Why Artificial Intelligence Is Here to Help Your Contact Centre

Companies are becoming cloud-based, everything is happening digitally and data is sovereign.

When was the last time you felt the burning need to fax someone? Or used a beeper to get hold of your partner?

There’s a reason old tech is beginning to fade away. Software keeps improving, driving the world forward.

The contact centre is certainly not exempt. Companies are turning to the cloud en masse – it costs less and VoIP has replaced the need for those old-fashioned phone lines. Now all you need to run your contact centre is a headset and an internet connection.

Technically, you don’t even need a workforce any more. You can outsource your calls to home agents or a BPO. Your contact centre can be, to all intents and purposes, totally invisible.

Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are only going to speed things up even more. In fact, it is difficult to foresee advances slowing down ever, not when tech giants such as Google and IBM have their sights set on quantum computing. (But let’s save that for another time.)

Here, ZaiLab argue that you shouldn’t be freaking out about the onset of AI and suggest how the technology can be used to boost customer service offerings.

AI Can Only Improve Your Service Offering

Companies like ZaiLab are all about machine learning. In fact, man and machine working together is definitely becoming their utopian vision for the future. Even the European parliament published a report that supported the idea of using AI to augment and scale human intelligence rather than replace it.

Solving complex customer problems, improving agent performance and KPIs, speedier engagement across multiple communication channels, delivering a personalised service, sentiment analysis (we’ve listed more tasks here) – all of these can be performed optimally with the assistance of machine learning. With less risk and room for error.

Because that’s what machine learning is made for – streamlining and optimising processes, reducing risk and improving your service to your customers.

According to information technology giant IBM, 80% of routine customer queries can be handled by chatbots, which frees your agents up for more quality work.

And remember what was said about data being sovereign? Machine learning can be used to generate mountains of valuable customer data and analytics, which it then analyses and translates for you, giving you a deeper understanding of your business and market than you’ve ever had before.

The competitive advantage this gives you cannot be overstated.

How ZaiLab Use Machine Learning to Change the Game

ZaiLab have designed their software to help you create a self-managing contact centre that’s constantly learning and improving its own routing capabilities.

ZaiLab’s algorithms monitor all your interactions and hold on to valuable customer data such as survey results, call outcomes, QA scores and so on. It uses these to determine which interaction gets served to which agent, and which interactions need to be prioritised.

It’s basically asking itself, ‘Which interaction must I serve, and to whom?’ and then it answers its own question without bothering you.

The aim is to essentially use machine learning to guarantee a much, much higher rate of successful outcomes.

How?

As previously mentioned, ZaiLab’s algorithm studies the data fed into the system – metrics such as previous outcomes, business value, SLA, services and skills, et cetera.

Some of these are mandatory metrics, while others are exclusion metrics. For example, if a call comes in that needs to go to a London agent, all agents not based in London will be excluded. You can also input preferred metrics, like language preference, for a better agent match.

Then, if, say, the customer value metric has a high importance, that interaction will jump to the front of the queue.

All this means the most important interaction will be helped immediately, by the very best agent suited to handle their query successfully.

That’s a big boost for your customer service.

So yeah, AI may not only help your business, it will transform it, allowing you to take your customer experience to new heights.

So please join us when we say: all hail our new robot overlords.