlled access to large volumes of data is necessary.” It will be our job to help build and maintain the public trust that AI needs to flourish.
