Artificial Intelligence and the Contact Center

Overview

The rise of consumer expectations, digital interactions, and technological advances are driving companies to rethink the way they interact with their customers. Intense competition and customer interactions at every stage of the journey are challenging companies to create seamless and differentiated experiences for their customers.

Studies by industry thought leaders like Gartner, Forrester and McKinsey all indicate that how a company delivers goods and services to its customers is as important or more important than what it delivers. According to IDC, over 70% of buyers point to customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most exciting technological innovations of the modern age. AI and its derivative technologies, including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) are being used to solve a number of problems, by offering new ways to automate tasks, create new efficiencies, and augment the performance of employees to empower them to achieve more and provide better customer experiences.

Contact centers are at the frontline of these experiences.

By 2025, AI-powered
enterprises will
be able to achieve

Net Promoter Scores
1.5 times higher than those of their
competitors.

Source: IDC Technology Spotlight on AI

What frustrates
customers?

Poorly designed online experiences and rigid
menu choices

Long wait times and lack ofself-service

Agents not able to resolveproblem on the
first call

The role of artificial intelligence in the contact center

Artificial intelligence is playing a key role in advancing contact center productivity and efficiency, and most importantly it’s benefiting both agent and customer experiences.

AI at its core, is based on the concept of fast predictions. Contact centers have been using AI in some limited form for decades. Even with basic automatic call distribution (ACD) technology it was possible to identify and route calls to the right agent at the right time using basic predictive algorithms to determine the best agent. The confluence of large data sets, faster processors, and cloud technologies have now made AI more powerful, relevant and practical.

Virtual agents such as chat bots, conversational IVRs, and intelligent assistants help to minimize agent burnout, while improving the quality of time spent with customers who need help from a human agent.

AI is being used to empower agents by putting context at their disposal in real-time, so they can quickly and accurately respond to customer inquires on the first contact.

Pain points of the contact center

Low CSAT, NPS, FSR

Poor customer experiences are hurting customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and the bottom line.

Customer expectations and competitive pressures continue to be the driving force behind improving employee and process efficiencies.

Companies that differentiate CX across every touchpoint in digital and non-digital channels, are those that will succeed in delighting their customers with fast, easy, and personalized service.

High agent churn

Agent turnover is at its all-time high with the average time to onboard a new agent taking 2 to 4 weeks and costing on average between $10K and $20K.

Agent churn creates disruption to productivity and workflows, ultimately leading to unhappy customer experiences. Agent burnout due to high call volumes and lack of access to relevant content, hurts agent morale and their ability to meet first contact resolution goals.

Process inefficiencies

Contact centers are challenged with cumbersome processes that create inefficiencies. 71% of contact center decision-makers say having too many manual processes and lack of automation is a significant problem, hurting productivity, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes.

In addition, poor customer/agent matching hurts first impressions leading to high customer churn and low customer loyalty.

Source: Cisco Global Contact Center Survey

The life of a contact
center agent

Put yourself in the shoes of a contact center agent who works with a number of different and often disconnected systems, sorts through loads of information and content, and tries to find the right answer or expert to help solve a customer inquiry. All this while possibly dealing with a frustrated customer. If you’re wondering why agent turnover rates are so high, this is why.

Using AI and ML technologies to automate low level tasks and give customers an easy way to self-serve, is one of the most effective ways to make agents’ work-life easier and solve information and call overload.

According to a survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group, agents spend 17% of their time searching for relevant knowledge to do their job. AI ensures agents have information at their fingertips, so that they can care for each customer at a highly tailored, individualized level.

What frustrates contact center agents?

Source: Cisco Global Contact Center Survey

Why are businesses implementing
AI in the contact center?

of business plan to implement/expand
AI in their contact center within the next three years

Source: Global Data Voice of the Customer- AI in the Customer Journey

AI Benefits

Reduces agent churn: Minimizes cumbersome, repetitive tasks that create agent burnout

Equips agents with knowledge: Enables agents to provide faster and more accurate customer service

Improves customer service: Offloads high call volumes and improves quality of time spent on complex inquiries

Speeds productivity: Reduces agent onboarding time and costs so they can be productive on day one

Improves FCR: Increases agents’ ability to meet first contact resolution goals

How successful companies use artificial intelligence

Will have their agents only handle highly specialized interactions by 2025

Increase in CSAT scores when using AI and omni-channel

Had measurable results using AI to improve customer experience

Source: Nemertes Intelligent Customer Engagement –Supercharging digital customer experience

Artificial intelligence creates “super agents”

One of the most misunderstood beliefs about AI is that it will eventually replace human employees. AI will certainly change workloads, staffing and processes that may lead to redefining how your contact center is staffed, but a primary advantage of AI is that it augments agents to make them more scalable and efficient.

AI and skilled people will need to work together. Take the example of a chat bot. When the bot detects that the interaction needs to be escalated to a human agent, it brings along with it the history of the conversation to enable a seamless transition from self-service chat to assisted chat. The agent can then very quickly and effortlessly take over the interaction with everything they need displayed right in front of them.

In this regards, AI is an enabler for better live agent assistance, not a replacement of it.

Technology innovation is critical for agent experience

Source: Cisco Global Contact Center Survey

AI has the potential to transform agent experiences. Our global study revealed that ¾ of contact center leaders agree agent experience has a significant impact on customer experience.

Minimizing cumbersome, repetitive tasks, and equipping agents with AI-powered context and knowledge in real-time, empowers them to deliver timely and accurate responses customers expect.

Agents are happier when they feel successful. Improving agent morale and job satisfaction leads to reduced turnover which is costly to the business.

Empowering your remote employees with AI

Extending your contact center operations to remote locations such as agent home offices is an efficient way to increase capacity of your contact center and improve agent productivity and job satisfaction.

Implementing chat and voice bots to handle incoming customer inquiries not only gives your customers intuitive 24/7 access to your business, it also ensures a seamless transition to remote agents when live agent assistance is needed.

Artificial intelligence can turn your remote agents into “specialists,” providing them with real-time guidance, suggestions, and instructions that are automatically displayed at their desktop based on the context of the agent-customer conversation. Agent assistance also provides easier ramp-up for newer agents, leading to higher productivity and lower costs.

Using data and AI to improve customer loyalty

Artificial intelligence thrives on data and is turning data into a new source of competitive advantage. When combined with AI, data analytics provides a powerful tool to enhance how contact centers engage with their customers proactively.

The secret to applying AI effectively starts with your data. AI can provide answers into what your data is telling you, giving you better understanding of the insights hidden in your data so that you can optimize contact center operations and resources for peak efficiency.

The combination of the two provides insights into a customer’s journey, uncovering the “truth” of how customers are experiencing a brand. With this knowledge, businesses can change those experiences to make them better and more profitable.

Experience a reduction in call volumes to agents when chatbots are deployed

Source: Cisco Global Contact Center Survey

AI routes customer inquiries more accurately

Artificial Intelligence enables more accurate decisions and routing so that many customer interactions can be handled without a human agent. AI has the ability to classify information and make predictions faster and at higher volumes than humans can accomplish on their own.

As an example, in an omni-channel contact center, customers can be routed much more quickly and efficiently to the right resource that can add the most value to the experience based on the intent or reason for the call, and the channel the customer is using (e.g. email, phone, chat).

AI can determine which inquiries can be handled by a virtual agent and which ones (the exceptions) will be longer and more complex in nature, and likely need live agent assistance. This requires contact centers to redefine how they do agent staffing and how they measure call volume and call success. The same amount of staff would be handling less, but longer calls, rather than many, but shorter less complex ones.

AI enables automation

Business process automation is a key benefit of AI in the contact center because it increases agent efficiencies and workflows.

However, the human world is complex and AI is still reliant on the human element. Think of it in terms of agent augmentation as much as automation. Technology-enabled expertise and human expertise are both needed.

Many people still want to engage with a human, so as contact centers take advantage of automation, it’s essential that customers can still reach a person when one is needed. These exceptions are often make-or-break moments in a customer relationship.

An example of this is an AI-powered intelligent agent that can listen to customers conversations in real-time, and proactively present intelligent suggestions and other key forms of enterprise knowledge to the agent desktop, while the human agent is interacting with a customer. This empowers agents with the needed context and information they need to deliver faster and more personalized care.

Companies experience a 37% increase in CSAT scores when using AI.

Source: Nemertes

Business outcomes of AI

Cisco Contact Center
AI Solutions

Cisco Webex Contact Center AI solutions are powered by best-of-breed AI technologies such as Cisco’s own AI and Google Cloud Contact Center AI.

Virtual Agent-Voice -Provides your customers with a natural conversational self-service experience over the phone using natural language understanding (NLU). Automates tasks, gives customers 24/7 access to your business while relieving agents of simple and repetitive tasks.

Virtual Agent-Chat -Intuitive on-line self-service experience with chat Bot for simple, less complex inquiries. Reduces the number of inquiries to agents,leading to improved agent productivity, and provides convenient, fast service for customers.

Agent Answers -Empowers agents with context-driven suggestions and guidance in real-time as they are talking and/or chatting with a customer, minimizing agent research time and improving first contact resolution.

Agent Call Transcription -Provides agents with call transcript and summary, minimizing post-call wrap-up time, improving agent efficiency and accuracy of transaction and follow-up.

AI APIs -Our open platform enables customers to differentiate their business by quickly developing AI solutions that meet their unique business needs.

Three actions to consider

Artificial Intelligence is advancing quickly and continues to show up in new places, creating exciting new possibilities for contact centers, and making a major impact in employee and customer experiences.

Cisco is a global leader in cloud contact centers, delivering the most complete contact center portfolio powered by best-of-breed artificial intelligence technologies, combined with world-class cloud calling, meetings, team collaboration, and customer experience management solutions, and the most advanced audio/video devices and headsets.

Cisco is the market-share leader for contact centers. We’re number one in North America and number two worldwide. We have more than 30,000 loyal customers and more than 3 million agents installed globally.

Cisco Webex Contact Center AI solutions are delivered by the most innovative team of AI experts with over 100 years combined experience in AI research and development.

Our cloud solutions are based on Webex, one of the world’s best known, scalable, and reliable cloud platforms. Cisco releases a significant cloud update every month and a major on-prem update semi-annually, advancing our commitment to providing all customers advanced technology and business success.

To learn more visit us at: www/cisco.com/go/cc