The Contact Center AI Value Proposition

The Agent Assist AI Value Proposition

The first part of the contact center AI value proposition deals with agents. Let’s be clear; AI isn’t going to replace human agents. The fundamental fact of the Customer Experience (CX) is that your customers will always want to speak to a human being. If people were satisfied with AI, we’d have done away with human contact centers years ago. But customers want empathy and they want advocacy; they don’t want automated systems that can only relay comforting platitudes.

So AI’s primary function in the contact center is to support human agents, whether that’s cutting down post-call workloads, or automating the simplest inquiries. And implementing AI at this level is surprisingly simple:

• By leveraging generative AI to transcribe and summarize interactions (both voice and digital), you can cut valuable seconds of every interaction. A generative AI platform can accurately draw out the key facts of an interaction and present them to the agent. These facts can be checked and then uploaded to a database, to be presented the next time the customer gets in contact.

• It’s difficult to understate just how valuable a tool like this can be. A few seconds saved off each interaction can result in minutes saved every day. Across hundreds of agents, that looks more like whole days of work saved. And that extra value is equivalent to an entire additional human agent.

• And AI doesn’t just make agents faster, it makes them more empathetic. Sentiment analysis can be used to measure customer tone across interactions, and even to support agents in maintaining an upbeat and helpful mood. No matter when the customer reaches out, AI ensures that agents always deliver an empathetic experience.

AI won’t replace agents; it will empower them. By equipping agents with AI tools, you allow them to get through their workloads quicker; and more efficient working means more customers served, which means an overall improved Customer Experience.

But the contact center AI value proposition doesn’t stop there.

The Customer Support AI Value Proposition

Supporting your agents is crucial, but no matter how efficient you are, an overwhelming workload is going to lead to low-quality service. The second half of the AI value proposition  deals with how you reduce that workload by automating as many interactions as possible.

The majority of contacts that come into a contact center on a typical day are usually simple or repetitive. Either people are experiencing the same general problem (as a result of a service outage or another fault) or they want to access information or make small changes. In these cases, automation is a pretty simple task.

• The first instance of customer-facing automation is the Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbot. These chatbots can be deployed via webchat, over digital channels, or even via voice channels. As they don’t leverage generative AI, there’s no risk of hallucination. They offer a simple but incredibly powerful service; they can act as a guided directory for customers.

• When a customer gets in contact, an AI chatbot can ask simple questions about intent and personal identification. An open-ended ‘Why are you reaching out to us today?’ can gather the reason for the customer’s contact, and NLP can match their response to the next best course of action.

• From there, the chatbot can provide the customer with the information they need via a link. If this doesn’t resolve the customer’s inquiry, they can be forwarded to an agent. All that information about identity and intention is forwarded with them; information that usually takes minutes to gather.

• The result is either a fully automated interaction or a voice interaction reduced by several precious minutes. Either way, that’s value for the contact center and value for the customer.

You can’t automate away all of your problems; you can cut your agent’s workload significantly. A reduced workload means more time to focus on high-complexity interactions, which means an overall improvement in customer experience.

The Future of the Contact Center AI Value Proposition

For the contact center, the AI-powered future looks bright. Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your AI transformation by implementing these basic, grass-roots changes, you can start thinking about more advanced ways to bring AI efficiencies to your business.

• Empathy assessment and sentiment analysis can be used to support agents in real time. Low sentiment could be flagged to supervisors, allowing them to intervene to support challenging interactions.

• AI tools can be used to identify the best points to launch a proactive customer contact. Sentiment analysis and interaction history could be combined to identify the customers most likely to benefit from proactive outreach and the best ways of making that connection.

• Generative AI could be used to create knowledge articles in real-time, depending on the needs of an agent. That means up-to-date knowledge, always, without the hours of work that maintaining a knowledge library brings.

Each of these applications shaves seconds off the daily work of agents. But those seconds become minutes, and those minutes become hours and days. That’s real efficiencies, without the slimming down.