Improving the Contact Centre Using AI

Jafar Adibi of Talkdesk gives his ways to improve your contact centre using artificial intelligence (AI).

How Can We Enhance IVR Performance?

To enhance the IVR performance of your contact centre, natural language processing (NLP) analyses hundreds of millions of calls to determine why people are calling and how all the sentences coming from the customer–agent interactions can go into one category.

There are many ways to ask the same thing. A robust, comprehensive and sophisticated NLP program, powered by AI, is key to understanding why a customer is calling and routing them accordingly.

An interactive voice response (IVR) without NLP will struggle to identify why your customers are calling. Enhanced IVR performance can help you and your contact centre by:

• Discovering customer intent: Know why people are calling you to improve your entire operation and to have more and better-informed contact centre agents.

• Identifying the best IVR set-up (e.g. new IVR exits): Sometimes just adding a new exit or reshuffling position two and three is all it takes. Those couple of seconds in every call can bring a significant improvement at the end of the year.

• Finding agents in need of coaching: Identify which agent performs better for each topic. A three-month analysis of a contact centre can reveal that some agents have better performance in certain topics.
  This comprehensive data allows you to map those agents to certain topics and look at KPIs such as Average Handle Time (AHT) and estimate the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) performance, offering routing optimization suggestions that can improve the entire interaction.

• Providing training recommendation: An AI-powered IVR can offer training recommendations by identifying which agents are in need of additional coaching.

Enhancing Agents’ Power

AI can help you enhance agent intelligence and overall responsiveness. Before every call, AI can look at the entire knowledge base, the CRM and every conversation transcript.
AI assistance analyses these information sources and, when a person calls in real time, the voice is transcribed into text.  The knowledge base can then be browsed and the whole conversation and all the available data can be used to fetch the most relevant document on the topic and present it to the agent.

Agents come and go. They do not stay for long. That is the reality of the business, and agent training is a hassle. Can AI streamline the agent training process? Can we bring knowledge under the agent’s fingertips in a snap? The agent might not have any clue about the customer’s questions, but what if AI can deliver the right information that could help the agent solve the issue in 10 seconds after the conversation begins?

Crawling through an NLP-assisted IVR is how you know why your customers are calling. The sooner you know this and start improving the way your contact centre carries business, the sooner you will get on your feet with AI.

Then comes the first baby steps with an agent assist, where you will experience the empowerment that such a strong AI tool can give to your agents.