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By Chrissy Calabrese, Vice President of Product Marketing at Playvox

AI in CX, Quality Management and Contact Center Solutions: Why the Contact Center is Here to Stay

To say that artificial intelligence (AI) has been written about frequently over the past year would be an understatement. There is probably one area where there are more expectations for AI than in customer experience. For many organizations, particularly in the telecom arena, contact centers are seen as cost centers, so those operating contact centers or holding support centers under their P&L are always seeking new ways to streamline costs in their business.

While recent studies show the expected growth and impact of AI over the next decade, there’s also potential for job creation. Most experts agree that customer service jobs will be augmented and automated, not replaced. Many believe that by automating mundane tasks, we’ll be more productive, efficient, and AI will enable businesses to provide better customer experiences with more self-service options and help fix employee burnout.

No matter what side you are on, the promise of AI is significant. In this article, we’ll discuss the history of AI being used in a contact center, how AI tools are utilized today, and the future of AI in improving CX.

AI in the Contact Centers: Looking Back to Look Ahead

Before we jump in and look at AI in customer experience today, it’s key to reflect and understand how AI has been previously used.

Workforce Management Solutions

Anyone who has worked in a service center for a long time is familiar with the teams of people, number of spreadsheets, and the hundreds of hours that have traditionally gone into creating schedules. There’s the initial analysis of determining when customer interactions come in (the hours when it’s the busiest), another analysis of which team members are available or not (noting special circumstances, when agents need to leave or any other schedule limitations), and then matching all this together to optimize schedules to deliver the agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs) for response and wait times, and first contact resolution (FCR).

One of the early ways that AI was leveraged was to optimize all the previous steps via a modern workforce management solution (WFM). WFM solutions automate the entire process outlined above and consider the most accurate real-time data to produce a schedule for your agents that accounts for hours and number of people needed, and the differences in agent availability — to create customer experiences in accordance with agreed-upon SLAs. This process is all done using AI.

Chatbots

Another tool that’s been in use for a few years is chatbots. These AI-powered virtual assistants can provide immediate responses to customer queries, offer product recommendations, and even help troubleshoot. As chatbots continue to evolve, they can handle multiple customer conversations simultaneously, help reduce wait times, improve overall customer satisfaction, and transform CX at the contact center.

 Personalized Customer Experiences

Personalized customer experiences aren’t new, nor is the ability of AI to create these kinds of experiences. A few examples include:

Using AI to provide relevant article recommendations on a website that relates to an article the visitor has already downloaded. In this case, a database saves information about a customer’s online identity and what they might have searched for or previously downloaded.
Matching the caller ID with a record in Salesforce: Through robust integrations with Salesforce, this type of AI lets a contact center agent greet a customer by name as their phone number “pops” in the agent’s CRM when the contact calls. This type of AI has been in use for many years, and although it might seem basic, it’s still in action in the typical contact center.

Whisper Technology

Whisper technology is when an AI-type assistant “listens” to an agent’

“What ChatGPT does, is able to do, is just mind-boggling,” says Daniel Foppen, VP Product and Product Marketing at Convoso, an AI-powered contact center software for sales teams. “And especially with the latest version, the 4.0 model, this is really going to replace a big chunk of customer service agents. That's a full stop. I'm envisioning 20 to 30% within the next year or year and a half… Klarna, the payment service provider from Sweden, just released recently the news that they replaced 700 agents with ChatGPT virtual agents.”

Daniel Foppen

However, Foppen does not see workforce reduction. He sees workforce reassignment and growth. If you were staffing your call center to cope with surges of calls that occur at lunch time or other point on the clock or calendar, to filed inbound calls, you will now be reassigning those workers on outreach. From defense to opportunity. Foppen calls for a new approach to outbound call management. In this podcast we discuss…

Call campaigns at Scale
Leveraging AI and Automation
Enhanced Data Insights

… and we touch on how call centers can achieve higher closure rates on outbound calls. The technology change mirrors a significant role-playing change: the contact center from being a point of customer care to becoming a revenue center.

About

Convoso is a leading CCaaS contact center software provider for sales and lead generation teams. Since 2006, Convoso has remained at the forefront of innovation, consistently developing solutions to foster customer growth while supporting adherence to regulatory standards. Its omnichannel capabilities include conversational AI game-changer www.Voso.ai  to scale sales and revenue further.

Storied communications brand strives to meet customers where are on the migration path

“It's a hybrid setting,” Martin Bitzinger of Mitel. “Some portions are going to be delivered out of the cloud. Other portions are maybe delivered out of some sort of private cloud that could have data sovereignty reasons, that could have security reasons, that could have performance reasons in terms of how real-time requirements, especially with AI entering the picture, there are fundamental requirements … or there could be cost reasons as well in many cases where it might be fundamentally cheaper to do things, one way versus the other.

In late April, Mitel unveiled a unveiled a portfolio strategy emphasizing hybrid, vertically integrated, and multimodal solutions.

In this podcast, Martin outlines Mitel’s view of how to best serve today’s enterprise. We demystify cloud communications and discuss digital transformation in practical terms. One of the big takeaways, in this podcast, is the acknowledgement of how different verticals will need different solution sets. A big focus is on frontline workers, almost half the workforce and the people everyone depends on for food, hospital, education, first responder, basic industries, and much more. We learn about Multimodal Capabilities for Frontline Workers.

Visit www.mitel.com

“If you think about it from a cybersecurity perspective, how do you defend as an organization what you don't thoroughly understand?” asks Stephen Aiello, Field CISO at AHEAD. “For most organizations, when you think about the age of a lot of large-scale organizations, they've grown, they have developed over time. A lot of them have grown through acquisition and just the legacy infrastructure and the size and complexity of the infrastructure is really, really challenging for most organizations to manage. You build and build and build over time. And then people retire, people move. It just worked with a large insurance firm, a global insurance firm. And they were talking about one of their cloud environments. And they said, you know, none of the people that built this environment work here anymore. Like nobody really knows how it was stood up.”

Steven Aiello

In this podcast, a frontline CISO and an active member of the Cisco Advisory Board, describes the challenge from the inside out, including the real-world challenge of kit-bashed networks, assembled over time and different IT leadership teams, along with the ongoing challenge of a cybersecurity threat that changes by the hour. Stephen Aiello walks us through the issues and discusses Cisco Hypershield. “We've been saying that we want to get security as close to the asset or as close to the data as possible.” We discuss how Cisco Hypershield answers that need, especially in light of industries that not only have special IoT needs, but also operate under a rigorous regulatory structure.

Visit www.cisco.com

Phone.com’s newest take on AI delivers an enterprise grade solution for the solopreneur

You can’t cut hair and answer the phone at the same time. You can’t cook in a commercial kitchen or grill and take reservations or pick up food orders. You can’t see a client, and take a call and book another client appointment, at the same time. Inbound calls remain a basic, critical, communication tool for millions of small, businesses. But millions of people who work on their own have limited means to manage those calls. Old school voicemail is as good as lost business.

In this podcast Amber Newman of Phone.com walks us through AI-Connect. AI-Connect is designed to interact in natural, free-flowing conversations with callers, enabling it to efficiently handle tasks such as call routing, schedule management, or answering FAQs. This capability is made possible by combining state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP), text-to-speech (TTS) and large language model (LLM) technologies.

We see how AI-Connect works, including its ability to handle responses beyond yes and no. People use jargon, and AI-Connect handles jargon. AI-Connect also learns as it goes, improving with each use.

Visit www.phone.com

“I'm a very practical person, so I love technology,” says Russell Crampin of Axians. “I love seeing what's new out there, but I always ask the question, so what? How does it help me? How does it help my customers? How can we make money?” In this podcast, Russell outlines the practical side of AI and how AI is already being used to help MSPs, and the clients of the MSP community, do routine organizational tasks, better. Russell stresses that AI innovation is part of a larger, longer continuity that stretches backwards and forwards in time, of applying machine-based technology to leverage the advantages of processing data, quickly.

Wi-Fi, for example, is an everyday tool that almost every organization offers to employees, and typically onsite guests. Here’s a place what MSPs can shine for their customers in overcoming challenges and delivering better experiences “Why is my network running really slow? Why is the Wi-Fi user in this part of network not getting a good reception? And this network will be learning, the tool will be learning, well, what's going on there? What's specific about this environment? What patch levels are they on? What is the connectivity? What is happening? What are the firmware levels? And it will start to diagnose and make recommendations. And that means that we can use our engineers to be more customer service focused and talk and proactively help users and customers rather than be doing hard coding, trying to run scripts and finding out what's going on, because all that's taken care of…” adds Russell.

Axians is an organization with 16,000 employees, across 37 countries, with revenue of €3.6.

Visit www.axians.com