The telegraph allowed instantaneous long-distance communication, the telephone brought two-way dialogue to everyone who wanted it, and the internet opened digital transmissions to the masses. Now, AI is changing how we communicate. This technology isn’t just sneaking its way into all kinds of places – it’s making a huge splash in the world of call centers.
While it isn’t the answer to everything, AI can simplify agent tasks, personalize communication more accurately, and speed up time to customer value. As a result, companies are deploying AI to improve the customer experience (CX) in their contact centers.
For example, a major e-commerce company launched an AI chatbot on Facebook Messenger to help customers with routine inquiries like tracking orders and checking balances. These virtual agents can quickly handle a high volume of calls, freeing human agents to focus on more complex problems. This reduces the duration of each call, cutting costs for the company while providing a better customer experience.
Additionally, AI can power a knowledge base that suggests articles or manuals during live customer interactions. It can also provide information and answers to help resolve a problem, which enables agents to spend more time on high-value, high-touch customer service. This helps reduce the stress of working in customer service, which is notoriously one of the most stressful jobs in the world, and it can create actual career paths based on interpersonal skills instead of just technical knowledge.
Lastly, AI can help ensure the most critical information is shared with the right people. It can analyze conversations at scale and identify the key terms most relevant to a specific customer. It can also identify common questions and phrases, enabling businesses to anticipate customer needs better and create more personalized communications.
Using a unified data platform, AI integrates with CRM systems to access relevant customer information and uses skills-based routing, predictive routing, or customer priority to match callers to the best agent. This ensures that someone with the right expertise handles the call to resolve it. It also helps agents stay on track during conversations by suggesting the following steps and displaying the most relevant information.
AI is also helping to boost employee satisfaction and loyalty. For example, an AI-powered chatbot on the e-commerce site BabyCenter UK provides parents personalized recommendations for products that best meet their family’s needs and preferences. It can also offer multiple interior design options for 3D-rendered apartment floor plans or suggest workouts tailored to individual fitness levels and goals.
In the near future, we can expect to see AI-powered solutions in all sorts of areas—from home automation and smart cams to health care and financial services. Ultimately, these advancements will help us work smarter and more efficiently. But the biggest benefit may be that they will allow us to spend less time doing monotonous or repetitive tasks and more time doing things we enjoy or that contribute to our success.
