There hasn’t been a week in 2023 without some kind of debate or news emerging around artificial intelligence (AI).
ChatGPT has made enormous strides (and headlines) this year. Its ability to produce uncannily human-like responses to queries has sparked conversations among many professions, including customer service, about the role machines and automation might play in the not-too-distant future.
This kind of debate is nothing new. When Britain first industrialised, textile workers formed the Luddite movement in response to their jobs being displaced by mechanised looms and knitting frames. The name has stuck ever since.
Although we’re not in Luddite territory again here, there can be no doubt that AI is having a growing impact on every part of business life. Indeed, it is down to business leaders and innovators to extract the greatest value from automation in a way that enhances human employee experience and productivity.
The trends all point to 2023 being the year when AI and machine learning (ML) really come into their own as the technology matures, the number of applications rise and adoption surges.
The world of customer experience (CX) is a primary example. For many organisations, AI is already transforming the way they interact with customers, the contact centre being where it is and will continue to make the greatest impact. Indeed, some 80% of CX professionals already believe AI will provide a better contact centre experience.
Part of the increased AI uptake has been borne out of necessity. Since the Covid pandemic upturned the world of work, contact centres have seen dramatic change as large office-based centres have been replaced with distributed CX teams powered by agile, efficient and scalable cloud-based tools. As a result, the CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) market is growing exponentially and forecast to reach $19.8bn in value by 2031.
As well as adapting to new working models, technology is offering new ways to drive customer satisfaction and employee wellbeing. AI and automation are at the forefront of this, helping businesses deliver customer and employee experiences effectively and profitably, particularly in the contact centre.
Three contact centre AI trends for 2023
Cloud-based CCaaS has become the preferred deployment model for contact centres, and we are continuing to see how AI is augmenting CCaaS performance.
For instance, AI chatbots are handling customer queries, while other AI tools are helping agents optimise their interactions with customers through improved routing, advanced decision-making and by offering real-time actionable insights.
What can we expect to see this year? There are three major trends we expect will drive AI and contact centre operations this year as more organisations look to leverage automation as a means of optimising their customer experience.
The first centres on assisting employees. AI assistants and bots in the contact centre can empower colleagues with tools that intelligently match customers to the agent with the best knowledge to resolve the issue. These can pair intelligently with integrated tools in the contact centre environment to enable immediate access to customer information, thus limiting delays and enabling agents to resolve queries quickly and effectively first time.
Enhanced personalisation is the second key trend. By delivering predictive engagement insights to employees, AI can create highly personalised experiences for customers. Such is the intelligence now provided by AI and machine learning, these solutions can track sentiment in human voices and assess intention to determine when a conversation is going poorly. To help get things back on track, these tools will then offer advice on how to steer the interaction.
The third major trend involves automating repetitive tasks and improving efficiency. Here, AI can record information quickly, reducing the manual work an employee needs to do in the contact centre. While supervisors can’t listen to every call to grade agents to gain actionable insights, AI can. AI-powered self-service bots and tools are also becoming more sophisticated at answering customer questions – this not only gives customers more options for how they resolve their enquiry, but also helps to ease the work burden on human contact centre agents, freeing them up to resolve more complex and nuanced issues.
Investing in AI will yield several key benefits
Organisations that leverage AI in their contact centres in these ways can expect to see several key business returns on their investment, including lowering costs and boosting productivity. As the contact centre’s most valuable (and expensive) assets, agents need to focus more of their time on business-critical duties. Here, AI is very much an empowering partner for human workers to lean on, able to take on repetitive, menial tasks. This should also help to reduce staff turnover, ease the issue of staff shortages and reduce costs relating to recruitment.
One of the biggest issues facing contact centres is a high rate of staff churn. Employee experience (EX) is a key part of CCaaS and gamification has been proven to improve the lives of agents. Employers cite a 48% engagement increase with a gamified work experience and 90% of employees say it makes them more productive.
Leveraged smartly, workplace engagement tools can reinvent the employee experience, actively coach and train agents, and boost performance – when workers are engaged and feel valued, employee churn falls and productivity rises.
AI will continue to make its mark on the contact centre world in 2023. Employers and their teams of agents need to approach it as a tool that can augment both their own experience and the journeys of their customers. With margins ever tightening and the battle to secure talent and maintain customer loyalty hotter than ever, making the most of AI in the contact centre is essential to delivering vital business outcomes.
