Why Do I Love AI in the Contact Center? Let Me Count the Ways

Your contact center serves as a key gateway through which customers interact with your brand, so you want to ensure that each customer’s interaction is smooth, fast, and informative. They should not only achieve their desired outcomes but have a positive experience along the way – one that makes them want to come back. 

That’s why businesses are finding more and more ways to apply AI in their customer experience planning. They love the many ways it can help them architect the desired experience for customers and employees and achieving and competitive edge… all while creating game-changing efficiencies.

Let’s look at a few examples.

AI reduces contact center costs and complexities while increasing efficiencies  

Chatbots and Natural Language Processing, or NLP, are driving billions in annual customer support cost savings. AI capabilities such as screen pops and real-time transcription shave off seconds from every customer interaction that collectively save millions of dollars while increasing first call resolution (FCR) and reducing handle time. AI-powered virtual agents and call deflection further reduce costs and keep call queues lighter for customers who need to speak with someone quickly. AI can even auto populate the notes section of your CRM to speed after-call work for agents. AI takes what’s complicated and makes it simple, with a proven ability to reduce costs over the long term.

AI gives customers what they want most for a superior service experience

AI supports effortless interactions with a personalized touch that keeps customers coming back, from front-end solutions like conversational AI and call deflection to back-end applications that customers have no idea are working behind the scenes to elevate their experience. For example, real-time transcription via speech-to-text that enables agents to know exactly what the customer is saying the first time, every time or identity-centered security that lets customers skip repetitive verification questions without compromising security or compliance. When done right, AI makes communication more effortless and drives more personalized engagement for long-term loyalty.      

AI helps you expand your pool of talent and create “super agents” 

Work is no longer somewhere that you go, it’s something that you do. A coffee shop, a co-working space, or a dining room table easily qualify as suitable agent workspaces in a post-COVID world. AI delivers next-level training and coaching that can be done from anywhere, so your company can cast a wider net and hire top-tier talent while creating an environment where agents know they can be successful. 

Toolwire, a member of Avaya’s Experience Builders ecosystem, crafted Spaces Learning, an AI-powered learning and development solution that offers learners more timely access to relevant, focused training and skill-building materials through both self-paced on-demand and real-time collaborative learning options. The platform features a carousel of micro-learning-oriented course content, sandboxed training environments for hands-on access, assessments, and AI-based insights on how employees, both in and outside of the contact center, are retaining and expanding their skillsets to better serve customers across the entire organization.  

AI in your contact center with Avaya

AI solves for so many challenges in the contact center related to employee retention, customer expectations, and the explosion of the surface area where customers and employees interact. Here’s how Avaya brings contact center AI to life:

•  We have a rich ecosystem of AI partners like Google and Journey, a digital identity verification and authentication platform provider, who strengthen the value of the Avaya solutions we deliver to our customers. For example, in healthcare, a provider can use Avaya OneCloud to simplify routine interactions like appointment and bill pay reminders by securely sending notifications across the channel of a patient’s choice, with patients being able to make payments directly from those notifications with high veracity authentication via Journey. This delivers the kind of experience the patient wants (easy and frictionless) while improving identity verification, decreasing false acceptance ratio and costs associated with fraud.Avaya OneCloud – our composable, cloud 3.0-enabled experience platform – includes our award-winning Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, which speeds the creation and delivery of new processes and experiences, even for very narrow use cases. You can customize or make things easier by leveraging our pre-built apps (ex: Avaya Virtual Agent). You have full control over how you bring AI to life within your contact center.  

• Not ready to go off-prem? You can ease into the cloud with hybrid solutions, keeping core services in your data centers while augmenting them and infusing cloud-based AI innovations. You’ll get all the disruptive benefits of AI without the requirement of a disruptive platform shift. One of our customers delivering outsourcing programs for some of the largest companies in the country chose a hybrid solution with Avaya OneCloud. Combined with meetings and collaboration from the cloud within the Avaya Spaces browser experience, this all-in-one solution provides everything in one convenient place for the customer, as it replaced multiple systems previously used throughout the company, saving them over $1M.

• The Avaya Media Processing Core delivers faster AI innovation that creates the kind of competitive experiences I walked through earlier (ex: AI transcription). 

Customers and agents are beyond tired of experiences that underwhelm and frustrate. Aren’t you? The contact center is the single most impactful place an organization can implement AI. I can tell you from firsthand experience working with our customers, your customers, agents, and your entire business will love the results. 

See what you can start doing in your contact center today. Find out more here.