Where and Why to apply AI in your contact centre

The world of Artificial Intelligence is broad and complex, and definitely difficult to penetrate for the uninitiated. The most commonly asked questions that we’ve come across at events and with our clients at EdgeTier are:

• Why implement AI for customer service?
• Where is the best place to start using AI systems?
• What benefits can you expect from an AI project for your care team?

In this blog post series, we will provide a comprehensive guide to the use of artificial intelligence at your contact centre. With this guide, you will have the tools to cut through the deepest marketing speak and technical jargon, and position yourself to make better decisions when implementing an AI strategy in the contact centre.

The AI Market

Over the last decade for customer service, Artificial intelligence (AI), has been touted as an all-promising panacea that can solve cost, quality, and data understanding problems for contact centres. There is management pressure on contact centre administrators to implement AI initiatives and deliver transformative results.

However, the market for AI is clouded and complex. There are hundreds of companies offering AI solutions for the contact centre market. Solutions overlap, marketing muddles messages, promises are not always fulfilled, and vendors often sound similar. 

Your AI journey can start simple

Determining where to first apply AI solutions is a challenge. The first step for any contact centre is to understand where in the contact centre AI can help, and what the primary impact of an implementation in each area would be. With a broad understanding of the possibilities, an AI strategy be articulated and actioned.

In the posts of this series, we will examine six different applications for AI in contact centres, how these AI systems work, and the expected impact for each. These are:

• Contact Deflection and Customer Assistance.
  You’ve heard of this first application the most – chatbots, customer deflection, and automated assistants. But, where do you start? And what do you need to look for?
• Automated Query or Survey Classification
  Use AI to decide what the contents of surveys or incoming queries are. “Text Classification” is a key part of contact deflection approaches, but can be used on its own to make sense of your contact centre data.
• Agent Assistance
  While AI can deflect some customers completely, it can also help agents where the customer connects to one, with the benefits of faster handling times and higher quality responses.
• Sentiment Analysis
  AI can asses the “sentiment” (positivity or negativity) of a customer from the text that they write. Armed with this information, contact centres can take actions to improve NPS by changing processes or agents that drive the most customer dissatisfaction.
• Automated Quality Assurance (QA) and Agent Review Processes
  The agent-review process is used by contact centres to improve consistency and quality amongst agents. AI systems can help move assessments from spot checks to include every interaction, and isolate precisely the points for improvement for each agent.
• Intelligent Monitoring and Alerting
  As a contact centre scales, it becomes impossible for a single person to keep tabs on the patterns of communication and real time changes of customer conversation topics. AI can assist contact centres to respond rapidly to real-time events and ensure the highest customer satisfaction.