Call centers have rarely been an enjoyable experience for customers in the past. With monotonous IVR menus, customers often have had to wait several minutes to reach a service agent, only to be diverted to the wrong department. Businesses facing problems due to the shortcomings of traditional call centers are disappearing due to mass transitions toward smart contact centers using Artificial Intelligence (AI) backed by Machine Learning (ML). This article will explore how these innovative contact centers are revolutionizing the call center industry to create a new era in customer experiences.
How are intelligent contact centers transforming the contact center industry?
Businesses that are still employing traditional call center practices have the opportunity to consider upgrading their centers. With rising customer demand and competition amongst companies to be the industry's best, a good customer service experience can be what pushes a business to the top over its competitors. Deploying smart contact centers has never been easier, and let us see why they should be considered for your customer needs.
1. Conversational AI
Conversational AI is an industry game-changer that uses Machine Learning (ML) to be a virtual assistant that can learn, understand and react to customer needs and queries in real-time, offering the best resolutions. These conversational AI bots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the sentiment and intent of customer speech and try to mimic a customer service agent's response closely. Conversational IVRs and chatbots use deep learning to learn and improve the quality and speed of AI responses to customers.
2. Employing omnichannel experiences
The new-age customer does not only rely on telephone or email as a means of communication. Instead, they use a combination of channels, including phone, email, social media, whatsapp, etc. Unlike their traditional counterparts, innovative contact centers can provide enhanced service to customers with any channel preference. An additional feature of smart contact centers is easy switching of customers between multiple channels. For instance, the engaging AI may transition a customer from messenger to telephone when it feels it can better resolve their requests by switching channels. Likewise, a calling customer with a routine query can be resolved with an automated SMS with the appropriate information, saving the customer’s and the service agent's time. This technology paves the way for the channel-less contact center of the future where all current channels are entirely interoperable, and all channel conversations act in unison as one intelligent conversation rather than a patchwork of multiple exchanges.
3. Reducing Operational Costs
Automation is a big part of an intelligent contact center, resulting in operational efficiency and reduced employee costs. Hence, businesses can instantly slash operating costs by employing smart contact centers.
4. Sorting, filtering, and routing communications to free service agents' time:
Smart contact centers use AI to reduce call volumes by automating information and routine calls. Smart contact centers offer futuristic customer experiences by engaging in AI bots that analyze sentiment and intent analysis of customer queries to break down customer speech or text to a root level. Inflection with its smart contact center services can help businesses provide their customers with the best agents suited for handling the customer's unique needs.
5. AI providing valuable analytics
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.
6. Upgrading call centers with ease
Smart contact centers can be easily deployed in one go or periodically over stages by a more iterative process. Either approach has its advantages and disadvantages. By an iterative approach, businesses can start small and deploy AI in certain smaller, less critical departments for testing and step-by-step improvements. This allows the AI to gradually learn from mistakes and avoid significant damage to business operations or reputation. As the AI improves itself, smaller low-risk rapid deployments can be performed to cover other departments.
In an all-out approach, the business gets a quick, comprehensive view of what's working and what's not working in the intelligent contact center. Accordingly, service agents can make manual inputs for the AI to learn and achieve a better working system. Although this approach may incur some dissatisfied customers, many businesses prefer it as it is a quicker deployment strategy. Either approach business owners side with the ease with which a traditional call center can be transformed into an intelligent center and its notable benefits make it hard for businesses with older systems to resist the upgrade, and neither should they.
7. Smart contact centers being the deciding factor between business competitors
With the substantial increase in industry competition, businesses armed with the best customer service experience platforms have noticeably stood out with a significant competitive edge. This, combined with the effortless adaptability of going smart with contact centers, has resulted in business owners driving for their company's best contact center services. Combined with the benefits of intelligent contact centers and the newly acquired competitive edge, businesses can truly thrive with an AI-powered intelligent contact center of the future.
8. Cut costs with readily available outsourced service providers
With the availability of outsourced service providers that offer businesses the best smart contact center services at affordable prices. These services eliminate the business cost impact of manually setting up smart contact centers and artificial intelligence technology. Several smart contact center providers offer quality services with competitive pricing worth considering for your business needs.
In conclusion, the benefits of intelligent contact centers are hard to ignore, and businesses would greatly benefit from assessing how they can be integrated into their existing systems. Ensuring your company employs the best intelligent contact center solutions could be the push you need to rise above your competitors. So don't hesitate and find out how to enter the future of customer experiences.
Outsource contact center services to Inflection for the highest quality services
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.
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