Artificial intelligence is a very new technology, yet about 35% of businesses are already incorporating it in some way.
AI is advancing incredibly quickly, presenting all kinds of new possibilities and opportunities. Businesses can use it to improve various processes and operations, helping them operate effectively while saving on expenses.
Outsourcing is a normal business practice, and many businesses are starting to outsource to AI-based companies. AI call center outsourcing is a perfect example of this, but is it right for your organization?
In this guide, we’ll take a look at how AI is changing the call center industry and how you can benefit from it. Keep reading for more.
The Evolution of AI in Call Centers
Call centers have already started implementing AI in various ways. There have been some key developments that call centers are currently using to their advantage.
Automated Call Routing
Call routing and call deflection are common practices at call centers. AI can analyze incoming calls and determine which departments or agents they should go to. This saves time as manual call transfers are no longer needed, so customers can get the help they need faster.
Virtual Agents
Virtual agents, chatbots, and conversational AI can all be very useful. They use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to understand users and respond in real time. They can provide answers to common queries to prevent long wait times, and human agents then have more time to focus on other matters.
AI-Assisted Reviews and Speech Analytics
In the past, performance reviews have required supervisors to listen to entire calls. AI speech analytics tools can analyze recordings at a much faster rate to speed up this process. This is a streamlined way to ensure agents are fulfilling their quality assurance (QA) scorecard criteria.
AI can do this for all of an agent’s calls, rather than just picking some at random like a supervisor would. This helps give a more comprehensive assessment of all agents.
How Call Centers Can Use AI
Even with AI, call centers are still supported by skilled agents. There are various ways in which these agents can improve the quality of their services by leveraging AI technology.
Improved Call Routing
Skills-based call routing is a fairly recent concept itself. It involves using customer profiles to pair customers with suitable agents who can assist them. AI and customer service automation can achieve this much faster than a human.
Self-learning algorithms can analyze customer personality models and look at information like behavioral data and call histories. From this, it can determine the best way to handle a call. This helps connect customers with an agent who will be able to handle their queries with ease, saving time for both agents and customers.
The technology learns and improves with time. This means that results are constantly improving.
Viewing Call Analytics Instantly
Data is invaluable these days, and every customer interaction provides more. Capturing and using this information is crucial for improving services.
Live sentiment analysis, for example, can offer insights into how people feel about your brand based on their language. It can assess positive and negative sentiments so supervisors can determine any key issues that might need their attention.
AI can help with contract center analytics and can provide real-time insights that your agents can view. This will help them understand customers so they can deal with them in a suitable manner.
Gain a Better Understanding of Customer Behavior
AI can build upon analytics to better understand trends in customer behavior. From this, it can help predict emerging needs and develop ideal practices with these in mind.
It can also build more detailed customer profiles that agents can use. The more information agents have, the better they’ll understand a customer’s needs. This will help improve both customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Real-Time Response Suggestions
AI has come a long way, but it’s not perfect. It’s unable to formulate perfect responses for all scenarios, so agents are still needed for this.
What it can do, however, is produce suggestions in real time based on conversations with customers. This can help agents provide customers with the solutions they need quickly and effectively.
This technology can also help ensure agents adhere to your internal standards. It can detect if conversations stray away from this and require intervention or follow-up actions. Over time, this will help improve overall quality.
Elimination of Repetitive Tasks
Time is one of the most valuable assets any business has, so saving it where possible is vital. This is one of the biggest benefits of AI in almost any business environment.
There are various repetitive tasks that call center agents typically do, but it’s often possible to hand these off to AI. This can save a lot of time that these agents can then use to help customers and provide a better service. Additionally, this helps reduce the risk of human error, so not only will it save time but it will minimize mistakes.
Improving Scalability
Scalability is a major challenge for many businesses. Growth is a good thing, but it can often be difficult to do so without any issues. AI technology can be very beneficial here.
Any tasks that are handled by AI are much easier to scale than they would be if managed by human operators. There’s no need to hire more employees or think about things like additional hardware or training. Increasing these things in a short time is often difficult, and can actually limit growth progress.
This is also a major benefit for companies that experience seasonal changes in demand. AI can scale up and down with ease, giving you one less thing to worry about.
Effective AI Call Center Outsourcing
AI is making things much easier for a lot of businesses, and the benefits will continue to improve in the coming years. AI Call Center Outsourcing could be the perfect solution for your organization, helping you grow your business and achieve your goals.
Centris is a leading business process outsourcing company that offers nearshore contact center services to businesses throughout the US. Our contact center agents are 100% bilingual and make use of the latest technology to deliver the best quality services available. Take a look at our services page for more information on what we offer.
