By Raghavendra M, VP-Sales & Customer Success, Mihup.
Any new technology that is introduced in business operations, aims to be effective on two points.
1. Making things easier, faster, and more convenient for all users
2.Optimizing resources to achieve greater outcomes
These two expectations of contact center leaders fulfilled by AI have made it emerge as the biggest transformation in the arena until now. AI-powered contact center automation has brought about deeper customer and product understanding, ease of usage, real-time insights, and reduction of workload and operational costs for contact center teams. To understand how all this is being achieved, let us look at contact center operations from the perspective of three core stakeholders involved in every conversation.
Contact center management
Contact center operations are all about the speed and quality of customer experience. In the post-pandemic environment, there is a shortage of quality or experienced agents, but a sharp spike in the number of telephonic conversations. Consequently, there is a greater burden on agents and quality analysts which irrespective of intentions, leads to longer wait times, missed conversions, or upselling/cross-selling opportunities. Quality analysts are able to review less than 5% of the conversations, and might not even be aware of what is going right or wrong in the remaining 95%.
AI automation resolves this problem
It automates the process of analysing to the extent that every voice conversation is reviewed. Integration of Natural Language Processing and the modern concept of natural language understanding enable AI to automatically comprehend a call interaction. Using a speech analytics system powered by a conversation intelligence platform, quality analysts can extract meaning, context, importance, and various other inputs from each conversation. Was the customer happy, annoyed, or frustrated or did the agent adhere to the script and protocols or not? Everything is understood, accurately segregated, and presented to the contact center decision makers in an easy-to-understand format. Accordingly, they can benchmark agent performance, and customer satisfaction levels, and modify the training processes or introduce refresher training wherever needed.
Agent Performance
Agents are at the core of any contact center operations, but they are overworked generally. With an ever-increasing diversity of products and services to cater to, there is a humongous amount of information. It is humanly impossible to be on the button with everything in a live conversation. However, customers don’t know these challenges. If they don’t get product information or service assistance, they will walk away. At the same time, agents have to try and keep the conversations shorter, and precise and aim to convert leads into sales.
This is where AI automation is truly making agents fall in love with it.
Real-time cues for agents on live calls provide precise, contextual, or predictive nudges. For instance, the call history of a particular caller can help the agent understand the nature of the problem or recommend a product or service that they should pitch to the caller for greater conversion chances. The speech intelligence system keeps an eye on compliance to let the agent know if they miss something. This makes agents feel empowered with information and technology to handle each conversation with greater confidence and deliver positive outcomes.
Customer experience
The biggest impact of speech intelligence is in transforming the customer experience. Many people prefer to not call contact centers due to:
- Long wait times
- Poor agent knowledge
- Need to repeatedly inform each agent of the problem
- Lack of understanding including problems arising out of language barriers
- Lack of willingness and relevant information.
However, with AI-powered speech intelligence, these problems are a thing of the past. The transformation starts right from the time a customer initiates a conversation. As the call starts, the agents that respond are usually courteous and aware of the problem the customer is facing (if it is a repeat call), or capable of quickly identifying the same for providing the desired support or information. The outcome is a smooth conversation with reduced AHT.
AI automation makes it a joyful experience for customers to engage with the contact center. They are confident of the quality and quick support, and therefore, are likely to continue to engage with the brand. For agents, the speech intelligence system offers the confidence of handling even complex queries and deliver first-call resolutions. For contact center management, delightful and positive customer engagement results in better revenue generation, optimization of resources, happier agents, and lower loss of talent and customers.
What more can any contact center operator ask for?
very clear and good article easy to understand. Thank you