5 Ways Conversational AI Can Support Your Contact Center Automation
Customers are increasingly turning to digital channels such as social media, websites, and messaging apps for information, purchases, and support. But even after decades of technical innovation—most recently focused on artificial intelligence and automation—consumers are often still left frustrated by a poor customer experience (CX).
The contact center AI Conundrum
Over the years, generative AI and its applications have drawn attention. The role of natural language processing in addressing growing customer needs can’t be underestimated.
However, even with all the technology available, some organizations have steered clear of AI solutions due to IT budget, resource restrictions, and the fear of delivering a disappointing digital support experience. Conversational AI is not something to be afraid of implementing into your contact center, however. The barriers of experimentation are far outweighed by the benefits of agent productivity and resolving customer queries faster.
Here are five ways in which conversational AI can revolutionize your customer self-service experience across channels and departments.
1. Answer questions effortlessly
If you are finding that your agents are struggling to focus on more complex customer inquiries as they are continually distracted by repetitive ones, implementing an AI chatbot in your digital channels could be the answer. Building out conversation flows with the most frequently-asked questions will allow your chatbot to assist with simple questions, freeing up your agents to focus on complex ones.
In fact, 92% of contact center leaders using conversational AI say it has helped resolve customer issues faster, while being available 24/7 across time zones and in over 100 languages.
2. Order goods seamlessly
As more consumers turn to online shopping for convenience, businesses must focus on hassle-free order placement for a positive customer experience as part of their digital transformation. Many consumers are still anxious while shopping online. By enabling customers to order online using conversational AI, this presents the opportunity for personalized processing and customizations. With 87% of IT leaders believing that real-time agent assistance is one of the main benefits of AI capabilities, seamlessly passing orders to a live agent to validate the customer’s purchase and process their payment securely makes this a reality.
3. Book appointments easily
Booking appointments and other types of scheduling should be a quick simple task where self-service should take center stage—no one wants to sit waiting on hold. However, the reality is that due to appointment bookings being mismanaged by many organizations, customers forget appointments or cannot reschedule, which becomes costly for the business.
With conversational AI synchronized with your CRM, customers can call in or chat online with an AI bot, explain their requirements and make adjustments if necessary, making for a highly effective and streamlined process. Moreover, organizations should consider using booking forms that can help organize schedules and appointments the right way.
4. Route calls intelligently
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) menus and intelligent call routing innovation has also advanced, but customers can often get stuck and abandon calls when they do not find the right option or person to speak to, creating a poor experience.
By adopting conversational AI into your contact center, calls can be easily dealt with and routed to the right department. Organizations using conversational AI for this purpose have seen huge benefits, including the reduction of customer wait time by 55% in their contact centers.
5. Report issues efficiently
Trust is important when looking to keep customers happy. Offering fast and efficient ways of connecting with your organization isn’t the be-all and end-all if customers don’t trust that their issues will be resolved in their first engagement.
By integrating digital channels with conversational AI, customers can report an issue and receive progress updates via email or text. For urgent incidents, your AI chatbot can escalate immediately to a skilled agent who can assist with a full context of the report or conversation with the bot.
Leverage powerful AI solutions at your fingertips
At 8x8, we understand that providing great customer experiences is crucial. With 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, a powerful user-friendly conversational AI solution, we’re focused on advancing our customers’ self-service capabilities by offering faster, automated resolutions in your contact center. It’s focused on reducing call volumes in the contact center by handling self-service experiences and seamlessly transitioning handoffs to live agents and specialized bots. With our plug-and-play AI templates, you can deploy automated simple self-service solutions into your contact center and quickly benefit from its efficiency. Check out converse360 as a conversational AI partner of 8x8.
