What is Conversational AI for Contact Centers?

The contact center industry is rapidly changing with the introduction of conversational AI technologies that help human agents focus on meaningful rather than repetitive work. With the right combination of technologies, the service industry is shifting from having to answer all queries to helping users get answers faster by themselves. That evolution doesn’t mean that the human agents are suddenly less important, but rather that the role is shifting from a volume to a quality mindset, solving complex problems and nuanced scenarios.

In this entry, we will discuss some of how conversational AI is used by contact centers, use cases, and benefits.

How Conversational AI is Being Used in Contact Centers

Contact centers are introducing AI technologies across their entire operations. From reducing their employees' workload to augmenting their abilities, doing their best work, and providing better service, AI is becoming a tool that disrupts the industry. 

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)

Intelligent virtual agents, or intelligent virtual assistants, are the most advanced conversational AI product that helps contact centers improve productivity. With an IVA, users can have a natural conversation with a machine that guides them through their queries and solves the most common problems. At the same time, it logs the information and user experience for the organization to understand patterns better and for human agents to have more traceability and understanding of each user. 

Omnichannel Strategy Implementation

Conversational AI also plays an essential role in better understanding and serving customers across channels. With a conversational AI product, call centers can have more information and a more robust understanding of user journeys across multiple scenarios and channels. As a result, users can pick up where they left off regardless of the medium used, increasing service quality, reducing workloads, and improving customer success metrics. 

Automation

The main advantage of AI is its ability to automate processes that would otherwise require a lot of human effort. From the beginning of the interaction, where most problems are easily solved, to ensuring information is updated and shared across departments, and customers get the best solution possible, AI streamlines the processes. 

This helps the workforce focus on tasks that matter instead of solving the same query multiple times per day. Internal employee satisfaction rises when work is more meaningful, and with automation of processes that don't require a nuanced understanding, this is possible. 

Translation and Transcription

Artificial intelligence technology excels at understanding communication patterns and translating them to multiple languages instantaneously. Contact centers can use this particular capability to serve a wider variety of customers, access transcriptions to facilitate compliance and due diligence processes, and reduce workloads. 

Proactive Customer Engagement

Understanding patterns is another of conversational AI technology's top capabilities. With its implementation, contact centers can improve their pattern recognition, provide more efficient solutions, and even anticipate problems and potential queries to provide proactive solutions. 

At the same time, other activities,, such as running particular campaigns, promotions, preventive maintenance notices, etc., can be automated and proactively run across multiple segments. 

This allows human agents to focus on getting in touch with customers who require a bit more attention, have more complex situations, or are actively interested in a particular product or service. 

Why Every Contact Center Needs a Conversational AI Platform (CAIP)

Contact centers are constantly evolving to meet service standards and innovate to better serve customers. In this journey, a conversational AI platform is one of the best ways to ensure staying on top of the game and improving operations, service KPIs, and internal satisfaction objectives. 

Advanced AI Capabilities to Understand Customer Needs

Few experiences are as pleasant as getting exactly what you need before asking for it. With conversational AI technologies, you can help your customers by proactively identifying behavioral signals and providing solutions. 

How is this possible? Conversational AI uses technologies like natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and natural language understanding and generation (NLU and NLG) to understand conversational context and provide the best possible solution. 

Cross-Channel Integration

Understanding users across channels and touchpoints is difficult without a platform that centralizes and makes sense of the journey. Conversational AI platforms are vital in this process, given that they integrate information that would otherwise be scattered across multiple channels into a single place. This capability allows human agents to better understand each interaction while also facilitating decision-making for managers. 

Around the Clock Support for Customers

A common issue around customer service is service hour limitations. With an overreliance on human-only interactions at call centers, companies are unlikely to provide permanent customer service, given its cost. However, with conversational AI technology that helps customers solve most common scenarios on their own, most customers will be able to have a more positive interaction, access better service, and do so whenever it's convenient for them. 

Reducing the Language Barriers

Language barriers are hard to overcome, given the time it takes to learn a language or the higher cost of having a multilingual employee at a contact center. With conversational AI technologies that excel at instant translation and transcription, service providers can find ways to serve their customers across multiple languages much faster and more efficiently. 

Understanding someone speaking a different language in real-time allows contact centers to work across time zones and cultures. It also improves end users' access to service in their preferred language instead of trying to communicate with customer service representatives or outdated chatbots in a language they are not fluent in.

Lead Analysis and Qualification

Most people think conversational AI platforms are tools that help customers have a natural conversation with a virtual agent. While that is part of them, they are also a business intelligence platform that helps decision-makers improve the quality of their decisions. 

Lead analysis and qualification is a time-consuming process that can be difficult to tackle without tools that help you identify patterns. Luckily, conversational AI platforms are tools that automate and provide context and behavioral information around lead stages, what it takes to move forward across the funnel, and triggers that accelerate revenue. 

Operational Benefits

Running a contact center is quite complex operationally. You need a large number of people for a job that has historically been quite demanding and repetitive. With conversational AI, your workforce strategy can shift its focus to keeping your best employees, training them to incorporate AI to augment their work, and doing more with less.

With a conversational AI partner, contact centers can prioritize quality and performance, keeping top employees and increasing meaningful engagement rather than having to run job fairs or campaigns every couple of quarters. 

Best of all, your end customers will notice by being able to access self-serve options, better and more personalized service, and faster response times. 

Satisfied and Happy Customers

Contact centers are all about delivering excellent customer experiences to as many people as possible. With conversational AI platforms, customers are empowered to solve problems independently, getting access to better human agents with more information and training to solve any query while skipping hold times. 

How to Implement Conversational AI for Contact Centers

While every organization has its own complexities and needs, in general, contact centers must follow a series of steps to ensure conversational AI platform implementation is successful:

1. Clear understanding of the main objective: Understanding what you are trying to accomplish matters when incorporating AI technology into your business. While you might be tempted to do as much as possible with AI, knowing what can be done with this technology and what needs to remain primarily done by humans is vital.
2. Ensuring features cover needs: Not all conversational AI platform providers have the same expertise and capabilities. Once you know what you need, the next step for success is to conduct due diligence to ensure your needs are met.
3. Ensuring compliance and legal terms are met: The contact center industry deals with large amounts of data, which increases compliance and legal risks. Ensure your conversational AI partner is built for enterprise and understands these complexities.
4. Prioritizing stability and enterprise experience: The AI space is very crowded and volatile, with products across multiple industries. However, partnering with a tech company that has a steady record and experience with enterprises is important to ensure long-term success. 

Why Choose Mosaicx to Transform Your Contact Center? 

Choosing the right partner to transform your contact center with AI technologies can affect your entire business. At Mosaicx, we have decades of experience helping large enterprises improve customer service with the latest technological advancements and unparalleled customer support. 

Book a demo with one of our specialists, and let us show you how we can help you transform your organization.