Automation and artificial intelligence would collaborate, rather than replace, the human element in contact centre operations. This was the main theme at CCW 2019 (Customer Contact Week), the world’s largest customer contact event, held in Las Vegas, last month.
One such example is Callminer. In a presentation at the conference titled “Accelerate Speed to CX Intelligence with AI and Automated Interaction Analytics” it partnered with Sitel to talk about how contact centres can bridge the gap between speech and analysable data.
The session looked at how by analysing customer conversations–whether they are over the phone, email, chat or social–businesses can unlock the intelligence needed to attract and retain customers.
Chatting about chatbots
[caption id="attachment_22250" align="alignleft" width="200"]
Gabriele Masili[/caption]
Once more, chatbots were broadly discussed. In a “fireside” chat, Gabriele Masili, chief technology officer of Customer Service and Support at Microsoft, told delegates about some of the learnings in the industry.
He said that whether it was a small company looking into chatbots to understand if they’re suitable for their business needs or bigger companies that have already implemented several, the key insights were that organisations should “start small, pilot, iterate, learn early from the errors, and then double down on the good things, invest further on those and throw away the things that just do not work”.
He added that organisations can possibly use some of the savings coming from a successful implementation to reinvest back “into the business to grow digital solutions”.
AI gets behavioural
Avaya used the show to announce a tie up between itself and Afiniti to improve customer experience and contact centre performance through new capabilities applying behavioural pairing AI to outbound campaigns and digital customer notifications.
According to recent research on AI in the contact centre, conducted by Vanson Bourne and sponsored by Avaya, 37 per cent of organisations are challenged to provide an effective yet tailored approach to customer communications, and 34 per cent have difficulty directing customers to the right channel to help them.
The pairing will see Afiniti’s AI-based behavioural pairing solutions integrated in Avaya IX Contact Centre solutions, providing outbound contact centre capabilities that strengthen customer experience and agent productivity.
Benjamin Gleitzman[/caption]