Johannesburg, 02 Dec 2021
AI (artificial intelligence) is impacting every area of service delivery, and customer service is no exception.
Today’s contact centres are no longer vast workplaces with rows of agents answering questions and taking orders via phone. They have evolved into complete contact centres that use the latest technological advances, including mobile, e-mail, chat and SMS to be as customer-friendly and cost-effective as possible.
This evolution also includes the use of AI, where technology systems demonstrate human-intelligence behaviours such as learning, problem-solving and planning. It continually provides multiple channels of communication without necessarily needing human beings present, so organisations are looking for AI to provide several benefits including cloud services.
AI benefits in contact centres:
Most companies have already started strategising for the new year, and if you’re running a contact centre, we hope AI is included in your 2022 plans – why?
AI can be used to assist agents
While an agent listens to a customer during a phone call, AI can run in parallel and do some of the heavy lifting of searching a knowledge base for answers while allowing the agent to focus on the customer interaction. Once the information is presented to the agent, they can review the results in real-time, decide what will work best in each situation and communicate the response to the customer.
Tools such as Bria Enterprise overlay on top of any VOIP solution, providing an easy-to-deploy, cloud-managed unified communications (UC) solution that can be scaled from one to thousands of seats.
See here how Bria works: https://go.counterpath.com/partners/scopserv/enterprises
AI can help with running analytics in the background
Predictive contact routing analyses key pieces information, such as whether the caller is a high spender, what kind of products they buy, their sales history, projected future behaviour and other key factors to route calls to the agent who has the best set of skills to successfully work with the customer.
Contact centres can use speech analytics technology to analyse recorded calls with customers (post-call analytics). Speech analytics technology can also be used on a real-time basis to analyse the tone and inflections of a caller to indicate when they appear frustrated, show anger and need intervention from a higher skilled agent/supervisor.
Callbi is a secure, cloud-based speech analytics solution for contact centres, with local support and hosted in your region.
Other factors to consider:
AI can reduce costs – If an automated system works well, customers may even reach out more frequently to get their answers quickly and easily. This will reduce waiting in queues, eliminate the time involved for a human response, and drive down overall costs.
The future of AI
The potential power of AI is tremendous. When implemented correctly, it is a complementary technology to the human contact centre.
Over time, AI will provide an opportunity for contact centres to reduce expenses and improve the customer experience, but the human element of live agents will always be a requirement for a successful contact centre operation.
At ScopServ, we provide a wide range of AI and cloud contact centre products that help clients and agents stay connected businesses wherever they are.
For more information about Callbi or Bria Enterprise, you can contact us directly on: (+27) 11 700 3800 or e-mail: sales@scopserv.co.za.
Share