Call Center AI: The Definitive Guide for Beginners

What Is Call Center AI?

The concept of AI or artificial intelligence isn’t a new one. Yet it still manages to grab the attention of many, and its growing development proves that it doesn’t plan to slow down anytime soon. According to a report, the growth of AI is predicted to reach $62 billion in 2022, which is almost 21% more than the last year. 

Call Center AI is a fast and reliable trend based on a virtual model. The concept primarily accelerated during the pandemic as the companies prioritized the health of their employees and their brand reputation above everything else. According to a recent study on the topic, the market for AI in contact centers is predicted to grow to $3.5 billion by 2026.  

Fortunately, the advantages of AI in customer service are many, and that’s why more call centers are adopting AI to reap its benefits. This discourse takes a deeper look into this concept. 

7 Amazing Benefits of Call Center AI & How It’s Being Used

When it comes to saving costs, companies find AI in call centers quite effective. It saves resources, improves work productivity, and produces better data to accelerate decision-making. Here are some of the fantastic benefits of call center AI. 

  1. Operational Speed and Efficiency Increase

AI enhances operational speed and efficiency by automating the quality of monitoring in call centers. Instead of humans monitoring a small number of calls for a particular duration, AI scans a large number of calls within a short time. This enables a solid evaluation of the agent’s performance and improves the customer experience. 

This factor also helps call centers reduce client wait time. For basic tasks such as resetting a password or paying a bill, chatbots eliminate the requirement of human interactions and reduce the wait in long queues. 

  2. Save Time and Resources on Training

It isn’t easy to run a call center, and often, managers complain of staff-related challenges. Finding suitable agents through reliable recruitment processes and then training them to deliver increased customer satisfaction is quite testing, but AI eliminates that need by a significant level. 

It saves resources and time because the need to hire new staff reduces manifold. As a result, companies invest that time and money in other business projects that help them earn substantial profits. 

  3. Quickly Convert Audio to Transcripts

Manual transcription involves listing a video or audio transcript and documenting the words on a paper. The entire process is time-consuming and monotonous for people working on it daily. Thankfully, AI helps automatically convert audio to transcripts, demanding less effort and ensuring perfect results. 

4. Analyze Transcripts for Common Themes

The process of analyzing transcripts manually involves six crucial steps. It all starts with reading the scripts and then annotating them. Then the data is conceptualized and segmented before each segment is analyzed correctly to write the results. 

This cumbersome procedure takes time and resources and can also become pretty expensive for call centers with a limited number of trained agents. Using AI in contact centers helps overcome this challenge by giving businesses a ready-made, well-analyzed transcript to work with every time. 

  5. Access More Data

Slow decision-making affects the way call centers approach their projects and has a negative impact on the morale of employees. AI ensures that call centers have good and timely access to necessary data so managers can make quick decisions. 

With more data, call centers also get the confidence to achieve accuracy. Therefore, the reliability of data creates valuable outcomes for the entire call center and its customers. 

  6. Better Call Routing

Call routing is a management system that distributes all the inbound calls to specific agents according to their criteria and rules. This process happens way before an agent picks up a call. Artificial intelligence ensures a smooth call routing process to improve customer service, reduce hold times, reduce the number of abandoned calls, and maximize overall productivity. 

  7. Speeding Up Customer Service

Customers hate waiting in line while agents find a solution to their problems. For a call center to gain popularity and more calls, it needs to excel in excellent and fast customer service. Otherwise, it all leads to losing customers to other centers. 

Taking advantage of AI in contact centers works wonders in maintaining good customer service. It accelerates the pace at which these centers perform so that the customers don’t have to struggle with their problems for long. 

Using Call Center AI: How & Where To Start

Artificial intelligence isn’t a buzzword anymore. In fact, it is an enabler for optimizing various processes in a company. It empowers call centers by producing data-driven insights, enhancing customer engagement, and offering real-time monitoring. 

It streamlines the processes and also improves the performance of agents. There are specific steps a business should take to start utilizing this feature. Before that, they should understand different ways in which AI can be implemented. 

Interactive Voice Response

IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is an example of AI that most people have experienced many times. It involves answering recorded questions and helping those companies that receive many calls on routine topics. 

This AI eliminates the need for a live agent and reduces the time a customer has to spend waiting for human interaction on call. Aloware provides the feature of Interactive Voice Response so that a call center can work more effectively.  

Predictive Call Routing

This AI assist technology ensures that the right call reaches the appropriate agent. It does so by evaluating the profiles of customer behaviors and understanding their personas and journeys. 

Conversational AI

Also known as chatbots, conversational AI allows call centers to have an online chat feature. This feature will enable customers to engage quickly and benefit from self-service options. Chatbots help customers to solve their on-demand problems and simultaneously reduce the load on agents working in a call center. 

Emotional Intelligence AI 

Many call centers use emotional intelligence AI. It helps detect consumers’ emotions on the call by evaluating their voice tone and cadence.

It also measures the number of times a support rep interrupts the customer on call and analyzes their tone. Emotional intelligence AI then gives the agent feedback to help them improve. 

Call Analytics 

AI helps call centers get data on their call times, customer information, and overall feedback on an experience. This technology can spot trends and provide more well-rounded analytics than a human agent or manager. 

Here are specific steps to integrate call center AI into the existing infrastructure. 

Build a Call Center With an Integrated Technology Infrastructure

Start with establishing a call center that supports AI. Integrate technologies such as IVR, speech analytics, and learning management systems to resolve all challenges. Perform this task efficiently to make call center operations more resilient and flexible, create personalized experiences, and improve an agent’s performance. 

Align the Team With New Goals

To avoid failure, companies should align team members with the new changes involving AI. All team members should then be trained for the new AI-based processes so they can put them to use. 

Businesses can start by communicating their strategy and goals to employees from top to bottom. They can use a collaborative planning procedure to encourage good performance and outcome.  

Pay Attention to Agents

Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of agents before training them for the new processes will ensure that they get the most out of that training. Connecting customers with the agents who can best help them will lead to ground-breaking results. Performance reviews for agents should be done to ensure that they are meeting the needs of customers effectively. 

Perform Real-time Alerts and Monitoring

AI helps call centers through real-time alerts and monitoring. When technology works the way it should, the chances of any compliance violations are reduced significantly. 

Obtaining data on unusual behavior before it starts affecting operations is vital to business health.

Grow With AI — Aloware Can Help

AI offers some excellent tools and features to help improve the productivity of call centers and the outcome they achieve for their customers. It also accelerates the processes and improves customer satisfaction without burdening the agents. 

If a call center could use what AI offers, Aloware may be of some help to that business. This contact center solution enhances performance through automated features, unlimited texting, and calls. It is also quite helpful in providing excellent customer support. 

Aloware offers a live dashboard, analytics, and an IVR facility, allowing call centers to experience excellent performance every time. It provides explicitly smart contact center solutions to manage calls and leads efficiently. 

Having a call center AI is beneficial for company growth and allows them to excel in their respective fields. It also gives agents plenty of leverage and the liberty to work efficiently and at their own pace.