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Five practical ways contact centres can use AI to create value Consumer expectations in relation to ultra-fast interactions, ease of engagement and service quality have grown exponentially, fuelled by the lockdown experience of the past year. BY MARTIN TAYLOR, CO-FOUNDER AND DEPUTY CEO AT CONTENT GURU MORE ADEPT and confident at using a multitude of digital and online channels, today’s consumers want quicker resolutions and frictionless journeys across every channel they use to communicate with companies. Little wonder that 80% of customer engagement professionals in a recent webinar said transforming how they engage with customers directly equates to competitive advantage. In 2020, contact centres had to pivot at speed to cope with the operational realities created by COVID-19. Alongside adopting agile cloud-powered platforms, many contact centres also turned to AI to maximise their capabilities and address customer issues faster. In the same recent webinar, 30% of customer engagement professionals said they intend to roll-out additional AI technology deployments to transform how they model and predict call volumes, enable new automated self-service channels and evolve the role of
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personnel based in their contact centre teams. With AI spending set to reach $110 billion by 2024, indications are that AI is revamping the contact centre and, in the process, helping to redefine the customer experience itself.
Delivering on the promise Since it first gained traction in the early 2000s, there’s little doubt that AI has been a much-hyped technology that business and IT leaders have found difficult to apply to real-world problems in a value-add way. However, advancements like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) have put powerful new AI capabilities into the hands of contact centres. This is making it possible to improve customer service and the customer experience through automated interactions, while capturing data insights that make it easier to respond faster and more accurately to evolving customer demands.
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