Call Center Solutions News: The Future of Call Centers

The subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) stimulates almost endless human curiosity. What is AI?  What are its capabilities? Can AI be productive, or is it a fad?

Authors have penned scores of stories exploring and speculating on all of these questions.

Whatever becomes of AI, one fact is inevitable: AI is making a massive impact on almost every industry and will continue to do so.

Today we’ll focus on how AI is driving call center solutions to elevate customer experience and increase call center efficiency and effectiveness.  Let’s dig in.

What Is AI, and How Does It Work?

AI refers to a machine’s ability to simulate human intelligence by learning and problem-solving. The machine is programmed by humans to carry out specific tasks in service of a particular goal. These programmed steps are called algorithms.

Humans use this programmed learning and problem-solving process for simple and complex problems.

That means AI is helping many industries automate efficiency increases while enhancing the effectiveness of its human counterparts.

How AI Creates a Superior Customer Experience

Nowadays, AI lends a vital helping hand in creating call center solutions that lift customers, agents, and managers, making everyone’s lives easier.  Here’s how:

Skills-Based Routing

When a customer calls and voices their needs in an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, the IVR communicates with an accompanying Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) system, which routes calls to the most qualified, skilled agent based on those needs.

It’s a fantastic programmed automatic process that:

• Increases efficiency
• Answers customer questions fast
• Caters to agent strengths

Speech Analytics

AI’s impact on speech analytics is undoubtedly one of the most significant call center solution breakthroughs.

This unbelievable technology can aide call center agents in identifying customer mood and attitude based on subtle cues. AI identifies:

• Tone of voice (anger, disinterest, delight, indications of genuine connection)
• Long pauses that could indicate increasing anger and dissatisfaction
• Silences, indicating a live but neglected call flow
• Speed, flow, words spoken, red-flag and compliance-triggering keyword tagging

Agents can then receive messages in real-time, indicating how well the conversation is going. Then the AI can offer suggestions and tips like, “You’re interrupting the customer too much, and they’re becoming frustrated.” With some back-end work, speech analytics may be able to trigger automatic call reviews, compliance checks and manager alerts.

Overall, speech analytics not only lifts customer service to new heights, but when combined with other AI-powered cloud-based software, significantly upgrades a call center’s ability to comply with the latest regulations.

Customer History and Personalization

Call centers, and the companies they serve, best serve customers by meeting them where they are. They know when and how the customer made the first contact with the company, whether it was through social media, by a search engine, or another channel.

Try recording every time the customer contacts you and why. Then, as agents bring up this comprehensive customer record, service becomes informed and personal – almost as if your agent has helped them since they become your customer.

Combined, this strategy saves customers and agents immeasurable amounts of time in rehashing previous experiences and details.

How can call centers afford to do this with every customer? Through AI, of course.

Managers can integrate their call center’s cloud-based software with third-party tools to take advantage of this incredible advancement.

We’re Only Scratching the Surface

While AI is delivering extraordinary benefits to all call center stakeholders, it’s important to stress that we’re only scratching the surface.

The fact is, managers can harness AI’s exciting and unbelievable capabilities to create synergistic call center solutions today and tomorrow.

AI Does Not Spell “Doom” for the Future of Call Center Agents

Many Americans usually discuss AI as a looming “threat.” Employees are legitimately worried about how AI will impact their jobs.

For now, call center agents don’t have to worry. AI’s hand in numerous call center solutions significantly enhances their productivity and value.

In fact, programmers never designed AI to replace agents in a customer service interaction. Programmers only meant for AI to support human capabilities.

After all, 86% of customers still prefer talking to humans, not a programmed IVR or chatbot, according to a recent study. Amazingly, that same study revealed 71% of customers would be less likely to do business with a company that didn’t use human representatives.

And get this – 71% of consumers dealing with stressful situations want to talk to a human representative by phone.

If that’s enough, using AI to mimic and handle all agent tasks is still exorbitantly expensive. Just think about the real-world complexities of many customer-agent interactions – not happening any time soon.

Human agents are also more intuitive and can more efficiently handle additional, non-related questions or issues that pop up. AI can’t compete here, either. But for routine tasks or those time-prohibitive (like performing voice-tagging on each call), AI fits the bill.

Join the AI Revolution Today; Supercharge Your Call Center Results

There’s no fighting it – the industry’s growth and development needs AI call center solutions.

Join the many call center executives leaving the bloated, inefficient, and frustrating on-premise systems behind – consider switching to TCN’s AI-powered cloud-based software.

TCN’s cloud-based call center solutions:

• Save money on hardware, installation, and maintenance fees
• Are easy-to-use and install
• Provide call center’s highly profitable insights and performance
• Are based on usage, with no contract and no cancellation fee.

Ready to learn more? Download our free report to learn why more and more call center executives are switching to the cloud.