AI helps companies deliver digital-first Contact Center experience in post-COVID era

With the emergence of multiple technologies to enable the comeback of businesses, the new normal looks significantly different. In particular, AI has grown as a vital technology essential for offering enterprises a competitive edge.

The last two years has resulted in a massive increase in call volumes at customer support centres across industries and countries. Call volumes in contact centres serving the financial, tourism, and healthcare industries have increased significantly.

Impact on contact center metrics

The sudden increase in inbound call volumes caused an adverse impact on contact center KPIs. Average queue/hold times increased with a cascading effect on increased call abandonment rate (AR). The Average Handle Time (AHT) almost doubled from an average of 3-6 minutes for many agents across contact centers.

Calls rated as “difficult” by customer service reps increased by 100% during the Covid-19 pandemic – HBR

Overall growing challenges for contact centers across industries and geographies are:

  • Long hold and wait times
  • Higher Abandonment Rate
  • Lack of unified experience across channels
  • Increased agent turnover
  • Siloed tech and inflexible infrastructure

Nevertheless, the post-pandemic situation also revealed a clear divide between prepared and unprepared ones – the businesses that had invested in a digital-first, cloud-based strategy versus those that remained a more traditional on-premise approach, where the former are finding it much easier to cope.

By truly embracing the potential that a digital-first contact center offers, businesses can take their customer service operations to a whole new level. In fact, they can create a competitive edge that will drive customer stickiness.

95.7% of contact center professionals view customer satisfaction as the most important call center metric ~ CallCenterHelper

The role of AI

At the core of this digital-first contact-center opportunity is artificial intelligence (AI).

According to the McKinsey State of AI in 2021 report, a majority of survey respondents say their organizations have adopted AI capabilities for their ability to impact both the bottom line and cost savings.

Businesses have started realizing that the transformational value of AI goes well beyond the typical self-service bots. Smart call routing, proactive outbound calls, agent assistance and contact center operations are undergoing a major overhaul.

According to ResearchandMarkets.com, AI-enabled services in Contact Centers are expected to reach $2990 million by 2024, witnessing 22.6% CAGR during the forecast period (2019-2024).

AI-enabled systems can provide predictive analytics, sentiment analysis as well as interaction analysis to help you analyze calls and agent performance and gain actionable insights.

Kore.ai’s SmartAssist, the AI-native Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) solution, provides end-to-end call automation through a combination of conversational IVR, intelligent virtual assistants, smart routing, and AI-powered agent assist. SmartAssist automates majority calls and chats without ever reaching a live agent, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and a superior customer experience.

For instance, a major global bank in North America was struggling while supporting exponential call volume in order to support its merchants’ customer queries. The contact center was receiving over 15 million calls monthly for partner credit card queries and call volumes were increasing 10-15% YoY. The bank implemented a multifaceted solution on Kore.ai’s experience optimization platform to offer smart call routing, brand-specific personalized responses on channels including IVR, Web, SMS, and chat and managed to easily scale its operations without dependency on IT resources or costly infrastructure. This resulted in an 18% reduction in calls reaching the agent with a call containment rate of 90%.

Business benefits of AI-enabled contact centers

According to IDC, the early adopters of AI in customer experience-centric use cases have seen up to 25% improved customer satisfaction and cost of service. It is apparent that AI can be a strong catalyst for a change in the contact center, creating real and lasting improvements in customer service.

AI-enabled Contact center systems are proving to be the game-changer when it comes to creating customer experience and agent experience. Let’s look at some of the benefits of implementing AI-enabled contact center technology:

Higher Customer Satisfaction: With AI-enabled systems, customers are experiencing lesser wait times, improved personalized services, and faster response time, overall leading to higher satisfaction.

Improved agent performance and productivity: With AI handling common queries via self-serve options, your agents are receiving lesser mundane calls and have more time to devote to complex issues.

Better coaching with in-depth insights into interactions: Based on AI-powered analysis of the call interactions, the agent’s performance can be evaluated in great detail and can be offered targeted guidance.

Good tidings beckon us

As we emerge from the shadow of pandemic, businesses have a need and an opportunity to rethink their contact center strategies and set themselves up for long-term success. Conversational AI will be the next essential technology to provide your contact center a much-needed advantage; it’s time to make the transition to staying ahead of the competition.

Abhijit Mhetre

Written by

Abhijit Mhetre is an SVP Marketing at Kore.ai, the leader in the Conversational AI Platform space where he is responsible for strategizing and leading ‘all things marketing’ from India. He is a specialized B2B techno-marketer who loves building global challenger brands.

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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