Australia
Canada
New Zealand
UAE
United States
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already in place in a large portion of contact centers and is expected to play an important role in the future. By automating routine tasks, AI can improve the speed and accuracy of an organisation’s interactions with customers.
Some of the ways organisations can use AI are:
- Virtual chat or helpdesks
- Speech analytics
- Identifying common themes or complaints
- Real-time insights into customer relationships
Let’s discuss the pros and cons to using AI in contact centers:
Pros
- Increased efficiency – By automating certain tasks you can resolve issues more quickly and free up internal resource.
- Improved customer experience – Often AI can provide faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries, leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
- Cost efficiencies – Automating routine tasks can help to reduce labour costs and improve operational efficiency.
- Speech analytics – analysing conversations to identify patterns, themes and insights that can be used to make data-driven decisions, which will ultimately improve customer experience.
- Increased productivity – By providing real-time insights into the customer behaviour AI can help predict future actions such as product recommendations to help drive the customer experience.
- Extending the availability of customer support – AI-powered technologies can provide customers with 24/7 support, which is especially useful for businesses with a global customer base.
Cons
- Unable to handle complex issues – It is unlikely that virtual chat and helpdesks will be able to handle complex enquiries or complaints without the need for human intervention.
- Customer frustration – Customers can be frustrated at interacting with a virtual chat, especially if they cannot get their enquiry resolved. This frustration can result in customers dissatisfaction.
- AI lacks personalisation – AI cannot offer the same personal experience as a human voice at the end of the phone. In cases of complaint or conversations of sensitive nature then AI cannot replace real human interaction.
- AI can sometimes be wrong – These technologies can make mistakes, and these mistakes can be more difficult to detect or might end in serious consequences, such as incorrect or inaccurate advice to customers.
- Cost of implementation: Implementing AI-powered technologies can be expensive, and not every organisation will have the required level of resource to invest.
Conclusion
AI is already commonly used in contact centers around the world and will play an increasingly important role in the future. To ensure success, organisations must carefully evaluate the use cases they’re solving for and determine whether Machine Learning technologies are worth the cost to implement and maintain.
Some of the cons mentioned above can be mitigated by working with a partner who understands the challenges that AI and Virtual Agents bring to the contact center. For example, Customers can utilise New Era’s Managed Services to help “coach” their virtual agent, helping improve intent detection and responses, and making sure your Virtual Agents are keeping up with your real business.
