In today’s era of digitization and intense competition, businesses recognize the paramount importance of customer experience. It goes without saying that exceptional customer support and service are instrumental in creating a positive customer experience, and the contact center serves as a pivotal component in achieving this.
To effectively cater to their customers, businesses worldwide have been incorporating various cutting-edge technologies into their contact centers, enabling them to provide streamlined and efficient customer support. Notably, a report highlights that 53% of executives consider customer experience as the primary motivation for companies to adopt AI.
Obstacle in Customer Service
Let’s envision a situation where a customer contacts a contact center seeking assistance from a service agent. During the interaction, the agent multitasks by taking notes, entering information, and navigating through various sources of data to find a resolution.
Unfortunately, this entire process prolongs the customer’s wait time, leading to frustration and sometimes driving them to explore alternative solutions. Moreover, the productivity and experience of the service agent are significantly impacted as they spend a considerable amount of time on manual, repetitive, and non-productive tasks.
Artificial Intelligence – The Answer
By integrating AI into the voice channel, customer calls are transcribed or summarized in real-time, eliminating the need for agents to manually take call notes. As a result, agents are liberated from this task and can dedicate their attention to the client conversation, aiming to make it more engaging, personalized, and impactful. This empowers support staff to enhance their capabilities, as they can utilize the saved time to improve customer service and explore new business opportunities during the call.
Exploring in-depth
When a customer presents a query or complaint, AI promptly provides suggested answers on the system, enabling agents to know immediately what needs to be addressed. Simultaneously, it offers suggestions for the next best actions on the screen, which can be shared with the customer during the call. Gone are the days of agents tirelessly searching through multiple systems for information, as they now have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips.
With the integration of AI into the voice channel, agents receive real-time feedback during the call, allowing them to make adjustments to their tone, speed, approach, and more. This ensures on-the-job training through the utilization of advanced technology.
Furthermore, post-call actions can be streamlined as agents no longer need to sift through manual notes to comprehend the conversation. They can simply refer to the automated call summary after the call to resolve the query and derive insights to enhance future interactions.
Overall, this dramatic reduction in agents’ average handle time for interactions, coupled with the elimination of human errors, significantly improves agent productivity. Consequently, businesses experience remarkable outcomes such as reduced costs, satisfied customers, and enhanced prospects for a thriving enterprise.
By 2023, it is projected that 70% of self-service customer interactions will be initiated through speech interfaces, a significant increase from 40% in 2019. This trend highlights the growing preference for speech-based interactions among customers.
Consequently, the widespread adoption of AI-powered automation in customer support can bring about a transformative and unparalleled impact on the realm of customer service. Given the escalating volumes of calls and inquiries received by contact centers on a daily basis, coupled with evolving consumer preferences and expectations, the integration of AI becomes imperative to deliver an exceptional customer journey.
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