Contact Center Trends That Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Help Accelerate!

I use a discount brokerage app for my equity investments. I transfer money into the app from my savings account regularly. When I transfer a larger sum of money, I get a call from my bank to confirm if I have initiated the transaction. When I agree to the transfer, they wish me for the day and hang up.

All of these happened in an automated manner using IVR and key presses.

I am one of the bank’s privileged customers, and they have allocated a relationship manager whom I can reach at the click of a button from their mobile app without having to go through their customer care. [I have mentioned this only for context.]

The last time I transferred a large sum of money to my discount brokerage app, I received a call for confirmation of the transfer. After a few minutes, I received a call from my relationship manager to check if everything was smooth with my banking operations.

While we were having this conversation, she casually mentioned the transfer that I was making to the discount brokerage app. She asked if I had ever considered having a demat account with their bank.

I answered in the negative.

Then she explained about their demat account and what advantages it had over the discount brokerage I use. After listening to this, I signed up for their demat account, and I use that to do all my transactions now.

This is a case of a relationship manager being proactive and genuinely interested in providing value to a customer.

How often does this happen?

Very rarely.

I won’t blame them. Even this relationship manager would have missed a lot of opportunities to provide value to her customers. After all, they have certain KRAs to fulfill every day, and this isn’t a part of it.

This is where Artificial Intelligence can play an enormous role in helping you serve your customers better.

Here are four customer experience trends where AI can play a significant role.

1. Real-Time Analytics

How many times has a customer been sarcastic, and you did not get it as an agent?

How often have you failed to read between the lines when your customers were having a conversation with you?

How often have you felt helpless because you couldn’t find the right information to address your customer queries?

Imagine if you had real-time help here. Would you agree that you’d love it and your customers would love it too?

Real-time analytics would extract data from text and voice – your communication with your customers via email, chat, chatbots, mobile apps, website, and phone calls.

Customer interactions are assessed in real-time, especially when you are having a phone conversation or chatting, to discover behavioral patterns instantly.

AI provides a more in-depth understanding of each customer through past journeys and customer insights across interfaces and channels.

As the data set gets larger, you must scrub it to ensure your data is accurate and up to date to provide better customer resolutions.

2. Lower Attrition

Market research and advisory firm Metrigy discovered that 28% of agents quit their jobs in 2023, largely due to burnout, which is considered the highest percentage recorded.

The biggest cause for this attrition is that agents don’t find it easy to get the information the customers need, and they have to sift through multiple screens and systems. This invariably makes them frustrated and burnt out.

AI can support agent interactions with customers, helping them find information faster and assisting them with the most appropriate responses based on history and acquired knowledge from past journeys.

AI can also help with disposition and action items they need to pursue in an automated manner.

This would considerably reduce agent attrition, especially when caused by frustration and burnout.

3. Contact Centers as Profit Centers

Recall the experience that I shared with my relationship manager at my bank, who helped me subscribe to their demat account.

Can that be replicated easily?

It is very unlikely without systems in place.

With AI, your contact centers would move beyond being customer service or support centers and start to act as an extended sales arm of your organization.

AI can provide agents with data on customers, such as their transaction patterns, their likes and dislikes, and if they are candidates for services that go beyond support.

Most agents, however, don’t look forward to getting into a sales pitch. To get them to do it, you should support them with decision-making systems (powered by AI) and incentivize them appropriately.

4. Help AI With Omnichannel Capabilities

Not many contact centers have successfully implemented omnichannel capabilities.

It works both ways – as an agent, you get to have a single view of your customer information across all interfaces that you access, and as a customer, you get to switch between channels seamlessly without having to repeat yourself anytime.

With all of these integrations, your AI systems can derive insights from customer interactions across channels and interfaces, helping you make informed decisions in providing resolutions and upselling services or solutions to your customers. 

Check this article on : Creating Personalized Customer Journeys with AI

AI is the key to turning contact centers into profit centers. However, businesses have to understand what it takes to implement an AI strategy, and they should approach them in a phased manner.

The most important aspect of AI will be to assist agents in providing the best possible resolutions to their customers’ problems and empower them to deliver those solutions.

AI will be the biggest trend in 2024 and in the coming years, helping businesses offer better customer experiences.