How to Effectively Use AI to Boost Your Call Center’s Customer Service

Artificial Intelligence is taking call centers by storm, but some still have reservations about how it’s impacting the industry overall. On one hand, AI can transform contact centers by improving customer experiences by boosting customer response times and agent availability, automating menial tasks to maximize productivity and reducing the number of needed agents to save you money. 

On the other hand, many call centers are concerned with what may happen if they allow AI to take over certain aspects of their operations. Job displacement concerns, a decrease in the amount of human oversight and emotional intelligence, ethical considerations around privacy and bias, working around integration with existing systems and ensuring customers are protected against robocalls are all valid concerns.

But despite the risks, AI is playing a rapidly growing role in optimizing customer satisfaction. So how can you effectively use AI to boost your call center’s customer service?

Empower agents, elevate experiences 

Perhaps the most well-known role AI plays in call centers is that of voice bots and chatbots, which make it possible for your customers to access your call center 24/7 without putting any extra strain on your agents.

In the modern customer service world, providing the option for customers to utilize these self-serve or automated options is crucial for meeting customer expectations. It’s a win-win situation – your customers are happy because you are meeting them anytime on their channel of choice, and your agents are happy because their time is freed up to handle more complex tasks.

AI also provides agents with what they need to increase the quality of the customer service they provide with ease, such as live coaching tools and chat response suggestions. In addition, call disposition logging, follow-up scheduling and other menial tasks can be taken off of agents’ shoulders completely thanks to AI.

Handing off these tasks has more benefits than just empowering your agents – it can also mean that those tasks are done more efficiently. When AI handles call scheduling, it does so based on the best time to call prediction, which can increase answer rates and the effectiveness of your campaigns.

TCN’s Agent Assist solution is a good example of technology that utilizes AI to help increase the overall efficiency and customer satisfaction of your call center.

Automatically exceed expectations

Effectively handling conversations and empowering agents to increase their efficiency and customer service isn’t the end of what AI can offer your call center – it can also dramatically reduce the time you spend manually analyzing your own data. This directly influences your customer service by deriving actionable insights more quickly.

With solutions like TCN’s Reporting and Analytics, you can predict the effectiveness of changes you make to campaigns in real-time and understand exactly what you need to do to exceed your customer’s expectations by barely lifting a finger. Additionally, tools such as Voice Analytics derive key insights from live call transcriptions and summarizations in real-time using machine learning. This can even lead to automatically assessing agent scorecards. 

These analytics tools also provide proactive issue identification and resolution. By automating your data analysis, you not only save time, you also access data that can be used to coach and improve agent performance and thereby improve your customer service.

Last but not least, TCN’s Workforce Management enables you to utilize AI to automatically leverage past trends and ensure you are adequately prepared for the future, never wasting money by having too many agents available or frustrating your customers by not having enough. This suite of AI tools can make exceeding customer expectations automatic.

TCN’s ticket to AI-powered efficiency

Now that you know AI can do much more than act as a chatbot, it is clear that AI has a transformative power for call centers by boosting your customer service through empowering your agents to increase customer experiences and automating your data analysis to show you exactly what you need to do to grow.

The key to using these AI tools effectively is by leveraging the human-AI collaboration model. When you lean into the strengths of both, you will experience positive outcomes for both your call center and your customers. The tools discussed in this blog are your ticket to empowering your agents to use their strengths as AI uses its strengths, thereby taking a load off of both your and your agents’ shoulders.

Choosing to effectively use these AI solutions will result in your customers and your agents thanking you. Request a demo to learn how TCN can transform your call center, and your customer service, through AI tools.