Why AI-powered contact centers are the most cost-efficient solution
Businesses often incur losses and customer attrition due to inadequate customer service offered by outdated contact centers. This may be because of long waiting times or the inability of service agents to provide sound solutions. Whatever the reason, businesses should prioritize customer support issues as it is a significant factor defining business success. This is where AI-powered innovative contact centers step in to help enterprises streamline their customer service and save a considerable amount of money. This article explores the different ways in which intelligent contact centers can improve the cost efficiency of businesses.
How does Artificial Intelligence lead to cost efficiency in a contact center:
Some of the principal features AI-driven contact centers offer, directly or indirectly, cause companies to save money. These features act in unison to provide extraordinary customer experiences to help businesses grow and scale. Some of these AI functionalities that enable companies to lower costs are:
Providing omnichannel support
Customers are growing comfortable with conversing through a combination of phone calls, email, messenger platforms, and social media. Smart contact centers can address customers on all these channels through AI bots that eliminate the need for channel-specific live agent teams. In addition, the multi-channel assistant can further facilitate automated switching of customers between channels without losing valuable customer information. This is typically done when the system, powered by AI, recognizes another channel better suited for a speedy resolution of the customer query.
Increasing efficiency by freeing service agent time
Conversational AI uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and sentimental analysis to capture customer mood and intent from customer speech to understand the customer emotion and nature of the issue. Combined with intelligent routing capabilities, conversational AI bots can route customers to agents best suited to resolve their queries. Customers with simple questions are resolved with appropriate automated responses or information via other channels such as SMS and Email. This process frees up service agent time significantly and improves organizational efficiency. Hence, reducing the staffing and salary costs needed for hiring multiple service agents to manually address a high volume of callers.
Reduced need for recruiting, hiring, and training
The lifeblood of the traditional contact centers was the quality and effectiveness of its staff and, most importantly, support agents. With new AI-powered intelligent contact centers, the need for recruiting, hiring, and training has been substantially reduced. AI conversational bots can automate most processes and help contact centers operate at a fraction of the labor required in their previous iterations.
Eliminating the need for live call monitoring
Monitoring call center calls by a live agent ensures that customer service agents' performance is by the business's requirements. This requirement can come at an additional cost to the company as it would require staffing and training of agents specifically for call monitoring. With advanced AI systems and NLU, these costs are thus eliminated. The AI voice assistant performs real-time analytical monitoring and provides actionable data reports on customer satisfaction and agent performance.
Providing customers 24/7 support
Conversational AI uses deep learning to constantly improve responses and provide customers with round-the-clock resolutions with minimum human intervention. The more time these bots are allowed to train, the more efficient they become, increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing customer attrition rates. High customer satisfaction is a success metric that increases business growth and profitability.
Reduced Average Wait Time (AWT)
AI bots can respond to thousands of concurrent callers without human intervention. A well-trained AI model only allows transfers of a percentage of these calls to service agents. Hence the overall waiting time for customers before resolving is comparatively less for smart contact centers than in traditional call centers. Reduced AWT directly correlates to cost reduction due to lesser agent call run-time.
AI-driven insights for increased operational efficiency
Smart contact centers have data-centric AI systems that constantly offer practical, actionable insights that are useful to improve system efficiency. Additionally, customer insights and profiling allow businesses to understand their customer base and preferences better. Sentimental analysis conducted on customers can provide invaluable product-specific insights. Failing business products can be identified, repaired, or removed from circulation without the business suffering operational or reputational damage with these insights. In today's data-driven world, smart contact centers can help you significantly improve your operational performance.
Future support and compatibility of smart contact centers
Often, businesses have to deal with costs incurred due to the upgrading of infrastructure and software. With AI-powered intelligent contact centers, you pay for one-time contact center AI setup costs that will learn and improve for you over time. This system has the potential to support future technological advancements such as new channel support and improved AI services. So save yourself money in the long run and invest in making your contact center smart today.
Easy deployment of services
Businesses can start small and deploy AI in certain smaller, less critical departments for testing and iteration-based improvements. This allows the AI to gradually learn from mistakes that don't affect the business operations or reputation. Then, as the algorithm improves, smaller low-risk rapid deployments can be performed to cover other departments.
Outsourcing contact centers
Setting up an AI contact center can be expensive with infrastructure, staffing, and training costs. Luckily, businesses don't have to go through this process independently with the availability of outsourced service providers that offer companies the best smart contact center services at affordable prices. These services eliminate the business costs of setting up in-house AI contact centers. Several smart contact center providers offer quality services with competitive pricing worth considering for your business needs. All businesses need to do is find the right service provider.
In conclusion, AI-powered smart contact centers are revolutionizing how contact centers will operate in the future. And they are built to integrate well with future technological advancements in the industry. Find out how to deploy your own AI smart center and save considerable money for your business. Luckily, outsourced providers on the market offer all the crucial innovations in contact center technology as a cost-effective service.
Reduce Cost by outsourcing your AI contact center requirements to InflectionCX.
Inflection offers AI-powered innovative BPO services for businesses to transform their engagement with stakeholders, internal and external. Our highly trained professionals deliver cost-effective, superior experiences to businesses, and our agents are trained in voice and multi-channel support to transform the customer experience. Contact us to explore how Inflection can help you deliver superior experiences while being cost-effective.
