As technology’s capabilities grow and become further woven into daily life, businesses are looking to embrace AI to improve the customer experience. Because the digital landscape is changing rapidly, there is growing uncertainty around how to use AI, coupled with the fear of missing out (FOMO) on the next AI breakthrough. Companies are unsure how to take that next step while keeping their customers, and the business at large, safe.
While AI requires care and caution, from assisting medical diagnoses to advancing autonomous vehicles, it’s helping to improve the world we live in. By using Generative AI to increase accessibility, customer service is transformed, and companies can meet their customer wherever their journey begins.
Democratising analytics
AI is improving the contact centre by democratising analytics across a business, making it simpler for companies to make informed, data-driven decisions on all aspects of the operation, from answering customer queries to forecasting. In the past, organisations would have data analysts and data scientists perform the complex coding required to assess data. Now, prompts are in the conversational interface that any team member can access because generative AI has made it as easy as starting a conversation.
Further, AI-enabled analytics can “listen” to customer calls and scan chat transcripts to quickly find out customers’ language, tone, and intent. They are thus able to decipher common reasons for customer contact, examine the quality of the conversations, uncover opportunities for training contact centre agents, and notify managers of compliance violations.
Binding guardrails to your brand
While AI makes utilising data easier, it does come with some risks, especially in larger enterprises. The good news is, when used correctly, this tool can help leverage rich historical customer data to create knowledge sources that bind guardrails within your business. For example, a company will not want its generative AI talking about topics that are not related to or aligned with its brand, such as politics or sports, when answering customer queries in an online chat. This emerging technology should be implemented in such a way that honours and reinforces the company’s brand values in every customer interaction. At the same time, it should also be able to detect nuances in the meaning of words from the calls’ context.
AI will essentially predict what a customer is calling about, what channels they prefer, and what their experiences with a brand were like in the past. The right customer service software can help ensure this technology learns from mistakes in previous customer interactions and that it uses the right terminology when communicating with those customers so that they are left feeling satisfied with their support experience.
Helping the workforce to thrive
As well as safeguarding interactions, having access to insights can help your (and the wider) workforce to accelerate and enhance their decision-making. Gone are the days of having to rely on small, specialised teams to answer questions which could take weeks and even months. AI can now take on the majority of repetitive tasks from agents’ workloads, allowing them to instead focus all their attention on the customer and, ultimately, offer a superior service. For instance, contact centre agents no longer have to spend time taking post-call notes as AI can automatically provide objective detailed insights from all interactions in real-time.
Additionally, AI-enabled virtual agents (otherwise known as chatbots) can be trained to match the level of performance of the best team members within a contact centre. Currently, chatbots handle more straightforward interactions with customers while human agents manage more complex and nuanced queries.
However, this dynamic is likely to soon change. By adopting AI into their day-to-day processes, human employees can single out the perfect customer journey (which includes the perfect messages aligned with the brand) out of tens of thousands of interactions. With time, contact centre agents will be able to train these virtual agents to communicate those perfect messages to all customers. As a result, virtual agents will progressively become responsible for more and more sophisticated conversations, delivering impeccable customer service and relieving their human counterparts of the burden of strenuous work.
AI allows everyone in an organisation to take action while adding value to the customer and ultimately benefiting staff, customers, and companies themselves in the long run.
Say goodbye to FOMO
As the digital landscape evolves at an exponential rate and AI transforms today’s workforce by the minute, businesses’ fear of missing out on embracing this popular technology is certainly not unfounded. This is especially true when it comes to leveraging AI to enhance customer service, as people’s expectations for the perfect customer experience continue to grow.
The implementation of AI in the contact centre is on the right path, and we are already witnessing the positive impact it has in this space. Interactions analytics is more accessible to all team members allowing them to uncover valuable customer data in real-time to facilitating data-driven decisions and communicate brand-aligned messages. AI also lifts the pressure off of overworked contact centre agents through the introduction of chatbots. While the technology itself might seem daunting at first, it’s utilised to simplify employees’ work and remove friction from the customer service journey.
How best to adopt this emerging technology is not a simple question to answer. But where there is uncertainty, there is always help, and businesses don’t have to do it alone. By partnering with the right supplier of contact centre software, companies have real-time access to data, repetitive tasks are automated, and customer service is streamlined. Equipped with the proper tools and the right expertise, organisations can say goodbye to any fears or hesitation they may have, and get one step closer to offering the tier-one customer service people seek today and which they themselves truly feel confident in delivering.
