Today, 70% of customers have spent more money to work with a company that provides great customer service. And in 2015, Gartner found that customer experience would be the key brand differentiator in the coming years.

Your contact center plays a critical role in providing customer service. Many business owners we speak with put off modernizing their call center because they’re worried about the disruption it will cause for staff and clients. Artificial intelligence (AI) provides a path forward. If you’re not delivering top-notch support to your clients, you’re probably losing business to competitors.

How AI Helps Contact Centers Excel

Significant advancements in AI in recent years have led to improvements in computers’ ability to interact with human speech, known as natural language processing. By using contextual clues, machines have dramatically improved their ability to understand how we speak. For example, when a customer says they are “free” to talk, the computer understands if they are referring to their availability, not a price, based on the rest of what they shared.

AI is also providing contact centers with tremendous potential for intensive analysis, bringing together billions of data reference points. This data means your contact center can better understand customer requests and questions, deliver smarter answers, and improve your routing system to ensure the happiest potential outcome for your customers.

SMOOTHER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES IN YOUR CONTACT CENTER

When AI is employed in the call center, it can reduce customer frustration. The improvements in natural language processing have helped the systems better understand callers. In return, the AI’s virtual agents can:

·        Provide more accurate information to customers

·        Do a better job of collecting relevant information from callers to pass to agents

·        Improve routing systems – getting customers to those who can help them with their problem faster.

With the high-powered analysis capabilities of AI, the system will also produce better predictive analysis of customer behavior. It will know when calls need a quick transfer to a live agent. This reduces frustration and provides customers with a superior experience.

IMPROVING THE AVERAGE WAIT TIME

Customers do not have a considerable amount of tolerance for wait times on the phone. One study found that about 66% of customers would accept hold times of less than two minutes, with a full 13% reporting that they did not accept any hold time at all. If customers feel dissatisfied with the amount of time they have been on hold, 34% of callers will hang up and never call back.

By improving the AI’s understanding of callers’ speech patterns and needs, call routing drastically improves. This translates to an increase in the number of calls a virtual agent can answer.

Then, when live agents get these calls, they have more information to address the customer’s question or concern. All of this means reduced wait times and more satisfied customers.

AUTOMATION: LEARNS FROM PATTERNS AND PAST QUESTIONS

AI also has tremendous potential to learn from patterns and past customer questions. By analyzing billions of incoming calls, it learns to detect insights that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. These patterns can then help the system automate repetitive tasks, which in turn allows supervisors and agents to spend more time focusing on the customers.

AI is not designed to replace human agents, but rather to improve the service the agents provide for customers. This allows businesses to provide those inspiring customer experiences that build loyalty and help call centers exceed the expectations of their clients.

Stay Ahead and Improve Contact Center Performance with CRI

The number of businesses using AI more than tripled between 2018 and 2019 and only continues to grow. As AI quickly gains recognition as the key to improving performance, an increasing number of companies call upon this technology to improve their own business. Chances are, your competitors are among them.

With AI, you can deliver superior customer service and leave your competition in the dust. Contact CRI today to get started.