From smarter forecasting to call routing and IVR, artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in how contact centres work. It’s no longer the preserve of big brands – with big budgets – but a mature, ready-to-use technology from which every contact centre can benefit.
But what does AI mean to your contact centre, your agents, and your customers? What benefits can you expect – and how quickly can you unlock them? Before investing in AI, you must understand the outcomes you’re aiming for. As a result, you can make intelligent decisions and achieve a strong return on investment sooner.
Whether you’re getting started with AI or wondering which benefits you’re missing out on, here are three great reasons to start planning your adoption now.
1. Empower and enable your agents
One of the most common implementations of contact centre AI is self-service. Chatbots and messaging instantly reduce the burden on your agents. However, this is just one part of the story.
Beyond chatbots, AI-powered assistants can equip your agents with the information and insights they need to delight customers. This could include customer sentiment, agent scripting, and complete journey tracking across every channel.
Supported by AI, your agents approach every conversation with the knowledge they need to remove friction. Meanwhile, routine admin-like call follow-up tasks can be automated, freeing your agents to focus on what matters. As a result, leading AI users report a 3% higher YoY agent productivity.
2. Analyse customer sentiment
In your contact centre, every interaction generates valuable data, a lot of which is overlooked and unused. Designed to analyse massive amounts of data, AI can collate valuable insights – not just call flow and agent notes but also customer sentiment.
You can understand customer sentiment analytics when your customers are frustrated, happy, or upset. The value of this data can’t be overstated.
When you understand customer sentiment, you can:
- Find the patterns and hotspots where sentiment is negatively affected
- See which agents are best at turning upset customers into happy ones
- Understand which agents would benefit from extra training or coaching
It’s a powerful way to start building empathy and making your customers’ emotions at the core of how you do business.
3. Reduce customer effort and improve routing
Customer effort describes how much work it takes to interact with your contact centre or complete a task. At the most fundamental level, it measures how easy or hard you are to do business with.
In contact centres, customer effort is often affected by poor routing or long call queues. There’s nothing worse than enduring a long wait, only to be sent to the wrong agent for the task or asked to repeat your problem as you’re passed from one agent to another.
AI can help reduce customer effort on multiple fronts. AI-powered chatbots and online knowledge bases give customers a faster way to get answers to common questions. Predictive routing ensures customers get the right agent for their questions, emotional state, and preferences. Agent conversation guides coach agents on the soft skills required on a given call, reminding them to show empathy.
AI delivers benefits that grow over time
Quick-win initiatives like chatbots can deliver near-instant time and cost savings to your contact centre. AI will start delivering value quickly if you’re trying to improve first contact resolution rates or reduce call volumes.
But the short-term is just the beginning. By definition, AI learns and improves over time. More data leads to more intelligent guidance, routing, and behaviours. Investing in AI now puts your contact centre on a path of perpetual improvement – and ensures a customer experience that only gets better yearly.