This is how AI comes in to help your Contact Center

At the same time, we as humans, are getting even more familiar with digital processes. Improvement comes while building solutions in the mix of human talent and machine capabilities. Combining human skills and machine capabilities, improvement comes while creating solutions. AI comes in to help your Contact Center and, next to collaborative intelligence, becomes an excellent ally for companies in processes or departments such as the Contact Center. 

When talking about this matter, one of the first questions is whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace any human worker shortly. It’s a valid interrogation, and the answer, at least now, is NO. It may be occupying several responsibilities previously handled by humans, but, at the same time, it’s allowing the workers to specialize in some other tasks that require more creativity or attention to detail. 

In the article Humans and AI are Joining Forces, authors H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty indicate that the addition of technology can complement and augment human capabilities, not replace them. Their research involved over 1.500 companies and concluded that their performance improved significantly in combining humans and machines. 

In summarizing how AI benefits companies, we should include:

• Speed in processes (like resolving inquiries with immediacy)
• Improve customer experiences
• Scale in projects
• Increase compliance
• Precision or accuracy 
• Providing new data that can help the business innovate constantly

Collaborative intelligence has become a recurrent subject when talking about improvements in the contact center area. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are a real thing now, with tasks such as giving consumers a conversational self-service experience that relieves agents of routine or repetitive work. Instead, the assistance provided by machines lets the workers focus on more complicated problems. 

The consumer, or customer, also feels the benefits. They can receive a faster experience, and it’s a dynamic like almost a self-service, but they could also move to customized P2P assistance if needed. That means that when they need a live agent’s help, the bot can deliver the call or chat to an agent to continue the conversation.

Mix and match humans and AI

Specialized software and tools are of great help in embedding AI into their contact center services. The process of collaborative intelligence positively affects the increasing volume and complexity of interactions, reducing customer frustration, as they should feel the difference in the attention between the machines and the human agents. For this to happen efficiently, there are several characteristics that the AI software should include:

• It needs to be practical.
• It should add agility to the business
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) skills

How is AI deployed for contact centers?

To understand how AI comes in the help of your Contact Center, we can reference some specialists on the topic. In their article, H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty indicate that humans need to train the machines (in the machine-learning process) to best interact with humans. Then, they need to explain the AI behavior to non-expert users. Finally, employees should continually ensure that AI systems function correctly, safely and responsibly.

The agent assist applications include no-code tools that are usable even by non.-technical administrators. They have nodes on which dialogs are created. Therefore, templates open the possibility of creating dialogues for processes or requests that can be automated.

One of the more recent innovations is speech recognition which allows customers to have conversational sense-ex service experiences 24/7 in steps such as scheduling appointments or indicating simple processes.

When the AI includes NLP, you can determine caller intent, and respond to several requests with open-ended prompts, understand speech and respond with text-to-speech.

Contact center managers can also determine what else could be automated. At the same time, the tools themselves can decide what to automate when analyzing conversations between customers and agents. 

After the communication happens, supervisors can analyze the interaction using AI once again, so they can understand how to train agents and where they can add automation for future processes.

CRG works with different partners, such as Automation Anywhere which has developed AI  and automation in various processes for business, such as Contact Center. Look for their other solutions to understand which of them fits you better.