With all the buzz around artificial intelligence (AI), many contact center leaders feel like they’re already falling behind with AI adoption. Implementing any new technology is daunting, and when it comes to AI, the pace at which it is developing can leave even the most innovative customer experience organizations racing to catch up.
The truth is that incorporating AI into your operations doesn’t need to be scary, and it doesn’t need to be a multi-million-dollar, multi-year undertaking. There are quite a few concrete ways you can easily implement AI. In this article, I’ll cover three places you can add AI to your customer experience strategy to get quick results and lasting value.
1. Add Generative AI to Knowledge Management Systems
Most knowledge management systems operate similarly to a search engine. An agent types a question, and a list of articles or documents appears. Next, the agent must sift through the articles and figure out the best answer. This method is not only time consuming, it’s also contingent on the agent entering the right search terms and understanding the material well enough to formulate the correct answer.
Generative AI takes your knowledge management system to the next level by allowing it to function more like ChatGPT. Even better, your generative AI powered knowledge management system is trained on your data (not the entire internet), so it’s aligned with your business objectives. With AI, agents can ask conversational questions and get actual answers instead of a laundry list of possible responses.
Generative AI-powered knowledge management benefits both your agents and your customers. When agents can easily get the answers they need, they become more productive and better at their jobs.
When customers get fast, accurate answers, they’re more likely to have a positive perception of your brand.
2. Deploy Virtual Agents Powered by AI
Chatbots are supposed to help you decrease live agent interactions by allowing customer to self-serve and get answers to their questions with the help of a bot. Unfortunately, these chatbots are often anything but helpful. Instead, they lead to customer frustration with their inability to answer questions that go off script.
The fix is to turn your chatbots into virtual agents. Using AI disciplines, like natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML), to recognize speech and text inputs and imitate human interactions, virtual agents can interpret the nuances of human language and engage in more natural conversations. With virtual agents, you’ll realize improved automated self-serve experiences with faster resolution times.
3. Deploy Smarter Call Routing
In most contact centers, when a customer calls, they’re prompted to select a reason for their call from an automated menu. If the reason for their call hasn’t been entered into the menu, then they’re routed to the next available agent. This isn’t ideal. Choosing from a laundry list of options can be frustrating for the customer, and not knowing why a customer is calling can be frustrating for the agent.
With AI, routing can move from reactive to a much more predictive experience connected to a full 360-degree view of each customer. Discriminative AI modelling can help qualify a call for agent routing. As a customer calls in, their customer data profile is analyzed for the most likely reason they might be calling and what actions they might want to take before being routed to the right agent. The results are fast, personalized experiences from the moment a customer reaches out. This faster time to resolution can greatly improve contact center KPIs and customer satisfaction.
Quick Results, Lasting Value
Introducing AI into your customer experience strategy doesn’t need to be all or nothing. It’s alright – and often better – to start with manageable areas that are relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. By simply improving your knowledge management systems, virtual agents and intelligent routing you can realize the benefits of AI quickly, while making a lasting business impact.
