AI contact centers harness cutting-edge technologies to revolutionize communication, streamline operations, and deliver personalized customer service across all communication channels. By integrating AI, these centers tackle tasks much more efficiently compared to purely manual processes. Time-consuming and error-prone processes like routing calls, answering queries, and analyzing customer data happen in the blink of an eye in AI contact centers.
Today, no contact center can afford not to think about the transformation to an AI contact center. Read on to learn how to decode the AI landscape and where to start making the right investments in AI that will help your contact center gain unmatched efficiency while ensuring an amazing experience for customers.
Historically, contact centers leaned heavily on manual processes, which meant grappling with inefficiencies, long wait times, and inconsistent customer experiences. Speeding up the process meant either adding more staff or trading off quality — either of which comes at a cost.
Contact centers without AI encounter a number of operational limitations, including:
With the integration of AI, contact centers are equipped to overcome these challenges and operate more efficiently by:
Modernizing contact centers with AI is essential for delivering the best possible customer support across a growing number of channels. AI contact center transformation ensures customers receive seamless, efficient service across any communication channel they choose — whether it's phone, email, chat, or social media. With AI, contact center managers don’t have to choose between improving operational efficiency and elevating the customer experience. With the right implementation of AI, these contact centers will drive higher satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement because people are getting the help they need, faster and more accurately — no trade-off required!
AI contact centers use a range of advanced technologies to improve functionality and efficiency, with different technologies being more fit for use in different areas. Let’s take a minute to define the key components driving this innovation:
These components and technologies come together to build powerful AI-driven contact center solutions. They efficiently handle a wide range of customer interactions, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Now you’re ready to choose your technology, right? Well, there’s one more step to take. To ensure you select the right AI solution for your business needs, it’s crucial for you to understand the differences between AI contact centers and AI call centers. While both types of centers are dedicated to ensuring quality customer interactions, the way they deliver those interactions looks different.
AI contact center: AI contact centers leverage cutting-edge technologies to deliver seamless, efficient, and personalized customer service across multiple communication channels. These channels may be voice-based or text-based (email, chat, text, etc.). These centers use AI to automate interactions, route inquiries, and analyze data in real time, ensuring consistent, high-quality service.
AI call center: AI call centers focus primarily on voice-based interactions, using AI to enhance call handling, automate responses delivered via voice, and provide speech analytics. While they share some technologies with AI contact centers, their scope is mainly limited to phone calls and voice communications.
Here’s a breakdown of the differences in service offerings and functionalities:
Now that you understand the distinctions between AI contact centers and AI call centers, you can choose the right solution to meet your specific needs, ensuring you deliver the best possible service to customers across all communication channels.
In Assembled’s 2024 state of support tech report, more than half of all survey respondents said they believe AI will have a significant impact on the future of contact center operations. What was less clear for survey respondents is how and where that impact will happen.
Contact center leaders will have to choose the best-fit technology to meet their organization’s work style and goals. Making the right choice of where to invest in the AI contact center transformation will bring a host of benefits that boost operational efficiency and elevate customer satisfaction, ultimately driving significant savings. Here are some of the key advantages and the AI functionalities that drive them:
Implementing AI in contact centers boosts efficiency, enhances customer service, and reduces operational costs. This powerful combination makes AI contact centers an ideal solution for modern businesses aiming to optimize their customer support operations.
As technology rapidly advances, new use cases for contact center AI are emerging constantly. Here are some exciting possibilities to consider as you formulate your AI contact center strategy:
Contact center agents often spend a significant amount of time handling repetitive tasks like resetting passwords or checking account balances, leading to bottlenecks and decreased efficiency. AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents can automate these routine tasks, providing instant support and freeing up human agents for more complex issues. For instance, consumer goods company Thrasio uses AI to automate over half of all customer interactions across 190 brands.
Contact center agents often spend considerable time drafting responses to customer inquiries, which can be time-consuming and lead to inconsistent messaging. AI-powered tools can help by drafting responses based on historical data, common queries, help center articles, and best practices for customer communications — all while connecting to your tech stack to include personalized info to efficiently resolve issues. Agents can review and customize AI drafts, ensuring the final response is completely accurate and personalized to the customer's needs. Advanced AI can be customized to address certain kinds of issues end-to-end, effectively scaling your best processes. This significantly speeds up response times, reduces the cognitive load on agents, and maintains a consistent quality of service.
Contact center agents and customers often struggle to quickly find relevant information from extensive knowledge bases, leading to delays and potential inaccuracies. If they manage to find the right article, they then have to read it and figure out which part of the article addresses their problem. Natural language processing is good at searching for articles, but the new wave of LLM-powered AI makes things even simpler. AI-powered knowledge base search streamlines the process by enabling both agents and customers to simply ask a question and get an answer from available documentation. AI can understand questions and provide direct answers, improving both response speed and accuracy.
Getting new contact center agents up to speed can be a tough, time-consuming process. They need to dive into extensive knowledge bases and master company protocols. AI-powered tools connect to your internal and external documentation so every answer a new agent needs is just a simple question away. This means new agents can quickly find the information they need, slashing onboarding time. With quick access to precise information, new hires are ready to deliver top-notch service faster and with more confidence.
Both contact center agents and customers often need to quickly review past interactions to grasp the context and key points of previous conversations. Sifting through lengthy transcripts manually can be tedious and inefficient. AI-powered tools generate concise summaries of customer interactions, capturing the essential details and key points. This makes it easier for reps and customers to quickly review and understand the context, enhancing customer engagement, ensuring seamless service continuity across interactions, and ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty.
AI seamlessly integrates with existing CRM, ticketing, and communication platforms, enhancing their capabilities and providing a unified customer experience. Here’s how:
Integrating AI in omnichannel communications significantly enhances the customer experience and streamlines operations. Here are key ways AI can improve omnichannel communications:
Contact center leaders are excited about AI’s potential, but they have their reservations too. Assembled’s 2024 state of support tech report found that survey respondents have a wide range of concerns, from security risks and poor tech stack integrations to unhelpful chatbots and an inability to replicate agent work.
These concerns can be avoided if customer service leaders take the necessary steps to ensure a successful implementation. Here are some key considerations:
By taking these steps, customer service leaders can ensure that deploying AI in their contact centers is strategic, effective, and beneficial for both customers and agents.
As we've explored, AI is revolutionizing contact centers by automating routine tasks, enhancing agent efficiency, and delivering personalized customer interactions. By integrating AI, contact centers can streamline operations, reduce costs, and significantly improve the customer experience.
The Assembled platform is designed to transform your contact center operations with powerful functionality enhanced by AI. Assembled Assist, an AI-powered copilot and issue resolution engine, uses generative AI to automate case resolution and guide agents to fast, accurate, and empathetic responses. This boon to agent productivity is helping companies like Honeylove increase solves per hour by 54%.
When paired with Assembled workforce management, Assembled Assist surfaces holistic contact center insights that streamline issue resolution, support optimal staffing levels to meet customer demand, and empower contact center leaders to respond to fluctuating support volume in real time. The only workforce management solution truly built for omnichannel contact centers, Assembled offers seamless integration with various communication channels so you can deliver a cohesive customer service experience.
Whether you're just beginning your AI adoption journey or looking to enhance your existing capabilities, Assembled can help your contact center get the most out of AI. Contact us today to learn more.
