How can AI improve contact center productivity?

Every contact center representative—every agent, support specialist, or manager—has felt the pain of a long customer service queue. Even the most effective phone greetings lose their charm after continued hold music.

Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and a member of our customer service team will be with you as soon as possible. Your approximate hold time is now 97 hours.

Artificial intelligence offers a suite of business-changing benefits. In the world of customer service, AI often means improved customer self-service, better automated assistance, and a larger percentage of customer concerns satisfied during their first interaction with support staff. AI also offers a massive improvement over traditional call routing strategies, instead routing customers to agents best suited to address their concerns without further consultation.

Let’s explore artificial intelligence and how it improves the complete contact center experience for both agents and customers.

What are the key AI components of an AI contact center?

Better customer service begins with better intelligence. In an era where personalized service is more important than ever, AI helps agents capture and use information that provides each customer with the solutions they need.

These features include virtual agents, live agent assistance, and proactive customer engagement—all of which help reduce costs and improve overall efficiency.

Virtual agents.

A virtual agent combines scripting with artificial intelligence to provide an automated version of customer service. While this form of customer support can’t satisfy every issue, it provides a greater degree of self-service that allows many customers to fix their own problems. This reduces queue times and improves resolution rates.

Interactive voice response (IVR) is one of the earliest forms of automated customer service. This virtual agent prompts consumers with options based on their individual issue. Based on how customers respond to prompts, the IVR system can send them to alternative phone menus or elevate the issue to a real agent. Given the limitations of an IVR system, however, the best companies are actively transitioning to generative AI to further personalize automated customer assistance.

Virtual agents are responsible for answering and categorizing customer outreach, whether customers connect with support teams via email, phone, or chat. When customers reach out through a phone call, for example, virtual agents can analyze speech patterns and intent, using natural language processing (NLP) to route those calls to the appropriate team. Virtual agents can also identify keywords and keyphrases that might indicate a particular type of issue.

Using a virtual agent is one of the only ways to offer true, 24/7 support for your customers. Tour Talkdesk Autopilot—our virtual voice and chat solution—to modernize the entire self-service experience.

Live agent support.

AI can’t replace human intuition. In a contact center environment, that intuition helps customers understand and solve some of their most complicated issues. Fortunately, artificial intelligence offers a full suite of features to complement the hard work of each support agent.

Here’s how AI already supports live agents in a contact center environment:

• Real-time information: Agents have access to valuable customer information that informs the nature of their concern. For example, in-app automations give agents access to customer data without exiting their current workspace.

• Call monitoring: AI monitors interactions between customers and agents to ensure that conversations satisfy customer needs in an efficient but complete manner. Voice and screen recording capabilities allow for easy call evaluation, with time stamps that can draw managers’ attention to particular aspects of each interaction.

• Warm transfer: Customers don’t like repeating information, particularly if they’re already frustrated with their product or support experience. AI solutions can summarize conversations between callers and agents and provide that information to the next agent. This saves the customer from repeating details and creates seamless service, regardless of the outreach channel a customer prefers.

Some of the top-performing agents already use Talkdesk Copilot for active guidance before, during, and after customer interactions. Tour the omnichannel engagement solution that allows agents to spend less time answering calls and more time actively addressing concerns from loyal customers.

What does AI mean for your company’s productivity?

AI is often the fastest distance between customer challenges and prescribed solutions. The modern era of AI and automation allows contact centers to unlock new benefits in operations, productivity, and issue resolution.

Artificial intelligence can visibly improve contact center performance in several important ways:

• Forecast customer demand based on historic and real-time data.

• Aggregate analytics in custom dashboards that make it easier for contact centers to review figures for their most important outcomes.

• Route all customer interactions to agents already prepared to handle incoming customer concerns.

• Reconnect customers back to the same agent when a disconnection occurs.

• Proactively schedule agents during anticipated times of peak customer needs.

As one of the most important ingredients in customer satisfaction, customer service should represent a large part of your company’s retention strategy. However, factors like remote agents, emerging customer concerns, shifting acronyms, and the sheer scale of a contact center can make the entire process difficult to manage.

The generative AI capabilities in Talkdesk make contact center management a straightforward, data-driven process. We already service some of the most successful organizations around the globe, optimizing customer outreach, improving answer rates by 50%, and doubling the rate at which customers answer their own questions through self-service features.

Request your Talkdesk demo today to learn exactly how you can improve business outcomes with an AI-enabled contact center built for your industry.