Ramping up Contact Centers with Artificial Intelligence
Contact center plays a crucial role in managing customer relationships and more in today’s time when worldwide Corona-virus disruption has closed physical channels of customer contact. Contact centers are gearing up to handle increased volumes with optimized customer service.
Optimizing customer service at a contact center requires an intelligent balance of customer needs, business goals and technology imperatives. Customer expects to receive a personalized service with high responsiveness (within minutes) at their convenience of time, location and channel. Whereas Businesses aim to create a competitive differentiation and generate revenue while managing productivity (utilization/occupancy) and Cost Efficiency. And IT decision makers, who are responsible for technology build and buy, consider low total cost of ownership, Interoperability and Security & compliance as key criteria. Addressing all these 3 sets of expectations, objectives and constraints requires a holistic approach and new perspective to contact center transformation.
Artificial Intelligence can help transform contact centers from back-office function focused primarily on operational performance and cost reduction, to a strategic function driving customer experiences, satisfaction and revenue.
Traditional contact center operations are typically draining for both customers and agents. Customers have to deal with long and confusing menu options, validation and re-validation processes. Agents have to deal with disparate and cumbersome tools which restrict their productivity and increase operational overheads. Such systems also directly impact the business bottom line with heavy capital expenditure and high total cost of ownership. The graphic below highlights typical challenges with contact center process.
Contact centers can embark on a transformation journey with AI initiatives in three areas — Core systems, Agent assistance and customer insights. The graphic below identifies over 15 AI initiatives to drive transformation
Amalgamation of these emerging technology initiatives has the potential to completely transform the customer journey and the agent journey, as shown in graphic below. Customer can seamlessly get personalized service and intelligent recommendations and resolutions without the hiccups of traditional contact centers. Agents can increase productivity, cross sell products and resolve customer issues better.
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