Andi Anugrah
The first “chatterbot,” ELIZA was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s. Originally developed for a psychological setting, ELIZA would aid doctors treating patients.
First created to demonstrate the theory that communication between humans and machines would be superficial, chatbots have turned out to be key to customer service in today’s modern contact center.
AI currently supplements the human workforce through the deployment of virtual agents, essentially chatbots that can handle frontline activities such as account or balance lookup, password resets, and other common, yet low-complexity activities.
Aided customer self-service is another current use case for AI in the contact centre. This type of assistance quickly provides relevant information to customers, helping to increase customer satisfaction (CSAT).
As time progressed, artificial intelligence solutions also aided human contact centre agents, prompting them with next-best actions, reducing data entry, and handling other mundane aspects of the role of an agent.
Solutions like Talkdesk Agent Assist provide agents answers or support to progress the conversation and simplify tasks such as searching product information. Agent assist technology provides human agents upsell and cross-sell opportunities based on access to database information on the products and services purchased by customers.
A third way that AI is being deployed in today’s contact centres is for data collection and analysis. The volume of customer data generated through the contact centre is vast and can provide a wide array of insights, including:
To be clear, artificial intelligence and AI-enabled virtual agents will not replace human agents in the call centre any time soon. That said, the 2020-21 pandemic did prompt many contact centres to accelerate the adoption of AI-enhanced solutions.
Future contact centres will increasingly employ a hybrid model that combines AI and human interaction. With chatbots and guided self-service rising in efficiency in handling low-level customer inquiries, human agents will continue to address more complex issues and problem-solving—as well as providing the empathetic and personalized customer service that consumers demand. Here are a few future-looking applications of artificial intelligence to keep an eye on:
While AI-enabled technologies have made considerable inroads into the contact center, there is still much advancement that can be made in using these solutions to perfect customer service.
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