Crucial for generating leads and sales, cultivating customer loyalty, and building revenue, the contact center is essential to any company’s strategy for growth.
As such, many contact center leaders have rapidly adopted innovative technologies over the years to improve productivity, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently the most exciting new innovation in the contact center.
By 2023, 62% of contact centers were either investing, or planning to invest in contact center AI. Additionally, one Bright Pattern study found that only 39% of companies hadn’t experimented with new developments in generative AI technologies.
Used correctly, AI can make agents more productive, empowered, and efficient at their jobs. It can also automate various tasks, such as answering routine customer questions. However, as adoption of AI technology grows, it’s important for companies to recognize the strengths and limitations of the technology. Here’s what you need to know in 2024.
AI is Augmenting, Not Replacing Human Agents
The rise of increasingly sophisticated AI solutions in the contact center has led to some concerns that intelligent tools might eliminate the need for human agents. However, this is far from the truth. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and similar tools can certainly automate simple tasks, such as handling routine inquiries in a contact center.
However, this doesn’t make human agents redundant; it simply means they have more time to focus on issues that require human expertise. By automating routine tasks, AI ensures agents are available to handle tasks that demand empathy, creativity, and various specific skills.
“AI has been a huge benefit to our partners and customers by helping them improve agent performance as well as CSAT scores. According to Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern, “We are heavily invested in AI, and believe it delivers great benefits to our customers. We provide functionality such as transcription and summarization, sentiment analysis, real-time agent assist for suggestions, interaction analytics for intent analysis, and auto-scoring for quality management. These features greatly enhance the agent’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience.”
Additionally, AI can act as a guide and source of support to agents throughout the customer journey. Intelligent tools can use data analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning to analyze customer information and suggest solutions or next steps to agents. This means employees can leverage the resources they need to solve problems faster, and more effectively.
The Focus Should Be on AI-Human Collaboration
AI isn’t a way for contact centers to reduce their reliance on human agents. It’s a way for companies to empower their employees to be more effective in their roles. Human beings and AI solutions have very different skills and abilities. AI bots, for instance, are excellent at tackling repetitive tasks that don’t require a great deal of human input.
They can use data to rapidly route customers to the right agent based on their intent or sentiment, quickly summarize text and conversations, highlighting action items for employees, and even process data at speed. However, they’re not capable of coming up with truly creative ways to solve problems on their own. They can’t show genuine empathy to customers during difficult conversations, and some can even struggle to understand certain dialects and terms.
The goal for contact centers implementing AI should be to create a seamless experience, where AI augments and supports live agents, acting as a constant source of assistance and guidance.
AI Can be a Cost-Effective Investment
Today, many contact center leaders are struggling with limited budgets. They need to make their resources stretch further in a difficult economy, which means every innovation they invest in needs to have a clear return on investment. For some time, implementing AI in the contact center was extremely difficult for smaller businesses, with limited development resources and budgets.