Contact center is the major hub of generating leads for business, but they have always been challenging environments that involve high workloads and high volumes of data.Today, a multitude of organizations around the globe are increasingly investing in cloud based telephone technology, given how customer support has been a vital aspect to grow a business.
A few decades ago, contact centers were voice-centric, and their success was judged based on the amount of calls handled per agent.
A focus has now shifted to providing customized, flexible options for initiating and sustaining contact with well-trained agents who are able to provide timely, accurate information.
While a majority of companies have switched to cloud-based contact centers to deliver a better customer experience, giving a quality customer service experience has remained the top priority.
In particular, contact centers and customer experience can be a great starting point since they provide a large amount of customer information that is impossible to process manually.
As great as cloud telephony is, businesses can take customer communication to an even higher level by leveraging artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence in the cloud is unquestionably a disrupting factor for organizations these days.
Read: Top 10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Embrace the Cloud
Cloud technology and its impact
Cloud Communication is a new, fast-growing technology that enables people to communicate via the internet, through internal or external communication.
Businesses can benefit from VoIP features and avoid the hassle of installing physical phone equipment on-premises with cloud-based phone systems. To be precise, Cloud technology enables innovation and improves existing systems.
Cloud telephony services may include Interactive Voice Response or a real person that takes calls on your behalf. The service offers call recording, call forwarding and can be accessed via a PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
With cloud telephony, businesses can now provide customers and clients with incredible functionality that was previously unimaginable.
On top of that, the ability to integrate with existing applications, strong data security and control, and automation have given a significant advantage to organizations in terms of scalability. An organization can upscale or downscale resources with subsequent fluctuation in requirements. Looking for a voip mobile phone service ?
Read: How Do Cloud Computing Services Benefit Businesses
Artificial Intelligence and its impact
Artificial Intelligence is the ability of a machine to do a particular work on its own and learn from its personal experience how to solve a problem or complete a task in the least amount of time.
So, in general, AI-based machines can complete a particular task on their own. With the evolution of AI, contact centers no longer rely solely on a large number of agents.
In fact, organizations wish to reap the benefits of AI in several ways to constantly communicate without necessarily having to involve humans.
Read: How Artificial Intelligence Predicts Trading Market
Cloud telephony and Artificial Intelligence together: How they are redefining contact centers?
Now while we are acquainted with both cloud telephony systems and Artificial intelligence, let’s have some useful insights into what happens when we bring these two together.
Many businesses are quite comfortable with the idea of leveraging AI for customer service. Many companies use chatbots or automatic emails to converse with their customers.
Beyond facilitating better text communication, AI can also help businesses manage calls more efficiently. It is undoubtedly a great idea to combine cloud telephony with artificial intelligence in order to optimize customer service.
It’s a very sensible approach, especially for organizations that lack resources or wish to automate their processes in the near future.
AI-driven chatbots and web chats are proving to make text communications easier and more efficient for businesses that have implemented them.
By leveraging AI, employees are able to manage voice calls better and respond to queries more efficiently by providing information, suggesting possible solutions, and reducing the amount of time spent on calls.
In the front-end, AI will enable consistent self-service, automated communication, and faster, smarter customer support at any given time. On the other hand, AI-based Speech Analytics help managers improve quality monitoring in real-time.
With keyword analysis and sentiment analysis, businesses will gain valuable insights from millions of customer conversations, helping them improve customer experience, marketing, and product development.
In addition, artificial intelligence is increasingly used by agents as a real-time coach and assistant to improve the quality and speed of every customer interaction.
Read: 4 Doubts you might have about moving to the cloud
How AI and Cloud Telephony is redefining contact centers?
Let’s discuss how they, together, are transforming the contact centers.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR):
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated telephone system technology that interacts with the incoming callers and allows them to access information without the need to speak with a human agent through a voice response system of pre-recorded messages.
Moreover, the system allows users to route their call to specific departments via speech recognition or simply pressing their phone’s keypad.
With AI and cloud telephony, calls are routed not only according to the customer’s query but also according to their prior interactions and personality. The system can also be programmed to respond to general customer queries if the FAQs are pre-recorded.
AI chatbots
For businesses, AI chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular tool for customer interaction. The chatbots are programmed to automatically reply to specific questions and collect customer data.
Besides, it also gives the agent data about their interactions with the customer so that they can make the communication between the two parties more personalized for the customer.
Customers and businesses can interact efficiently and conveniently with chatbots by using artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the AI also saves customers’ time by providing them with general information over chat. AI chatbots can be an asset to any organization since many customers prefer chatting over calling.
Read: How Artificial Intelligence Predicts Trading Market
Predictive Analysis
Artificial intelligence enables telecommunication companies to perform predictive analysis, which allows them to provide better service.
By leveraging machine learning, AI keeps track of an organization’s historic data to predict any potential risks or issues that might occur in the near future.
By doing so, businesses are able to prepare for such issues and avoid them altogether. AI streamlines and enhances business processes, as well as help business develop future-proof strategies to improve their performance.
Workflow Automation
When you automate many of your agents’ routine tasks, your agents are able to focus more on the customer – and your customers might also appreciate it.
Data handling by telecom companies is very intensive on a daily basis. So there remains a likelihood of committing a human error. Incorporating AI helps businesses to process data more simply and at a fast pace.
Not only does this ensure error-free processing, but it also allows more agents to spend their time on more important tasks, such as handling customers and solving their problems, instead of processing error-free business.
Live interaction monitoring
Using live monitoring during training is particularly useful because it allows corrective action to happen at the time rather than during a discussion later in the day.
Agents benefit from this feedback, as it enables them to develop quickly without forming bad habits. As a result of live monitoring, you can monitor agents’ performance and quickly correct any errors.
As well as benefiting the organization, it can benefit individuals by providing them with necessary information or insights. With real-time monitoring, your agents are not forced to strictly adhere to a script or rigid interaction guidelines.
Read: What Is Customer Retention – A Complete Guide
Benefits of AI-enabled Cloud Contact Centers
Understanding customer intent
The benefits of AI in a cloud contact center are unlimited. One such benefit is understanding customer intent by gathering and analyzing historical and behavioral data collected via phone calls, chat, and email.
Based on the analysis of numerous past interactions stored in cloud telephony, AI glean insights into the real motivations for a call. Just imagine how easily and quickly a customer’s query can be steered when the context behind that query is already known.
Improved training and greater agents’ productivity
As mentioned earlier, AI in a cloud contact center helps the manager monitor customer-agent interaction in real-time. This helps live agents get solution recommendations in real-time, and in the meantime, managers can evaluate their performance and offer appropriate guidance.
With AI technology and analytics, it is possible to determine what topics to focus on using personalized training.
Speed and efficiency
No doubt, responsiveness increases through automation. AI-based cloud telephony delivers quick resolution to customer issues, regardless of time zone or holiday.
Similarly, it ensures the delivery of peak performance in 24-hour service, thereby maintaining consistency and making customer interactions better. The satisfaction levels of customers increase when problems are resolved quickly, which further helps retain customers.
Scalability
AI, unlike human employees, is capable of handling several customer issues simultaneously. Not only that, it can handle a huge amount of customer data at any given time, regardless of different geographical locations.
Businesses can expand into new markets more rapidly with AI as it is highly scalable, eliminating the need to train or hire new employees.
Conclusion
Expanding the capabilities of your contact center means not only improving agent satisfaction by enhancing the available tools for accomplishing mandatory tasks but also strengthening your relationship with customers throughout their journey. You’re prioritizing them at the heart of your business.
With artificial intelligence in cloud communication, the process has been simplified and accelerated. Artificial intelligence can handle data in seconds that would take a normal human about a week to process.
The telecom industry has been able to provide uninterrupted services to customers and grow rapidly because of this.
If you like the content, we would appreciate your support by buying us a coffee. Thank you so much for your visit and support.
