Call Center AI: What Is It and How Does It Work?

call center ai

Yahoo Finance declares that the market for call center AI will grow by $2.7 billion from 2022 to 2027. Should this come to fruition, this would register a CAGR of 22.42%.

Brands worldwide are celebrating how contact center AI is improving the customer experience. What once seemed impossible to manage now is, because humans are getting help.

Call centers can be inundated with customer inquiries. Giving courteous service quickly can make or break a company. According to Microsoft, customer service is relevant to 95% of consumers when choosing a brand for ongoing loyalty.

To increase revenue, you must deliver superior customer experience. Here is how call center AI is rising to the challenge.

What Is Call Center AI?

It is artificial intelligence that is being utilized in a contact center. Contact center AI often automates repetitive tasks. It empowers call center agents to be more efficient and deliver a better customer experience.

Human customer service representatives and agents can prioritize their high-value customers. By artificial intelligence alleviating repetitive tasks, which can be a waste of an agent’s time, they can then dedicate their hours to complex issues where a human’s expertise is needed.

Improves Call Center Service Routing

Call center AI software can make assigning an appropriate agent faster. It uses intelligent call routing systems which have self-learning algorithms.

This customer experience software uses models to analyze the personality of a customer. It explores previous behaviors and call histories. The corporation’s call center is empowered as the software knows how to best route the call.

Sometimes customers can benefit from a simple chat integration. Other times, they need a live agent to handle an issue. It all depends on the nature of the request, and call center AI will make the determination.

AI will route the call to the best agent. The aim is to quickly and effectively resolve issues, take orders or close tickets. This results in freeing up time for employees.

This contact center technology can be more efficient and more successfully match callers to faster resolutions over time. This improves customer satisfaction. Recent data reveals that 86% of customers admit they will pay more for a brand that offers a better customer experience.

Immediate Call Center Analytics

Each customer interaction contains a wealth of information. The call center CRM a business uses can capture a large amount of data from customer activity. Contact center analytics can provide understanding about how customers feel about your service and brand, simply by their words.

The contact center provider can get real-time details from a customer’s positive and negative words. The contact center software can flag a supervisor if an agent needs assistance with a customer who seems overly irritated.

The contact center service can accelerate its game when AI has features like speech analytics and NLP (Natural Language Processing). Interactions are recorded, which can then be transcribed into a format that is easy to read.

Interactions are flagged and desktop reports can be generated.  Supervisors can quickly review a conversation and glance at the pertinent details. This helps with call center quality control. They can even find areas where agents need additional training.

Customer Retention

With immediate and robust call center reporting, AI empowers a call center to make interactions more effective. It can predict the needs of the customer. This insight lets organizations develop best practices for handling customer inquiries.

A recent survey shows that almost 46% of business professionals say customer experience is a top priority for their company in the next five years. Tailoring an agent’s approach to customers and anticipating their needs is a competitive advantage. Businesses have a tool to help them upsell, cross-sell, and retain customers.

Improving the Employee Experience

Improving the employee experience directly impacts the customer experience. It enhances the customer journey. Employee job satisfaction will be reflected during the customer interaction.  The less overwhelmed an agent is, the more attention is paid to each client.

Employees engaged in their role are likelier to deliver a hassle-free customer experience. This leads to higher employee retention rates and gaining customer loyalty.

Call Center Compliance

Violations of compliance can be costly. They can lead to complicated legal issues and regulatory fines. Without AI, contact center reporting can be challenging to monitor actively.

Industries such as healthcare, finance and insurance need to closely monitor agents and their contact center compliance. One of the best ways to help agents be compliant is by giving them scripts which dynamically change based on predetermined conversation triggers.  Contact center software and AI can give agents real-time guidance and prompts.

After the call, all activity flows into their contact center CRM.  A manager or supervisor can monitor performance to offer post-interaction review and coaching.

Contact Center Quality Control

The most significant impact you can make with quality assurance is to review the recordings and notes of the agents. This makes it easy for leadership to find instances where agents were compliant or non-compliant.

While some organizations may manually perform quality control, they can only review so many interactions. The business can evaluate many more calls when contact center AI automates the quality control process.

Self-Service and Deflection Options

AI cannot replace the human aspect of customer service. It can, however, provide a satisfactory resolution for a customer seeking a simple request. Day-to-day questions that are more “routine” can be cared for with a self-service contact center AI option.

This includes checking a balance, placing an order and paying a bill. This allows human agents to tackle more complex inquiries.

Although AI could handle more significant self-service inquiries, it depends on how accurate the predetermined reference data is for the call center AI software to pull from. When details are incomplete during the design process, it will limit the ability of contact center AI to generate accurate solutions.  Accurate historical data and quality analytics should be a top priority.

Email Integration

Call center AI automates the routing of email to supervisors, agents and teams. There are a few ways call center agents can receive emails, including receiving emails directly to their inbox or pulling from a queue.

Email integration works with contact center software, allowing agents to view and send email inside of the contact center software interface.

SMS Integration

It’s easy to help customers with SMS communications using call center AI. SMS has many excellent benefits. Messages are sent more efficiently.

Recent statistics reveal that SMS marketing has a typical open rate of 82%. This is much higher than email, with an average available rate of 20%.

Mobile devices are always close to your customer; a text message is short. Most smartphones give customers a notification when they receive any text message. Therefore, your SMS messages will be given priority.

Another common feature for most customers is that an SMS inbox is primarily ad-free, so there is not much clutter competing for someone’s attention. If you include a link in the SMS communication, you can create a clear CTA (call to action).

Call Center AI Is Omnichannel

You can reach customers using contact center software that works best for them, whether it is via phone, email, live chat, or SMS. We call this Omnichannel. The call center CRM keeps track of all the channels with easy-to-view contact center reporting and analytics.

CX Transformation

The most important KPI for a call center provider is customer experience. Statistics show that customers dissatisfied with a company’s customer service will share their negative experience with approximately seven people.

Brands are successful and grow when their customers are happy. Today, this requires interactions that are not only pleasant but personalized.

According to Twilio Segment, data shows that 60% of consumers admit they will be repeat customers of a brand that offers a personalized shopping experience. This includes their customer service inquiries.

Brands today always look at ways to improve customer satisfaction. This gives them a competitive advantage. That is why customer experience is at the heart of well-designed contact center AI structure.

Experts in Call Center AI

There is no denying the power of call center AI and its CX transformation capabilities. The benefits are impossible to ignore. Still, choosing contact center software and implementing a solution is challenging.

You need an AI system that fits your business, from the right omnichannel features to call center compliance to reporting and everything in between. That’s where Compendium Communications comes in. We bridge the gap.

By evaluating your contact center provider needs, we can provide an AI solution that will add the most value to your organization. Give your customers the service they deserve. Contact Compendium Communications today to learn more.