Moving Beyond the AI Basics for Call Centers
Today’s call centers are achieving great gains in efficiency and call deflection with AI, but many are missing out on its most impactful capabilities.
While the majority of AI’s applications and benefits are often narrowly focused on customer experience — which is truly important — AI has the potential to transform the agent experience as well. And with the current workforce challenge of recruiting and retaining employees, optimizing AI to support both customers and agents can be a game-changer for your call center.
Let’s look at three key aspects of AI for call centers and how you can integrate them for a consistently superior experience, improved agent satisfaction, and decreased costs.
The Benefits of Agentless Automation
Utilizing chatbots, auto attendants, and self-serve features is important, but it’s just a starting point. Early chatbots and auto attendants were primarily well-designed databases that pulled information to expedite responses, increase call defection, and reduce the workload for CSRs. This is introductory level AI for call centers.
At SharpenCX, we already offer sophisticated pre, during, and post-interaction automations to make the customer and agent experience seamless. Our flexible APIs offer integrations to best-of-breed conversational dialogue options like Google DialogFlow, NVIDIA Jarvis, and Sonance so you can craft the best experience possible.
In the future, you’ll see us driving agentless automation further through value-added features including:
- Additional Precision routing so you can leverage new AI models to get your customer to the best-suited agent or self-service.
- Enhancements to our existing chatbot/self-service automations with new speech-to-text and text-to-speech options, including new languages, conversational dialogue connections, and an all-new drag and drop interface.
- Low-code/no-code integrations to make every integration feel “out of box.” Our Open APIs already make connections a breeze, but we believe connections shouldn’t require development resources.
Beyond Customer Automation
However, the thing that keeps us up at night is thinking about how automation for your customers will impact your agents, supervisors, and admins. That’s because incorporating customer-centric AI completely changes what it means to be an agent.
When you have chatbots powered by a knowledgebase, only the difficult questions make it through to your agents. They now receive questions that require more critical thinking, more training, and more coaching. This can lead to increased stress for your agents.
Better self-service AI for your customer should equal better AI tools for your employees, so that they’re well-equipped to handle the escalated service needs. We’re creating tools to address this such as:
- Intelligent Agent Assist: Automated delivery of real-time, contextual feedback to the agent based on real-time transcription, customer and agent sentiment, and proactive coaching notifications.
- Supervisor Cockpit & Modeling Tools: Dashboards with outlier activities and end-of-day predictions so you can make staffing decisions on-the-fly.
- Agent Performance Score: At-a-glance view into an agent’s overall performance across all queues and channels.
Actionable Data Delivers Results
The power behind any automation is quality data. But this data is only truly useful if it can help you identify patterns, pull actionable insights, and make decisions. We’ve seen what it’s like to be drowning in data — and that can be a waste of high-value information.
Our Insights Roadmap is all about optimizing and doing more with your data. You’ll see enhancements like:
- Brand new no-code tools like Dynamic Dashboards and Derived Field enhancements – so that you can present the right data at the right time.
- 3rd-party data sources imported via SharpenCDP that you can combine with your Sharpen Data in derived fields or utilize external data points in Performance Tiles.
- New ActionBots to deliver real-time notifications, make routing decisions, or model daily stats derived from logged-in agent stats.
When your agents feel empowered and supported, they can better serve those customers who require human interaction. It’s time to deliver engaging agent and customer experiences with AI – any time, anywhere.