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Customer satisfaction and loyalty are vital to the long-term success and health of any business. As a main point of contact post-sale between businesses and customers, contact centers are important connection points to building, maintaining and improving this relationship.
Yet keeping customers happy is challenging and the consequences are very real. Around $1.6 trillion is lost every year just in the U.S. due to customers receiving poor customer service and switching brands as a result. Long call times, angry customers and inefficient agents all contribute to this lost revenue.
A critical piece of meeting customer expectations is incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). According to CMSWire research, 73% of CX experts believe artificial intelligence will have a significant or transformative impact on the digital customer experience over the next 2-5 years. Contact center owners can leverage AI (particularly AI agents) to overcome many of the barriers to both providing great customer service and reducing costs via increased efficiency.
The true value of AI happens when AI is used holistically for more than generating text from prompts (although that’s important, too). When used effectively, targeted use of AI can assist agents in their current tasks to achieve their best work.
AI-first Contact Centers, Defined
At its most basic, the “AI-first contact center” rethinks existing processes and its customer access strategy based on the new opportunities that AI has created. It uses AI Agents as the first point of contact for all interactions on voice and digital channels and automation at scale to reduce manual work and deliver favorable outcomes and positive impressions. Customers should come away satisfied from interacting with an agent in an AI contact center, where it’s an AI Agent, or an AI-assisted human agent. The speed, consistency and convenience in turn boosts customer loyalty and retention while reducing the burden agents and increasing their satisfaction.
We think of an AI contact center as a facility with AI technology integrated into existing systems, processes and workflows. AI isn’t meant to replace your human agents, but rather provide a competitive edge that allows agents to do their best work and deliver exceptional customer service to high-value customers.
Within the contact center, AI can be used for any of the following:
- Chatting with customers, using natural language understanding
- Providing real-time assistance to human agents
- Intelligently routing customers to the right agents who can best resolve their request
- Analyzing customer sentiment and delivering insights into customer behavior
It’s important to note that AI contact centers aren’t 100% automated. Automation is a means; it’s not a goal in and of itself. The robots aren’t replacing humans. Humans are irreplaceable in the modern contact center, but they simply play a different role than in the past as they are no longer handling the repetitive, low-complexity and high volume requests. What AI does accomplish is assisting human agents by automating routine tasks such as ACW, proactively delivering suggested actions or responses and providing valuable insights in real-time and at scale.
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Use Cases For AI in the Contact Center
How businesses integrate AI into their workflows will vary and depend on business needs. Perhaps you need conversational AI to understand the context of a user’s query, or generative AI to create unique, context-driven content within the structured business process Conversational AI is modeling. When implemented together, AI agents can give customers seamless experiences that are just as contextual and flexible as human interactions, yet faster and more consistent.
There are plenty of other use cases for incorporating AI into your contact center. They include handling low-level tasks, such as identification and verification, call routing or self-service. AI agents can assist human agents in the moment through sentiment analysis and responses, as well as afterward with call wrap-up and analysis. Taken as a whole, the tasks AI can perform are designed to scale routine tasks, giving your humans higher-level responsibilities, customers and objectives to focus their attention on.
Benefits of AI in the Contact Center
When integrated properly, AI lifts nearly every KPI a contact center may have. Key valuable benefits include the following:
Boosting Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction increases the faster their issues are resolved and particularly when solved in the first interaction. Simple changes or requests can be taken care of by AI agents and routed to a human as needed.
Empowering Better Agent Utilization
AI assists agents — it doesn’t replace them. When successfully integrated, AI frees up agents’ time, giving them the freedom and flexibility to tackle more complex customer issues by taking over the monotonous and repetitive tasks that don’t require a human to begin with. Contact centers have spent so many years forcing call scripts and inflexible processes on agents that they’ve taught humans to work like robots. But it’s time for machines to reclaim their work and humans to do the same, making use of their common sense, emotional intelligence and flexibility.
Saving Time
For better or worse, call centers live and die on their Average Handling Times. When all customer resolutions need to happen fast, every minute stuck in your call-handling process can cost you both money, customer satisfaction and possibly customers themselves. By automating manual tasks (such as data entry and user verification) AI agents help save time across all of your interactions on every channel you deploy them on.. Research shows that AI agents can lead to 99.5% faster response times and reduce your average handling time by approximately 30%.
From agents to customers, AI can improve customer service at all levels. If your organization experiences high call volumes and elevated churn rates, now is the time to explore how integrating AI tools into your contact center can save time, improve agent satisfaction and benefit your business all around.
Keep reading Cognigy’s Complete Guide to Contact Center AI at cognigy.com.
