AI in call centers: 6 use cases for any business

A lot goes into running a successful contact center, like resolving customer issues, end-of-call wrap-ups, answering customer questions, and agent training. Fortunately, technology is advancing rapidly, and artificial intelligence(AI) is paving the way for call centers to be more efficient and take better care of customers.

By utilizing AI, corporate profits jumped by 45%in the first four months of 2023, and a recent survey shows that 64%of CEOs believe 2023's AI breakthroughs justify the hype.

Here, you'll learn more about what artificially intelligent contact centers are and what features they provide. We'll also go over some of the best use cases for AI in call centers to help you with customer satisfaction and retention.

What is an AI contact center?

An AI-powered contact center uses artificial intelligence to provide additional support for call center representatives and management. This not only makes the call center run more efficiently and simplifies tasks but also helps improve the customer experience.

Rather than replacing workers, AI provides contact centers with solutions to improve internal workflows, reduce administrative tasks, interface with customers when agents aren't available, and much more. But how does it all work? Below, we provide a brief overview of the technology used in AI contact centers:

• Natural language processing (NLP): NLP is an aspect of AI that focuses on the interaction between human and computer languages. It's what enables AI to understand, interpret, and communicate in human language.
• Natural language understanding (NLU): This subset of NLP helps AI with comprehension. Thanks to NLU, AI can understand the intent and contact of text or speech from humans.
• Large language models (LLMs): AI primarily uses LLMs to learn the right words to use. It uses massive neural networks to consume enormous amounts of text data, which allows it to write and communicate.
• Machine learning (ML): Machine learning is the technology that enables AI to improve over time. As it receives more data with each interaction, it becomes a better optimized and refined system.
• Speech recognition and synthesis: This allows AI to understand and generate human speech. This is similar to text-to-speech, but the result sounds far more human than many of the technologies we're used to.

AI call center vs. AI contact center

There are some technical differences between AI call centers and AI contact centers, but they're often used interchangeably.

AI contact centers can be multichannel or even omnichannel, meaning they can support communication channels that aren't restricted to calling, including chatbots, video chat, text, social media, email, and messaging apps. AI call centers use AI technology exclusively to support phone calls.

AI contact center features

AI contact center software provides a wide range of useful features to assist call center agents, managers, and customers. Understanding these features is helpful to employ this technology in your call center.

1. Quality management assessments

Quality management is an integral part of running a successful call center because quality managers can provide valuable feedback to agents, like the best way to de-escalate a call. Unfortunately, due to the number of calls that come through a call center on any given day, it's unrealistic for quality managers to review each call individually.

AI can help contact centers with quality management by combing through entire call transcripts and creating simplified summaries with suggestions. Based on a specific set of criteria, it can review phone calls and provide feedback on the areas where agents can improve. This gives quality managers more time to focus on coaching agents rather than reviewing calls.

2. Agent Assist

In addition to providing more efficient quality management, predictive AIhelps agents with suggestions in real time. Customers can get frustrated when they're experiencing an issue and have to be put on hold while an agent searches for an answer or solution. With Agent Assist, AI provides suggestions to the agent while they're on a call with the customer.

3. Automatic call distribution (ACD)

ACDis the technology that matches the customer with an agent who has the unique skills to help them. For example, you may have bilingual agents who can communicate in different languages or have expertise in specific areas. With ACD, AI can assess what the customer needs and direct them to the agent best suited to meet those needs, saving time and providing the customer with a better experience.

ACD isn't just for directing calls, either. An AI contact center has interaction routing, so it integrates with all of your communication channels. Whether a customer calls, emails, or sends a text, AI can direct the customer to an available agent with the best skills for the situation.

4. Wrap-up summaries

After each call, agents write wrap-up summaries, often captured in a CRM, to recap what happened on the call. This helps the next agent who works with the customer know where the last agent left off and helps ensure that managers can review interactions for certain compliance requirements. While these summaries are necessary, writing them takes up time that the agent could spend helping the next customer.

AI can decrease the time needed for this task by generating a summary of each call once it's complete. Then, the agent simply needs to read it over for accuracy before moving on to the next customer interaction. With this feature of Zoom Contact Center, agents save time on wrap-up summaries for customers, increasing their efficiency.

5. Integration with other platforms

Call centers use a variety of platforms like CRMs, knowledge bases, and ticketing systems. Whenever you adopt a new form of technology, you want to ensure it works seamlessly with the platforms you're already using. AI contact centers can provide that functionality.

AI contact center software often integrates with the most popular platforms that contact centers use. Whether it's Salesforce, Zendesk, or PCI Pal, you can set up your AI contact center to work with them and utilize valuable contact center tools like wrap-up summaries and agent assist.

6. Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the technology that helps AI understand how customers are feeling during an interaction by analyzing the context and the customer's tone. During a conversation, sentiment analysis can let the agent know if a customer is getting upset in real time. It can then provide information and suggestions to the agent via agent assist. This can also help with detailed wrap-up summaries and quality management by informing you of the customer's mood throughout an interaction.

7. Knowledge retrieval

Knowledge retrieval is the contact center's ability to comb through all of the available information from various resources like previous calls, standard operating procedure documents, knowledge bases, and FAQs to help agents answer questions quickly. This feature helps limit the need to put customers on hold, keeping them happy and reducing frustration.

AI can also power contact centers with chatbotsthat answer simple questions for customers. Knowledge retrieval helps the chatbots answer a wider range of questions, which leaves agents free to work with customers who require a human touch.

7 AI contact center use cases

The use casesfor AI contact centers are wide-ranging. Below, we go over some common situations where this technology can benefit your call center.

1. Analyze data

Analytics are necessary for any business, and AI can help organize and analyze data efficiently and effectively. For example AI can measure your KPIs, like average call time, and point out key insights. Reporting data could show management that average call time is down due to customers switching to using chatbots rather than calling in.

Once you have your contact center software set up, you can customize it to run reports on the metrics important to your specifications.

2. Help with workforce management

Contact center AI software can also track call volume, which can help with workforce management. Every call center has busy and slow seasons. When creating schedules, you don't want to be overstaffed during slow times or understaffed when it's busy, and AI can help ensure this doesn't happen.

An AI contact center can monitor historic call volumes and provide you with valuable data for scheduling. Not only does this help you properly staff your call center for effective customer care, but it can also help ensure employees aren't overwhelmed due to understaffing.

3. De-escalate calls

It's no secret that customers can get frustrated; that's just the nature of customer service. Although agents are trained to de-escalate calls, sometimes they don't have the answers, so they place the customer on hold and find a supervisor. This can frustrate the customer even more and take up the supervisor's time.

Sentiment analysis can help provide agents with suggestions to de-escalate the situation. The AI-powered contact center is trained on your operating procedures, knowledge base, previous conversations, and much more. Agents can then quickly receive suggestions to help the customer without placing them on hold.

4. Improve customer experience and self-service

AI has access to your knowledge base, which can help you provide customers with a much better experience. Customers want their issues resolved quickly, and many prefer to find the answer on their own rather than having to make a call or get in touch with an agent through other communication channels. With AI, chatbots can handle many of your customers' common questions.

Whether your customers need help during unstaffed business hours or during the day, the AI chatbot can help. This frees agents to handle more complex issues that require human assistance.

5. Reduce costs

As we've covered, a primary benefit of AI contact centers is workforce management, which helps reduce costs by preventing overstaffing during times when it's slower than usual. AI-powered contact center software has such a wide range of features that it may replace other tools in your stack, saving your company from other monthly or annual fees.

Zoom Contact Center goes a step further to provide value for teams, offering its AI Companion across all eligible paid packages at no additional cost.

6. Make processes more efficient

AI contact centers help make agents more efficientby finding answers for customers and generating wrap-up summaries. They also make life easier for supervisors and quality managers by providing information that allows them to spend more time helping agents improve their day-to-day tasks.

7. Resolve language barriers

ACD enables AI contact centers to connect customers with agents who speak their language, but it can also do much more. AI can translate in real time. For example, a Spanish-speaking client can use your chat to speak with an English-speaking agent. Using the chatbot, the agent will see English text, and when they respond, the customer will see Spanish text.

Best practices when implementing an AI contact center

When getting started with an AI contact center, it may seem overwhelming, but you can make the process a bit more seamless by following some of our best practices.

• Set clear goals and objectives:Create goals that align with your business's needs. Do you want to be more efficient, improve the customer experience, or have better training for agents? It may be all of the above, but be sure to define these goals to ensure the contact center is helping you reach them.
• Thoroughly research software options: Once you have goals, find AI contact center software with the right features. These features should align with your goals and work well with your call center's operations.
• Have an integration plan: Prior to setting up the technology, have a plan in place to train your agents on how to use the new tool. To do this, be sure your training team properly understands the technology, then create a lesson plan to train the agents. And remember, it's always helpful to show your agents how this new contact center can make their lives easier.
• Maintain privacy and security: As with other forms of software that store customer information, it's important to protect that information with firewalls and strong passwords.
• Monitor and evaluate performance: You should regularly monitor how your new AI contact center is performing and whether it's meeting your goals. For example, Zoom Virtual Agent has a bot simulator where you can test and troubleshoot your bots before setting them live to interact with your customers. Part of this process should involve feedback from call center agents, supervisors, and others who may use the contact center regularly.

How Zoom Contact Center uses AI to help transform businesses

An AI contact center can help propel your call center to the next level by creating more efficiencies, improving the customer experience, and helping your staff.

Zoom Contact Center uses the latest AI technology, employing features like sentiment analysis, Agent Assist, and ACD. It also integrates with popular platforms like Salesforce and Zendesk. To learn more about how Zoom Contact Center can help your business, request a demo today.