Contact centres play a crucial role in enabling customers to communicate, interact and engage with brands, and for brands to develop long-lasting relationships with customers. Unfortunately, there are many negative perceptions of contact centres, for example: long wait/hold times, constant transfers to someone else who can supposedly help, not keeping a commitment to call back, and untrained agents, to name a few. When any of these are experienced, the customer relationship is badly damaged and brand reputation negatively impacted.
To ensure a great customer experience, brands must provide great customer service. This requires contact centres to be expertly designed with a balance of humans and technology working in harmony to meet the needs of all customers.
Contact Centre Transformation
The digital transformation of the contact centre has accelerated in recent years. From being a telephone only channel of communication to leveraging social and digital channels and becoming an omnichannel hub providing a service to customers on their terms, the contact centre is now an experience centre. With the rise of AI as an effective digital tool, the contact centre is undergoing further technological transformation.
Customers, contact centre agents and brands can all benefit when AI is correctly deployed and used in the contact centre. Enabling personalised interactions with single screen views of full customer history, preferences, products, more customer self-service options, eliminating hold/wait times, real-time call analysis to enable the proactive feeding of information to agents without them having to search for answers or information, and automated translation and summarisation of calls eliminating post call administrative work, are just some of the benefits of using conversational AI solutions in contact centres.
Whilst there is an increased use of conversational and generative AI in contact centres, at the same time the importance of the role of the human in contact centres is growing. The most effective strategy for companies to employ in the contact centre is one in which AI complements humans.
Agent Assist
Creative Virtual’s Agent Assist is a conversational AI solution that creates ‘super-agents’. Leveraging technology, Agent Assist enables the very best of unique human talents such as care, understanding, emotional intelligence and expertise to be most effectively used to help solve complex customer challenges.
With Agent Assist, contact centre agents:
- Have information and insights immediately at hand, so customers do not have to wait, are not put on hold and experience fast resolution
- Can see all products, services and plans that a customer has with the company
- Are provided with a real-time transcript of the conversation
- Given themes, additional information/topics for them to explore with the customer
- Have a virtual agent on hand assisting them if necessary
- Are provided with real-time personalised ‘next best action’ based on AI data-driven insights, increasing sales through a better understanding of the customer
- Handed a full transcript of the conversation if the customer is passed to a live agent from an initial chatbot, so the customer doesn’t have to repeat anything
- Is provided with a summary of the call which is automatically generated reducing administration time which can be used to focus on customers
- Data extraction and analysis is automated providing a general view of what happened on the call, actions agreed and taken and any follow up actions required
- Can see customer satisfaction rating with their performance, through automatic measurement and recording
- Given immediate feedback on actions that could improve performance, ensuring on the job training
The use of conversational AI in the contact centre is enhancing operational efficiency and agent productivity. Importantly it is not replacing the human touch but rather elevating the human touch, ensuring brands deliver a human experience. Brands that have taken the strategic decision that customer service should be about the customer, ensure that AI is empowering agents so they are connecting, communicating and caring on a human level.
Agent Assist, and other conversational AI solutions that Creative Virtual creates, builds and deploys are designed to be a partner to human agents; elevating their skills and abilities and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences. AI makes the contact centre experience better because it enables human agents to do what they do best; delivering service excellence, building meaningful customer relationships, and creating loyal, brand advocates.
