Increase ROI in Your Contact Center with Artificial Intelligence

Contact centers must streamline operations in order to remain competitive in the modern business landscape. Artificial intelligence has the ability to do this in ways that a strictly human team simply cannot. Many contact centers that are falling behind with the technology are also falling behind in performance. Let’s take a look at some of the ways that artificial intelligence is used in the modern contact center.

Automating Routine Tasks

Ensuring that routine functions are routed through an automated system helps to free up your creative talent to solve problems that need personal attention. When you give the difficult issues more personal time, you build goodwill with your customer base. The issues that would otherwise cause customers to leave negative reviews get solved more quickly. Everyone is happy, and productivity goes up.

Machine learning actually gives your call center the ability to automate difficult customer service issues as time goes on. Although the current generation of AI still requires human inputs to get started, the systems can learn how to adapt to situations given a large enough dataset.

Reducing Costs in the Center

AI helps to reduce costs in the call center. With less of a need to assign more humans to similar tasks as sales increase, call centers now have the ability to increase ROI at scale. Employing natural language processing and cognitive sentiment analysis gives the modern call center a chance to direct even more functions through the AI system rather than personalizing them to human employees.

The best systems have the ability to employed natural language processing across languages. For instance, international companies now have the ability to translate between English and German in a natural way that does not sound forced or mechanical. This breakthrough allows some incredible scaling opportunities if the interactive voice response is properly employed.

Raising Customer Experience Expectations

One might think that raising customer expectations is setting the company up for a fall. On the contrary, providing natural sounding AI options actually decreases the amount of problems that your customer base will give you. As you learn to direct larger problem arrays through customer service journeys, you actually streamline your buyer profiles into more precisely segmented groups. Within those groups, customers can actually expect more, because you are more aligned with the needs of that segment.

Home assistant programs such as Google Home Assistant and Amazon Alexa have spoiled the average consumer into this kind of personalization. It is contingent upon every company to raise customer expectations to the point that highly vetted customer groups align themselves with your company and allow you, rather than a competitor, to serve them.

Analyzing Trends

Finally, AI helps a company to analyze trends and become proactive in solving problems. Without the need to compensate for human error, egotism and personality clashes, a company has a much greater ability to get to the bottom of what is causing a particular type of problem during a service chat.

Properly analyzing a problem from beginning to end can help a company to create a system that fixes it at its core rather than dealing with its symptoms in the call center.

The characteristics above are only a few of the ways that AI can help to increase ROI in a call center. If you are looking to compete in today’s world of highly productive sales, you should consider implementing AI into your traditional call center structure.  For further information, take a look at look at our website page IBM Watson in the Contact Center or Contact Us.