4 ways AI delivers extra workforce capacity

/ By Doug McNeilage /

In our private and working lives we regularly turn to technology to help lighten the load – it’s not that we can’t do a certain task, we’d just prefer it was done more efficiently by other means. Take GPS for example; humans are capable of reading a map, but Google Maps can plot a route far more effectively, leaving your passenger with more time to soundtrack the road trip and dish out the snacks.

For the same reasons, companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to augment their human workforce, giving them extra capacity to deliver better customer experiences (CX). AI and automation can not only be a huge asset for agents on the front-line handling customer interactions, but also employees at every level can see huge benefits.

• Agents: AI solutions can reduce the number of interactions agents are handling and improve skills through realtime guidance or building personalized coaching programs.

• Management: Technology helps to streamline longer and more arduous tasks, such as recruitment, staff rotas and quality management to ensure team leaders have capacity to deliver better business outcomes.

• Analysts: Bots help to analyze comprehensive engagement data and uncover trends that help to shape CX strategy.

By implementing AI for better customer experiences and operational efficiency, brands start on a journey to achieving CX automation within the contact centre. This generates additional capacity for your workforce, potentially driving huge ROI by giving agents time flexibility to deliver better customer experiences.

We’ve identified four leading outcomes that are possible when companies embrace AI.

Autonomous AI: No Need for Human Input

Containment bots act as the gatekeeper for customer interactions, resolving the most straightforward, common queries and removing the need for escalation to a human agent (although they can hand over more complex questions when required).

Customer inquiries, such as retail order tracking or booking a hotel, are answered by a chat bot from the first contact. AI bots trained on the business’ unique data understand the most common intents and provide personalized answers.

The conversation is contained without escalation to an agent, reducing your employees’ workload and giving them greater capacity for handling more complicated cases.

Improving Interactions from Behind the Scenes

Customers don’t want to wait too long whilst agents try to find relevant information to help resolve their query. It’s the opposite of good CX. The key to successful customer/ agent conversations is delivering the right answers at the right time to improve first contact resolution rates.

AI-powered knowledge suggestion can bring efficiency to a customer interaction by recognizing context and customer intent and suggesting relevant articles for the agent to cite and share. By removing the need for a lengthy manual search, customers receive swift and accurate answers from a single source of truth that ensures consistency across a wide number of customer queries. However, not all interactions go this smoothly. If a customer reaches out with a complaint or has a negative reaction during a conversation, real-time coaching can be an essential tool for an agent. The support provided is similar to knowledge suggestion, but instead of shareable content, the AI gives guidance for steer a conversation towards a positive outcome, ideally improving both customer and employee experience.

Enabling a Flexible Working Environment

Building staffing schedules that ensure high quality customer experiences and offer enough flexibility to satisfy your workforce can be a tricky balancing act. Fortunately, it's another area where AI can come in handy, helping to predict customer demand and shape decisions for building shift patterns across an organization. The technology takes into account a myriad of internal and external factors that can impact customer interaction volumes and adjusts its forecasts accordingly. It’s adding capacity without increasing complexity.

Once managers have set their staffing levels, they need employees to fill the shifts. However, agents also need flexibility to ensure a good work/ life balance. Organizations can integrate AI tools that give agents time flexibility, empowering them to autonomously change their schedules in real-time. The solutions remove the need for a lengthy approval process while making sure the shift changes don’t negatively impact the business or CX delivery.

Monitoring Every Customer Interaction

The completeness of your interaction data dictates the quality of your insights. This makes AI transcription and ingestion of every customer conversation vital for building datadriven insights. With the details of 100% of customer interactions, your analysts have access to a constantly growing source of invaluable behavioural data.

This precise record of customer engagement gives a complete understanding of interactions by channel and the challenges agents and customers encounter at each touchpoint. Analysts can also determine how effectively issues are being resolved. By consolidating these insights with workforce data and customer feedback, organizations can more easily visualize customer journeys and build more successful CX strategies.

Your Path to AI Outcomes Now

The most effective AI solutions perform specific tasks that give agents, managers and analysts extra capacity. What does that increased capacity mean? It enables organizations to generate positive AI outcomes that solve genuine customer engagement problems. As CX increases in the contact center, organizations can simultaneously elevate CX and increase operational efficiency, enabling them to build lifelong customer relationships.

Douglas McNeilage is the Regional Director for Verint South Africa. www.verint.com