Using artificial intelligence can improve both your customer experience and overall efficiency. With new tools continuously hitting the marketplace, there are a number of ways to integrate AI into your contact center, automating tasks and complementing the effort and expertise of your agents.
It’s important to note that while you can use AI to optimize various contact center processes and enhance your overall operations, it still requires human management and regular quality assurance.
Three of the top strategic ways to utilize AI specifically in terms of quality assurance in your contact center are:
1. Speech Analytics
Speech analytics technology uses AI to analyze conversations between your customers and agents. It can identify keywords, tone, and customer engagement levels, thus helping supervisors evaluate agent performance objectively.
Speech analytics also can detect compliance breaches, enabling you to maintain regulatory standards and adhere to industry guidelines.
While speech analytics will provide your organization with the ability to mine 100% of desired contacts, there are still countless aspects of the customer experience that simply cannot be maximized and evaluated through AI alone. Especially as it relates to agent development and training, adding the human component to monitor and assist is essential.
Quality Assurance Steps Required: Implement ongoing human verified AI quality assurance (formerly called managed speech analytics) to monitor agent-customer interactions, identify coaching opportunities, and ensure compliance adherence.
2. Sentiment Analysis
Understanding customer sentiment and emotion during interactions is vital for delivering exceptional service. Where human verified AI quality assurance provides the required personalization for future development, AI-powered sentiment analysis tools can analyze things like tone of voice, cadence of speech, pauses and interruptions, etc. to detect a customer’s mood in real-time to help you identify potential issues before they escalate.
In addition to real-time support for your agents, tracking sentiment trends in your contact center also allows you to proactively address recurring problems and fine-tune your customer support strategies accordingly.
Quality Assurance Steps Required: Regularly analyze sentiment analysis reports, compare with human verified AI quality assurance data, and leverage customer feedback to improve agent training programs and optimize the overall customer experience.
3. Automated Routing & Predictive Analytics
Efficient call and chat routing is the backbone of a well-organized contact center. AI-driven routing algorithms use predictive analysis to utilize existing customer data — such as past interactions, purchase history, and preferences — to efficiently match customers with the most suitable agents.
This information can enable your contact center agents to be better prepared during interactions with customers. In turn, this can lead to more personalized and efficient solutions … and a better overall customer experience.
Automated chatbots — sometimes considered “virtual agents” — are becoming increasingly popular for handling routine customer inquiries. These AI-driven chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand and respond to customer messages in real-time, much like human interactions.
Incorporating automations into your contact center helps reduce customer wait times, ensure 24/7 availability, and swiftly resolve simple issues. You can also use these tools to gather initial data and seamlessly transition complex queries to human agents.
By directing contacts to agents with the relevant expertise, you can enhance first-call resolution rates, reduce call durations, and ultimately, improve customer satisfaction.
Quality Assurance Steps Required: Continuously monitor routing outcomes and customer interaction, assess customer feedback on agent performance, refine predictive models as new data becomes available and fine-tune the routing algorithms to achieve better results.
5 Bonus Tips to Getting Maximum Benefit from Using AI in Your Contact Center
AI is tremendously beneficial in helping you run a successful contact center. But it does need to be managed properly if you are going to get the maximum benefit.
So, here are 5 additional things to consider:
- Ensure your channels are robust enough to handle a sudden jump in contact counts so that you are never caught off guard with a bottleneck.
- Ensure your channels are properly set up to resolve inquiries with efficiency, urgency, and sensitivity.
- Develop your AI-powered infrastructure with a proactive mentality and model it to be used regularly at all times vs. a reactive model designed to engage only during volume spikes.
- Ensure proper staffing levels and know your agents’ individual strengths so that you can put the right people in the right chats vs. telephone seats.
- Continuously look for ways to better support agents and ensure they have the right information and tools.
Implementing AI Tools in Your Contact Center
Integrating AI into your contact center empowers your agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences, boosts operational efficiency, and can even enhance overall metrics and KPIs.
AI can give your contact center a competitive advantage in earning the trust and loyalty of your valued customers. Truly successful AI integrations require continuous monitoring, regular updates, and informed, proactive management, which is our specialty.
We invite you to connect with us to discuss how you can strategically integrate AI into your contact center along with a quality assurance program to ensure that it continues to work for you.
Contact us by using this form to book a call or by calling 1-866-513-4825. If you prefer email, you can contact us at info@arcqs.com.