We’ve all dealt with chatbots before, and it hasn’t always been smooth. In fact, around 70% of chatbot experiences were marked as “below par” by contact center professionals, highlighting how clunky they can be.
However, despite difficulties with the technology, customers are still open to interacting with chatbots and conversational AI if they’re not able to reach a human. These new contact center conversational AI tools are much more intuitive than the frustrating chatbots we’ve dealt with in the past.
In this article, we’ll cover what these AI solutions are, how they can improve contact centers, and the steps to get started with integrating one into your business. Plus, we’ll explore some industry-specific use cases.
AI has already made big waves in contact centers, mainly in the form of chatbots and virtual agents. Unlike previous incarnations, these solutions are powered by modern AI technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP) and understanding (NLU), and machine learning (ML), making them far more powerful and intelligent.
Instead of forcing customers to navigate through menu options and spitting out predefined answers, these interfaces are able to interpret and understand the nuances of human language and realistically mimic human conversation.
These new tools are capable of understanding input, context, and the nuance of a conversation to provide answers and successfully navigate sophisticated, complex interactions that your classic chatbot wouldn’t be able to.
This all means they can offer a more human-like interaction, making it feel natural, rather than the product of a machine. They can gather information and analyze it for you, make predictions about customer preferences and behaviors, and even pass relevant information on to human agents if they’re unable to solve a problem on their own.
Companies can use contact center conversational AI to power various different tools and solutions, including:
The most significant benefit from adopting call center conversational AI is that it can dramatically improve your overall customer experience. These solutions can open your contact center up to a global market by enabling 24/7 availability, multilingual chatbots and AI-powered virtual agents.
Plus, they can reduce wait times by offering improved self-service options, solving simple customer queries nearly instantaneously or collecting information to pass to agents in more complex cases. They’re even able to personalize interactions by drawing information from your internal knowledge base and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Using call center conversational AI can make an impact on several of your key metrics, such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer effort score (CES). All of these improvements can lead to increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, and even a more positive brand image.
Your agents are the lifeblood of your call center, and using contact center conversational AI can help make their day-to-day work easier. With virtual assistants and chatbots handling simpler queries, you free up your human agents to focus on complex customer issues and more meaningful work.
These tools can also collect and analyze all kinds of agent data too, giving you insights to help improve your coaching process and boost call center agent training with AI. This allows you to personalize training sessions for individual agents, or create team-wide training for specific skills.
Adding in these AI-enabled tools can help reduce everyday stress for your agents and boost morale. It can also reduce the risk of agents burning out—and eventually churning—which lowers hiring and onboarding costs in the long run.
Money motivates, and integrating call center conversational AI tools can lead to big savings for your company, both upfront and in the long run.
Conversational AI interfaces like virtual agents are able to handle a huge number of queries, which doesn’t just free up your existing agents, but allows you to process a greater volume of interactions without having to hire more live agents.
Implementing these contact center conversational AI tools offers you a low-cost addition to your business that can achieve a quick ROI compared to other solutions. This leads to lower operational costs, allowing you to allocate that budget to other areas of your business.
Naturally, because these tools can automate some aspects of your interactions, adopting contact center conversational AI tools can help you streamline multiple aspects of your operations.
For example, AI tools can improve or replace your existing IVR system, assist with intelligent call routing, and even expand your self-service options.
These tweaks can all lead to significant savings in both time and money, so you can push those resources towards better handling difficult customer support interactions, improving training sessions and upskilling agents, and even refining existing workflows and processes.
With many call center conversational AI platforms offering built-in data analytics, you can get better insights into your organization’s performance. AI is able to automate QA functions like sentiment analysis and root cause analysis, giving you a better understanding of your customers.
Additionally, contact center AI can parse data across multiple sources to identify trends, spot patterns, and gather insights automatically. It can even collect data on your agents, which you can then use to tailor training sessions.
AI may even be capable of spotting trends that humans miss, adding extra context to your manual reports, and speeding up the overall reporting process.
This all adds up to a system that can help you identify the weak spots in your customer service experience and help deliver personalized agent training. It can even spot flaws within your processes, identify upselling opportunities during customer conversations, and help to increase revenue per customer.
As you can tell, adopting these tools offers a ton of benefits. Contact center artificial intelligence is already making an impact across the industry, with some surveys showing that 94% have seen productivity improvements thanks to conversational AI.
So, let’s explore a little further and provide some examples of how conversational AI can be used across industries like BPO, financial services, retail, and more.
It’s fairly common for BPOs to deal with massive volumes of interactions across multiple clients, clogging up channels and keeping agents occupied. To tackle this, call center conversational AI can handle routine issues like checking order statuses, updating payment information, and password resets, to relieve the workload of customer interactions.
Internally, you can set up AI tools to assist your agent inside and outside of interactions. These AI tools can quickly search internal knowledge bases, HR questions, IT troubleshooting, and even company policies to help improve productivity.
Both of these features combined can lead to a huge boost in your first call resolution (FCR) rate and your average handle time (AHT), improving your customer experience and agent productivity too.
Adding call center conversational AI can help financial services expand their business far beyond their normal reach. It enables them to open up 24/7 support for their customers to perform simple tasks, such as checking their balance, bill payment, or looking up transaction history, all without needing to speak to a human agent.
They’re also able to create and use AI-powered financial advisors to help provide budgeting tips and investment guidance and even help customers get more information about the financial services’s products and offerings. However, it’s also important to note that these AI tools are not infallible, and you should always speak with a licensed expert for financial advice.
The retail industry is often one of the most varied, maintaining multiple channels of communication and handling a variety of tasks, from processing payments to customer support, and more.
Adding in AI can help automate these tasks by improving your IVR system or expanding self-service options, which can be incredibly beneficial during peak traffic or holiday seasons.
These AI solutions are also capable of analyzing historical data and both customer behaviors and preferences to generate personalized offers and even learn the best time to make those recommendations.
It’s not uncommon for the tech industry to have its fair share of complex, time-consuming customer interactions. Conversational AI can easily handle common software and hardware queries without the need for a human agent.
They’re capable of giving customers step-by-step instructions to help resolve issues, and even answering questions during the process. And if there’s a situation where the chatbot can no longer help the customer, it can intelligently route the call to specialists within the contact center to assist.
Integrating contact center conversational AI chatbots and virtual agents within the healthcare industry can make a significant improvement to the customer experience.
These tools can handle routine activities like scheduling appointments, sending reminders and follow-ups, and even answering simple queries for hospitals and practices, freeing up human agents to work on other tasks.
They’re capable of carrying out basic medical screenings based on symptoms before an appointment, giving healthcare providers additional context before meeting a patient in person. These bots can also aid with limited mental health support by providing exercises and resources to patients in need or directing them to proper mental health care in case of an emergency.
AI-powered tools are already popular within the HR industry, thanks to their ability to dramatically speed up candidate screening and parsing resumes. They’re able to automatically analyze candidates to find the most suitable ones to be interviewed and can even reach out to them and schedule interviews.
Conversational AI can also be trained on your internal knowledge base, company FAQs, handbooks, and other HR resources to quickly answer employee questions without needing human help. It can answer questions about payroll, company benefits and policies, annual leave, and even employee-specific information like direct deposit, PTO, and more.
Sales teams are also able to take advantage of contact center conversational AI tools, helping collect data about customer trends and patterns and using it in a variety of ways.
Teams can use these platforms to identify and analyze prospects and gather basic information about them before they make initial contact. They’re also able to assist sales reps during calls by generating information on the fly, such as product knowledge, insights on competitors, or even knowledge base answers. They can even help make recommendations to upsell services based on that customer’s behaviors and patterns.
Once the sale is completed, these virtual agents can handle the onboarding process for new customers automatically, offer an easy way to answer common questions, and provide long-term product support.
Before you start to research vendors and options, you should stop and assess what you’re actually going to use these AI tools for. Look for specific use cases that apply to your needs and goals. Think of some of the applications that you could use it for, such as:
Once you have an idea of what you want to improve with contact center conversational AI, it’s time to do some research. Look into different vendors and software solutions, especially ones that come highly recommended by peers. You should also look at their reviews and testimonials, and compare specs and pricing to see what fits your needs and budget the best.
Now that you have your plan and your chosen solution, it’s time to integrate. However, rushing in and completely overhauling your contact center and its processes with AI tools is a quick way to go too far too soon.
It’s incredibly risky to make big changes so quickly. Instead, you should start small with pilot projects and monitor them over time. Watch it as they develop and make gradual changes before expanding.
Taking your time and looking at the results from these integrations can help you make more informed decisions as you expand it to other areas of your contact center.
You’ll also want to ensure that your contact center conversational AI platform can integrate with your existing systems for maximum performance. It should be able to pull information from your existing QA platform, CRM system, internal knowledge base, and telephony systems, too.
Additionally, you may want to opt for generative AI tools to assist with drafting emails and internal documentation.
Of course, the biggest elephant in the room is the concern that AI is going to replace human workers. 39% of customer support specialists fear job displacement due to AI, but this doesn’t have to be the case if you’re using it ethically.
Properly educate your teams, including management, on how they’re able to increase productivity and performance with these tools. Show them how these new tools work and reassure them that it’s a collaborative effort between AI and humans—not a way to cut jobs.
Most importantly, you can’t forget how important it is to keep both organizational and customer data safe. You want to make sure your customers know how their data is being used and protected, and always ensure you get consent before collecting.
You’ll also want to make sure you’re still complying with regulatory standards to keep that data secure.
That means creating robust data compliance and security procedures and conducting regular audits. Additionally, your QA platform likely offers compliance features that can help.
The “Pandora’s Box” of AI has already been opened, and there’s no way to close it. The evolution of AI to current day contact center conversational AI tools has been impressive, and it’s certainly not slowing down.
These tools can save your business tons of time and money by automating workflows, answering routine queries, doing deep analysis, and improving customer experience.
But this can only happen if you do it the right way from the start.
Taking your time to analyze and set goals, starting with small deployments and scaling up, and preparing your team for these changes can all help it go as smoothly as possible.
And if you want a QA solution with embedded AI, Scorebuddy can support a powerful and intelligent conversational AI implementation. We offer AI assistance for evaluators, GPT-powered auto-scoring, 100% conversation analysis, and more.
Book a free demo today and see how Scorebuddy can automate your QA processes to drive efficiency.
