It’s time to face the facts, people. Companies are becoming cloud-based and jumping on the machine learning bandwagon, everything is happening digitally and data is sovereign. You can’t get away from it, so you might as well join the conga line.
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 isn’t around anymore. Software keeps improving, driving the world forward.
The contact center 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 center is a headset and an Internet connection.
Technically, you don’t even need a workforce anymore. You can outsource your calls to home agents or a BPO. Your contact center can be, for all intents and purposes, totally invisible.
Advancements in AI are only going to speed things up even more. In fact, we don’t foresee advancements slowing down ever, not when tech giants such as Google and IBM have their sights set on quantum computing. (But we’ll save that for another time.)
So get comfortable, because we’re going to tell you why you shouldn’t be freaking out about the onset of AI.
AI can only improve your service offering
Here at Zailab, we’re all about machine learning. In fact, man and machine working together is definitely our kind of utopic vision for the future. We’ve even blogged about it. Hell, 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 personalized 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 optimizing 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 we 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 we use machine learning to change the game
The Zailab tech wizards have designed our solution to help you create a self-managing contact center that’s constantly learning and improving its own routing capabilities. All you need to do is sit back while the optimization algorithms do their thang.
Our 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 prioritized.
It’s basically asking itself, ‘Which interaction must I serve, and to whom?’ and then it answers its own question without bothering you.
We’re essentially using machine learning to guarantee a much, much higher rate of successful outcomes.
How? We’re glad you asked.
As we mentioned, our algorithm studies the data fed into the system – metrics such has 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 won’t 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.