Bite-size AI: Contact center AI is more accessible than you think

Right now, every business is buzzing about artificial intelligence (AI). Some are racing to adopt new AI technologies, while others are interested in AI, but aren’t sure where to start. (If you fall into the latter camp, take this AI readiness assessment to see where you stand).

In the contact center and customer experience space, incorporating AI into your operations doesn’t need to be daunting, and it doesn’t need to be a multi-million-dollar, multi-year undertaking. There are quite a few tangible ways you can easily implement bite-size AI. In this article, we’ll cover three places you can add AI to your customer experience strategy to get quick results and lasting value.

1. Harness Generative AI for Powerful Knowledge Management

Most contact center knowledge management systems work like a traditional search engine. The agent types a question, and a list of articles or documents pops up. Then it’s up to the agent to skim the articles and figure out the right answer. Not only is this method time consuming, but it relies on the agent entering the right search terms and understanding the material well enough to arrive at the right answer.

By adding generative AI to your knowledge management system, that traditional search engine functions more like ChatGPT – except it’s trained on and only uses the data you give it, (rather than the entire internet). That means agents can ask conversational questions and get actual answers instead of a reading list.

Generative AI-powered knowledge management is a win for both your agents and your customers. When agents can easily get the answers they need, they become more productive and better at their jobs, which our internal data shows leads to higher retention rates. And when customers get quick, accurate answers, they’re more likely to have a positive perception of your brand. Win-win.

To see generative AI-powered knowledge management in action, check out this video.

2. Turn Chatbots into Virtual Agents with AI

The promise of chatbots is that they can help customers self-serve and get answers to problems without involving a live human agent. Unfortunately, too often these chatbots just end up frustrating customers with their inability to answer questions that are phrased in a conversational way.

With AI, you can transform chatbots into virtual agents. Using data, machine learning, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize speech and text inputs and imitate human interactions, these virtual agents can understand and interpret the nuances of human language and engage in more natural and fluid conversations with customers. Virtual agents can even draw on customer data and touchpoints to make their interactions more personal and relevant. The result is an automated self-serve experience that helps customers resolve issues more easily.

To see virtual agents work, watch this video.

3. Introduce Intelligent Routing

Your contact center agents aren’t mind readers, but with AI they can get close. When customers call your contact center, they’re generally prompted to select a reason for their call from a laundry list of options. Based on their selection, the customer can be routed to an agent or to an automated answer.

With AI-powered intelligent routing, it’s possible to predict the most likely reasons a customer is calling before they even say a word or press a button. When a customer calls in, AI analyzes their customer data profile for the most likely reasons they might be calling and what actions they might want to take before being routed to the right agent or answer. This faster time to resolution can greatly improve contact center KPIs and customer satisfaction.

To learn more about intelligent routing, watch this video.

Next Steps

When it comes to incorporating AI into your customer experience strategy, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or to feel like you need to do everything at once. The truth is that you can start small – with better knowledge management systems, virtual agents and intelligent routing – and still make a big business impact.