This post is an excerpt from the article ‘’ by Andreea Plesea, Co-Founder and Global VP at Druid SA, published 11 Oct 2022.
Read the full article here.
As long as there are customers who need help, there will be contact centers to assist them. Every day, millions and millions of calls are made to companies of all sizes to help people solve their issues, and companies are becoming smarter and more efficient in how they service their customers.
57% of CIOs and CTOs agree that conversational bots can deliver significant returns on investment for minimal effort – particularly in contact centers. Conversational AI is on the rise in the contact center industry, and there’s no question why. Conversational AI offers the potential to enhance the customer service experience as well as preserve human workers for tasks that make the best use of their time and energy.
Gartner predicts that conversational AI will reduce contact center agent labor costs by $80 billion in 2026. These are tremendous cost savings – and only the tip of the iceberg of what conversational AI has to offer. Here are a few key ways conversational AI is already helping reshape and optimize the customer service experience for contact centers.
Provide 24/7 Support
Conversational AI is becoming an increasingly lucrative solution, enabling contact centers to offer around-the-clock support. Conversational AI resolves customer inquiries quickly and intuitively, no matter how complex the situation is.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables the understanding of the variations of human language to answer naturally and intuitively. Plus, with access to your company’s knowledgebase, your conversational AI will have all of the information needed to successfully interact with customers and resolve issues such as:
- Checking balance information
- Determining whether an item is in stock
- Assess the status of an order
- Track shipments and more
A virtual AI agent will dramatically streamline customer results by quickly escalating customers through the problem-solution process to understand and resolve the issue behind their call.
When human agents aren’t needed, conversational AI will handle tedious tasks, freeing up contact center employees’ time to focus on more complex and valuable customer interactions.
Respond via Multiple Channels
Conversational AI can work across platforms through text, voice, SMS, a chat function, and more – sometimes even simultaneously, if needed.
Conversational AI can be programmed and readily usable across various channels, operating with speed, efficiency, and responsiveness that human beings cannot execute at scale.
Another aspect of this application is simply responsiveness: unlike a human being, conversational AI will always pick up the phone, answer the text message, and respond in the chat mechanism for as many people as needed.
Automatically Collect and Analyze Customer Data
Continuing from the previous point, conversational AI makes for more accurate contact center interactions. Your conversational AI agent can access your company’s data for precise information. Similarly, it can provide this information to your human workforce, supplementing their efforts with fast and accurate data.
With greater accuracy, your customers will benefit from an improved customer experience, and your workforce will find themselves performing better in their roles.
Delegate Tedious Tasks
Conversational AI makes the delegation of repetitive and tedious tasks simple.
Human agents can delegate repetitive tasks to a conversational AI agent, giving them more time to focus on customer service and relationships.
Conversational AI significantly streamlines these processes by placing orders, answering customers, or updating inventory. Even by automating these seemingly mundane tasks, your contact center can drastically increase productivity and efficiency, allowing you to scale operations.
Respond with Emotional Sensitivity at Scale
With Natural Language Processing (NLP), conversational AI agents can respond intuitively and recognise emotion, creating a human-like experience – even if human agents aren’t available.
This means that if a customer is frustrated or discouraged, conversational AI can sense these things through tone of voice, vocal stress, and more, allowing it to communicate with a customer in a human-like manner that stimulates empathy and understanding.
Even better, conversational AI agents are being retrained and developed all the time to become even more sensitive in listening and understanding human emotions and needs. This technology will only improve in the future.