There’s no denying the rapid rate at which businesses have been adopting generative AI technology. Organizations across industries are finding ways to use AI for their daily work, including customer interactions.
However, making the most out of AI takes more than just adding a ChatGPT bot to a contact center and calling it a day. You need to know how to use AI to improve the customer and agent experiences.
To help our understanding of AI’s impact on the customer experience (CX), let’s look at how conversational AI can be used in contact centers today.
What Can AI Bring to CX?
The first step to understanding how AI can improve CX is knowing where it can be applied throughout customer interactions and how.
From the moment a customer calls a contact center, AI can assist them via a natural language auto attendant. These can help direct customers to the right department or agent for their needs based on voice input, rather than needing to go through a monotonous menu where they have to constantly press buttons to go to the next option.
In fact, using AI can provide a good customer experience without even needing to involve an agent. With digital-first self-service, customers can receive assistance and information from an AI-powered assistant, allowing them to get help quickly even when agents are unavailable.
Beyond that, AI can help agents from the moment the phone rings with AI-powered customer context. While CRMs that provide customer information are common, they only help with existing customers who already have their information saved to it. AI can gather customer information and context before the agent gets the call, so the agent will be better prepared to assist them.
During the call, AI-powered solutions can provide additional contextual information to agents, such as any previous interactions the customer may have had or answers to the caller’s questions, as well as real-time sentiment analysis. Afterward, the solution can analyze the interactions during the call to help with agent training and guidance.
Of course, contact centers consist of multiple agents, all of whom are taking multiple calls each day. That’s a lot of interactions, which are valuable sources of data about customers, agent performances, and any common questions or issues that may be arising. AI can analyze that data, glean new insights, and provide reports delving into any issues or patterns that businesses should be aware of.
Each step in this process can help improve the customer experience, whether it’s by helping make each call more efficient, assisting agents to provide a superior service, or gathering insights to help organizations improve.
AI Features Available Now
For a good example of how you can use AI in a contact center today, we can look at Landis Technologies. Landis’ contact center solution integrates directly into Microsoft Teams, transforming the Teams platform into a full-feature contact center, and features AI-powered capabilities that have been shown to improve CX.
Landis’ solution utilizes generative AI before, during, and after the call to improve the customer experience. For self-service, it has Voice Multi-Level Auto Attendant, which helps customers navigate multi-level IVR with naturally spoken requests and takes users to specific departments and people, as well as digital-first self. The same technology can also be used as a chatbot, using the same generative AI as the voice menu.
On the agent’s end, Landis uses generative AI to provide agents with structured information related to what customers are calling about, as well as pertinent information about the caller. Agents can then add the caller to their CRM with the information the AI gathered with a click.
Additionally, managers can run analyses of their AI interactions, gather pertinent information, and find areas for improvement or training.
“There’s a lot of hype in the market about what AI will be able to do in the future, and justifiably so, but we’re loving what it can do today in Landis Contact Center,” says Paul Martin, Account Executive at Landis.
“Of course, there is more to come, but what we can do with AI right now is already very exciting, and it already shows real tangible benefits to our clients.”
To Summarize
While the technology behind AI is constantly growing and developing, there are many ways that it can be used to improve CX today with technology like Landis’ contact center solution.
AI can:
- Assist callers with auto attendants and self-service
- Provide agents important customer information and contextual information
- Analyze interactions to provide actionable feedback and insights
All of which can make the customer experience even better.
For contact centers just starting their AI transformation, it’s advised to start small and get used to a few AI features at a time. From there, you can implement new features leveraging AI; with each new feature, you’ll see the user and customer experiences improve. But with the right AI-powered tools in place, businesses can supercharge their contact centers at every step, creating more efficient agents and a great customer experience all around.
