The Impact of AI on Call Center Operations in 2024
Customer service is changing rapidly. Just a decade ago, a call center was just a phone room where phone operators handled incoming calls for business. But now, call centers have become integral to businesses. They handle vital stages of businesses like lead generation, customer success, and more.
But as customer demands grew, call centers evolved to use technology to meet them. One of them is AI in call centers.
Our AI call center guide will cover benefits, challenges, and ways to use AI call centers, and more. So let's delve deeper into AI call centers and discover how it is shaping the future of customer service in 2024.
What is an AI call center?
AI in call centers is using AI technology to solve customer queries, manage tickets, and handle different customer support tasks.
By leveraging natural language processing, machine learning, and speech recognition technologies, AI call centers can solve queries faster.
Using AI in call centers helps human customer support agents focus on more complex customer queries.
AI call centers offer businesses a competitive advantage by enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs.
Benefits of using AI in contact centers
Artificial intelligence (AI) in call centers can help contact centers improve productivity, customer experience, and operational efficiency in several ways. Let's take a look at some of the benefits of using AI in contact centers below.
Improve agent productivity
One of the key benefits of using AI in contact centers is its ability to automate routine and repetitive tasks. This frees up human agents to focus on more complex customer interactions, such as those that require problem-solving, empathy, or negotiation.
24/7 availability
AI can also be used to provide 24/7 customer service. This is especially important for businesses that operate in multiple time zones or have customers who need assistance outside of traditional business hours.
Self-serve AI assistants and agent assistants can provide immediate assistance to customers. They can help by answering questions, resolving issues, and scheduling appointments. This can help businesses improve customer satisfaction and loyalty while reducing the number of calls that need to be handled by human agents.
Increase customer satisfaction
Customers hate waiting. AI call centers can help reduce wait times from hours to mere minutes. AI assistants can help support agents find the answer to customer queries within seconds. This leaves more time for the agent to build relationships with customers.
One real example is when a Fintech digital lender used AI in their contact center to reduce customer support wait time from 4 hours to 5 minutes!
Read: Does conversational AI really improve NPS?
Enhance customer analytics
AI in call centers can be used to analyze customer conversations to identify trends and improve decision-making. By analyzing customer conversations, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. This information can be used to improve the quality of customer service, develop targeted marketing campaigns, and make better strategic decisions.
Overall, AI in contact centers can be used to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and customer experience of contact centers.
Why has adoption of AI in call centers spiked?
The adoption of AI in call centers has skyrocketed in recent years, driven by several key factors.
Rising customer demands
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitization of businesses and increased customer demands.
60% of customers define "immediate" response as 10 minutes or less! 87% of people expect an email response time in under 1 day, with 30% expecting a response in an hour or less. Any slower, leads to frustration and even customer churn.
AI call centers help meet this demand by reducing customer wait times to minutes or by implementing AI self-serve options.
Cutting costs & increasing operational excellence
Solving a simple customer query can cost $20-30, but solving a complex query can go up to $250! With such high costs, high support agent attrition rates & steep learning curves, AI call centers seem a great choice.
AI in contact centers allows businesses to cut down training time to weeks instead of months. One of our clients, Assurance IQ, used Alltius' AI assistants to slash insurance agent ramp-up time from 6 months to 1 month. The new agents at Assurance used AI assistants trained on company documents. The agents type in customer queries and the AI assistant will return the answer within 10 seconds. This enabled agents to provide undivided attention to customers, rather than spending time reviewing plan details individually and memorizing offerings. It also increased a 15% increase in call-to-sale rates, turning the AI contact center into a profit center instead of a cost center.
Applications of AI in contact centers
AI can be used for a variety of applications in contact centers. Let's look at some use cases for using AI in contact centers.
Self-serve AI - Ticket Deflection
69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own, without needing to contact a support agent. This shows a high preference for self-service options.
Conversational AI in contact centers can make a huge difference here. You can implement AI in your call center's contact us page. You can train self-serve AI assistants on your company's help documents, tutorials, product documentation and implement it on your customer-facing application. This will give your customers 3 ways to access help.
- Going through the help articles
- Chatting with the self-serve AI assistant
- Call customer support.
This option of adding self-serve AI can reduce customer support costs by $50k per month or more!
Intelligent call routing
AI can help with call routing. Self-serve AI can chat with customers to identify their sentiment, intent, and main area of issue. Once identified, AI can route it to the best-suited agent based on their skillsets and expertise to allow for quick resolution.
Customer Intent
AI in call centers can be used to identify customer sentiment. Using NLP, machine learning, and customer conversations, Alltius' AI assistants can detect customer sentiment with perfection.
This allows call center agents to accurately assess situations instantly. They can respond appropriately, adjust their tone accordingly, or escalate the interaction if dealing with an angry customer.
In cases where a strong negative sentiment is detected, AI in call center can automatically escalate the interaction. As a result, this leads to quicker and proactive support. This allows for the resolution of the situation promptly and ultimately creating a better customer experience.
Information retrieval
Support agents spend over 3hours+ every day searching for information to answer customer queries. This means precious time is lost searching for information than talking to a customer.
Using AI in contact centers can change that drastically. By analyzing customer data and interaction history, AI can identify customer preferences, needs, and pain points, allowing agents to tailor their responses accordingly.
Alltius' AI assistant can solve customer queries by understanding the root cause of a problem, going through company documents, and finding the answers. This reduces the agent's search time from minutes to mere seconds.
Call Summarizer
75% of customers expect continuity in conversation.
No one likes to repeat themselves. So when a customer talks to your brand via email, chat or via social media, they expect you to know the information. By using AI in contact centers, this becomes easier.
By integrating AI across different communication channels, such as phone, email, chat, and social media, contact centers can extract conversations into one single database. When a support agent talks to a customer, they can know the entire history of their conversations. With a call summarizer, they can get a quick recap of their history. With this information, customer support agents can provide a seamless and consistent customer experience regardless of the channel used.
Customer Conversation Analytics
AI in a contact center can also analyze customer interactions across multiple channels. This can provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be leveraged to improve overall customer service strategies.
In conclusion, AI has a wide range of applications in contact centers, offering numerous benefits and advantages.
Challenges and ethical considerations
While AI offers numerous advantages in contact centers, it also presents certain challenges and ethical considerations that require careful attention.
One significant challenge lies in the potential for bias and discrimination. AI systems are trained on data, and if this data is biased, the AI system can perpetuate and amplify these biases. If an AI in a call center is trained on customer service data that contains biases, it may provide unfair treatment to certain customer groups.
Using AI in contact centers raises ethical considerations related to privacy and data security. AI in contact centers processes sensitive customer data. Protecting the security and privacy of this data is vital to protecting customer trust and following data protection regulations. Robust data protection measures and transparent data usage policies are necessary to address these concerns.
While AI holds great potential to transform contact centers, it is crucial to address the challenges and ethical considerations associated with its use.
How to get started with AI in call centers?
This section will discuss how to get started with AI in call centers.
The first step in getting started with AI in your call center is to identify your business goals and objectives.
- What do you want to achieve by using AI in call center?
- Do you want to improve customer service, reduce costs, or increase efficiency?
Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start to assess your current contact center operations and identify areas for improvement.
Next, you need to research different AI solutions and choose the one that best fits your needs. There are many different AI call center solutions available on the market, so it's important to do your research and compare different solutions before making a decision. Consider factors such as the features of the solution, the cost, and the scalability.
Once you've chosen an AI solution, you need to develop a plan for implementing AI in your contact center. Think about
- How the AI solution will be integrated with your existing systems
- How employees will be trained, and
- How the AI solution will be monitored and evaluated.
Finally, you need to train your employees on how to use the AI call center solution effectively. This training should cover the basics of how the AI platform works, as well as how to use it to improve customer service.
Read more: How to build a Gen AI plan in your organization?
Alltius: The best choice for implementing AI in call centers
Chat-GPT wasn't made to improve customer experiences. Alltius is.
Alltius is a platform created as a result of decades of research at Carnegie Mellon and Wharton focused on one goal: Improve customer experience across all touchpoints.
Alltius is an all-in-one AI customer service platform. It can deflect incoming tickets with self-serve AI options for customers & reduce customer wait times with AI assistants for agents.
Alltius' AI assistant is trained on your company documents like FAQs, product documentation, tutorial videos, previous customer tickets, customer information, and more.
It has the capabilities to perform multiple tasks like answering questions, debugging, and drafting responses. Performing actions like calculating account balance or acting for customers, raising tickets, adding information into CRM, or more. It is completely customizable as per your needs.
Think of it as an additional support employee who can be trained to do anything you'd want.
Conversational AI assistant for your customers
Self-Serve AI is a customer-facing AI assistant that can be deployed on a website, in the product, Slack, zendesk, or any other customer-facing channel. It can understand customer intent, instantly, acknowledge customer queries, identify customer needs, and solve customer queries within seconds. This reduces customer wait times, increases ticket deflection, and improves customer satisfaction.
Conversational AI assistant for your support agents
Support Assist AI is a support agent's AI assistant that curates information from multiple sources so the agent spends more time building relationships with customers. Support AI helps your customer support agent:
- Understand customer intent - like happy, angry, dissatisfied
- Solve customer query - with drafted responses
- Identify up-selling opportunities - with tailored pitches and best products to cross-sell
- Update customer information in CRMs - with easy integrations
With features like customizable CUIs, version control, and seamless ecosystem integration, Alltius enables businesses to fine-tune AI applications for maximum efficiency and innovation.
It has been used by major brands to revamp their customer service & reduce their customer support costs by $50k per month. In case you're interested in implementing conversational AI for customer support, experience Alltius in one of the 4 ways:
Read more:
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Create AI assistants trained on your data now!
