AI in Contact Centers: A Detailed Guide for 2024

 AI in contact center is no longer a new concept that we used to talk about.

Today we can see a lot of commercial sectors using technology to improve customer satisfaction.

Call centers are one of those that have always used various technologies to better their service.

And, today we see AI dominating call centers with its endless profitable application. 

How many of us knew that the first invention of AI dates back to 1943.

However, it wasn’t until 1956 that the American Computer scientist John McCarthy adopted the word “Artificial Intelligence” at the Dartmouth Conference. 

Are you curious to know how you can use AI in contact centers and make more money? 

Whenever we talk about AI, the first basic examples hitting our minds are Google, Siri, and Alexa.

They are always ready to guide you through any queries you ask- either through speech or text. 

For example, When we ask Siri to “play music,” it follows the command like a human. After all, the ultimate goal of AI is to provide a human-like experience. 

Hence, it is no wonder that AI technologies dominate call centers. These are used in call centers not only to provide an amazing customer experience but also to evaluate a call agent. 

It is true that people still get to talk to an agent today. But, the AI does most of the preliminary work. So, by the time a customer talks to a human agent, the executive already knows who they are talking to and their issue. 

This article will discuss how AI revamps the call centers and provides an exceptional customer experience- ultimately saving your business from falling apart.

A. Importance of AI in contact center 

1. From call center to tech-enabled CX company

AI has enlarged the horizon of technological and commercial possibilities.

It helps the call centers provide a better service while relieving the entire burden of their executives. 

For any brand to succeed, they would need to be top on the customer experience. Otherwise, customers would never recommend a brand or do business. 

Call centers play a significant role in the game.

Since your team will be interacting with customers, it is your responsibility to satisfy their demands. 

With the help of Artificial Intelligence  in contact center, you can understand a customer’s intent, emotion, problems beforehand while having some AI-predicted solutions ready.

Moreover, your customer wouldn’t be asked to repeat their information time and again before talking to an executive.

AI makes the whole process very smooth, providing an exceptional customer experience.

Thus, with the help of an AI, you can uplift your business standard- from a call center to a CX company. 

2. Time-saving

Time is a precious thing for both your business and your client.

Neither your client nor your executive would like to spend hours talking about useless solutions.

AI tools makes it easy for your call center, though. 

It records the necessary data from a customer and tries to provide a custom AI-generated solution (in the forms of FAQs, threads, etc.). 

If nothing works, it directs the customer to a suitable executive while providing the executive with enough data beforehand.

AI also scans the customer’s intent and emotion and predicts call routing. Hence, the executive already knows who they are and their issue and is the best to handle it personally. 

It saves a lot of time. Customers love it because it is fast and they don’t have to keep repeating it. 

3. Automation of reports

One of the best advantages of using AI in call centers is that it generates reports automatically. As Enthu.AI shows your call center agent’s detailed analysis.

It then analyzes the call and determines the mood and response from both your executive and the client.

Finally, the report will contain the actions taken by your executive, whether it satisfied the customer, how well the customer was satisfied, etc. 

The report automation helps to train your team, better your responses, and provide the best customer experience.

In fact, you don’t have to go through each call to understand how it went. 

Instead, a 30 min call can be understood within 2 minutes by looking at these reports. 

4. Decision making easy

Using sentimental analytics, AI can quickly determine a customer’s behavior and assess their problems.

It can then provide probable solutions to the customer rep on call. 

The AI will also help understand the customer’s emotions, significantly impacting the solution prediction.

It makes decision-making easy for the customer executive and improves customer experience significantly. By helping in decision-making, AI also saves a lot of time simultaneously. 

5. Process improvement

AI in contact center reports are a great way to improve your team and coach them accordingly. You don’t have to listen to long conversations to determine how an individual executive is performing. 

It also scans the customer’s intent, sentiment, emotion, problem, etc., and prepares a detailed report to find room for improvement. 

Enthu.AI analyzes all your conversations between customers and individual customer reps and processes a surface for you to train them accordingly. 

6. Get more business by creating AI differentiation.

AI brings you more business through the differentiation barrier on all three dimensions–

When clubbed with human intelligence, artificial intelligence improves the quality of call centers.

It provides a far better output as compared to only human interactions. 

It also saves costs since it creates a lot of optimisation opportunities.

It also saves a lot of time, providing you room for more business.

Finally, it stops a business from falling due to poor customer experience. 

Call centers can benefit vastly from AI tools.

It smoothens and accelerates the whole process while providing a superior output. 

It results in superior customer experience, resulting in a high customer retention rate for businesses. 

B. 6 Contact center AI solutions

1. Conversation bots/ virtual agents

Conversation bots are the most common type of AI.

These are used to generate a conversation between the computer and the customer to provide a solution/service.

For example, you might have seen some pop-out chat boxes on some websites prompting you to talk to their executive. Those are chatbots.  

According to a report, 69% of customers prefer text-based communication with brands rather than calls.

You have probably seen some of the websites having chatbots. 

In this process, it first listens or reads what the customer is saying.

If the input is a voice, it uses ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) or voice recognition to understand and translate it to a machine-readable format. 

Next, the AI decrypts what the text means.

At this stage, it uses Natural Language Understanding, NLU (one part of Natural Language Processing), to understand the text’s intent. 

Now, after understanding the intention behind the text, the application forms a response using Dialog Management.

It then converts the response into a human-understandable format. In doing so, it uses Natural Language Generation, NLG- another part of NLP. 

Based on the query’s type (text or speech), the application then responds to the customer in the same format or both. It is how conversation AI works. 

2. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics is a very popular AI used across call centers.

It is a process to analyze the recorded conversations or calls with customers, which help to gather enough information, their intent, etc. 

For example, it is often not possible to listen to a 30-min recording and find the buried information. 

But Enthu.AI’s efficient Speech analytics makes it possible by providing a detailed report on how the call went and what the customer wanted. It helps your enterprise to grow and better future interaction. 

3. Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is another valued AI used by a lot of call centers to analyze historical customer behaviors using statistics and numbers to support data-driven decision-making. 

It records everything happening within the call. The prediction is based on the interaction, words used, duration, satisfaction, etc.

4. Predictive Call Routing

Predictive call routing is a technology that uses machine learning to learn a customer’s interaction by understanding past behaviors, responses, product preferences, etc. 

The evaluation then ranks your call center executive based on their experience, personality traits, customer handling capability, etc., who would be a better fit to interact with such a client. 

If put simply, predictive call routing is a technology that predicts the best agent-customer interaction and routes the call accordingly. 

5. Sentimental Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a very helpful AI technology that helps to provide you with information about customers’ attitudes, emotions about a certain product, your campaign, brands, etc. 

It analyses the customer’s input (through voice or text) and determines the emotional input. During the process, it scans words, the vocabulary used, sentences formed, tone, etc., to assess the nature of the interaction in text messages, emails, chats, or phone calls. 

Based on the reports, the AI can recommend some solutions to the agent, who can use his skills and decide on the best available option.

Conversations marked in green shows positive sentiment at Enthu.AI

6. Agent Quality Analysis and Training

Call centers consider several factors while evaluating an agent, such as how long an agent is speaking to the customer, how long it took to solve the issue, and the result on a customer survey form.

However, these methods can never provide a true validation of their services.

Apart from helping you gain strong customer experience support, Artificial Intelligence also helps you train your executives by analyzing them properly.

For example, Enthu.AI analyzes your executives’ conversations with clients and auto shells opportunities accordingly. 

It then draws out the conversation insights that can provide better agent coaching opportunities for agents and your teams.

B. How Enthu.AI can help contact center agents?

Enthu.AI is a market-leading contact center software due to its advanced features and capabilities.

Enthu.AI provides call transcription, agent feedback, coaching and training, performance tracking, and customer insights to contact center agents. 

These features enable agents to improve their communication skills, personalise their interactions with customers, and provide a better customer experience. 

Interested to explore further, request your FREE product demo

Thankfully, Enthu.AI’s speech analysis capabilities and conversation intelligence solution can help you automate 90% of this work.

Essentially, Enthu.AI helps you do the following:-

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D. Can AI replace human call center agents?

AI has the potential to replace some tasks currently performed by human call center agents, such as answering frequently asked questions or handling basic customer inquiries. 

However, there are still many complex and nuanced customer interactions that require human empathy, intuition, and problem-solving skills that Artificial Intelligence may not be able to replicate in the near future. 

It’s also important to consider the ethical implications of replacing human workers with AI, and to ensure that any transition to AI is done in a responsible and socially conscious way. 

Ultimately, artificial intelligence can fully replace human call center agents will depend on the specific context and the development of AI technology in the coming years.

Final Thoughts

Many believe that Artificial Intelligence will eventually replace human intelligence.

However, after this detailed discussion, it is clear that you can enhance the customer experience even more by incorporating  AI in contact center along with human executives.

Efficient engineers have designed Enthu.AI to provide a seamless experience.

It records and analyses all your calls, gives you a detailed report, and ensures that both your customers and team are on the same page. 

It saves cost, provides a better CX, and eventually helps your business grow.

So, keep yourself up with AI technology to save your business in this rapidly changing environment. 

If you are looking at top 10 solutions for speech analytics, you can click here

FAQs

1. How is AI used in contact centers?

AI is employed in contact centers for tasks like chatbots, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis to enhance customer service, automate processes, and optimize agent performance, improving overall efficiency.

2. What are the AI bots in contact center?

AI bots in contact centers include chatbots for text interactions, voice bots for phone conversations, and virtual assistants. They automate tasks, provide information, and assist customers, improving service efficiency.

3. Will call centers be replaced by AI?

While AI can automate certain tasks in call centers, complete replacement is unlikely. Human touch, empathy, and complex issue resolution are areas where humans excel, and AI complements these capabilities, enhancing overall efficiency.