CHANNEL REPORT Call and Contact Centres
“AI will have the biggest impact on the interaction between consumer and call agent. Many simple
enquiries won’t even reach a human agent thanks to AI-driven self-service, reducing wait times and
speed to resolution for customers.” Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Global CMO at Content Guru
© greenbutter y-stock.adobe.com
technology acting as a customer
screening system. Important
tweets are agged, urgent calls
are brought to attention and
important emails made a top
priority – all thanks to AI.
“Furthermore, AI can
automate call transcriptions,
saving agents crucial time. is
technology is simply making the
customer and agent experience
better as it’s easier for the agent
to manage each interaction.”
Lisa Clark, Vice President
of Contact Centre Product
Management at 8x8 commented
“Today’s digitally empowered
consumers are surrounded
by AI-enabled technology
that delivers instant results.
eir expectations for what
constitutes exceptional
customer service have risen.
With AI in place, contact
centres can predictively and
proactively guide the customer
journey, empower agents,
and strengthen the use and
application of analytics at all
levels of the organisation.
“AI has already impacted
the way contact centres
work. We expect this trend
to continue; both in the way
AI is used to support front
end customer interactions
and the ways in which it will
empower the agents needed
to support those interactions.
Humans will always lead
the charge when it comes
to dealing with customers,
mainly because exceptional
customer service requires
human abilities like empathy.
As AI-infused self-service
applications are used to handle
routine interactions, agents will
be required to handle more
complex interaction. AI will
increasingly empower customer
service agents to respond with
speed and accuracy to handle
complexity, at the same time
DISTIE VIEW
CBM: Where will AI have the biggest impact in the contact centre? Front
end customer interactions or back end data insights?
Gary Bennett, VP Sales, EMEA, Enghouse Interactive
GB: “It will have a major impact on both. The latest real time speech
analytics technology, for example, can listen in real time to both sides of
a conversation between customer and frontline agent and provide live
feedback to agents, team leaders and quality assurance teams about
what is being said and how it is being said. In this way, AI is effectively
being used to upskill the agent, ensuring they keep to the script, remain
compliant and speak clearly and calmly to customers.
AI is also being used effectively in the back offi ce. Bots can be used to
review customer enquiries, search through back offi ce knowledge base
systems and deliver answers directly to customers through chat, or
they can be used to extract relevant information from backend systems
and present it to agents to help them manage calls more effi ciently.
In general terms, bots work especially well when the command is
prescriptive. You often see them used in the airline and travel industry
where similar processes are repeated frequently. Whenever the
interaction is open-ended, however, the bot will struggle because it
will not know all the potential scenarios. That is not to say that the bot
does not have a role to play in these cases but we always advocate that
the business puts in place an escalation path back to a human, to be
used as and when required.”
facilitating new ways of working
and collaboration to drive gains
in rst call resolution.”
Martin Taylor commented
“AI will have the biggest
impact on the interaction
between consumer and call
agent. Many simple enquiries
won’t even reach a human
agent thanks to AI-driven
self-service, reducing wait
times and speed to resolution
for customers. ose customers
with queries that do need
agent intervention will nd an
agent that is up to speed with
their query and augmented by
AI powered in-call listening.
is will provide on-screen
information prompts to guide
the conversation towards
resolution. When you consider
that 10-15% of call time is
currently taken up by the agent
looking up this information
manually this is huge.”
ED SAYS…
There is no doubt that AI will have an increasingly larger part to play in the
contact centre in years to come. For partners selling into the space it will be
imperative to educate themselves on the power of the products coming down
the line from vendors and how that enables their customers to deliver the
ultimate customer experience.
26 | Comms Business Magazine | November 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
/y-stock.adobe.com
/www.commsbusiness.co.uk