Will AI Dominate Call Centers In 2021?

In 2020, owing to the pandemic and preference for digital channels for transactions and communication, businesses came across changing customer preferences and expectations. These changes forced organizations to adopt new and advanced technological solutions in their call centers and customer service to efficiently cater to their customers’ demands. Furthermore, with millions of requests for information and services from the customers since the COVID-19 crisis, the need for robust customer service increased amongst several organizations.

The year 2021 and the subsequent waves of the pandemic accelerated the use of AI and call center automation to enhance and improve customer experience.

AI call centers support higher call volumes, provide personalized service solutions to customers, and more. In today’s article, we shall see how the call center AI market has evolved over the past year, and AI will really take over the call centers in 2021?

How is AI helping call centers enhance customer experience?

Let us see how conversational AI and other AI technologies have evolved the call centers and their ability to provide an enhanced customer experience.

1. Enhancing the outdated IVR or Interactive Voice Response in call centers

The IVRs used to serve their purpose back in the day when they first came out. But today, customers find it downright annoying, frustrating, and time-consuming, which degrades the customer experience.

Therefore, to handle the incoming surge of customer requests in 2021, many organizations replaced IVRs with AI-driven technologies such as chatbots and Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). These AI chatbots call centers interact with their customers in a much more robust and intelligent manner, enhancing user and customer experience.

2. Conversational AI in the call centers

Conversational AIs help automate customer conversations and interactions in a human-like manner. With no physical interaction between the organization and its customers last year, conversational AI helped and empowered businesses to interact with their customers in a personalized way.

As a result, they also help cut costs and losses, driving the net revenue. Apart from improving customer experience drastically, conversational AIs also allow agents to focus on complex tasks, while call center automation handles repetitive tasks.

3. Predictive Behavioral Routing (PBR)

PBR uses analytics and AI to match a specific customer to the right and suitable agent who can handle their requests properly. PBR first matches the customer to a specific customer personality model, which further routes calls with the suitable agents capable of handling those personality types.

Thus, PBR provides personalized customer service in conjunction with IVRs and CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

How is AI set to improve customer experience?

AI call center provides an enhanced user experience and saves cost and time for many organizations. AI-driven technologies and analytics analyze customer’s tone and sentiments for better interaction and also provide real-time feedback on customer and employee insights.

The personalized, seamless, and omnichannel AI call center technology makes all the difference in providing an enhanced customer experience and increasing employee productivity.

Summing Up

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and forced more and more businesses to adopt AI solutions and AI-driven technologies within their call centers and other business areas to enhance their customer experience. AI improved the current and outdated IVR technology with IVAs and addressed small to bigger issues of customers in a highly personalized and efficient manner.

In 2021, businesses will continue to deliver exceptional customer service through conversational AIs, AI-driven chat tools, PBR, and more. Therefore, it is critical to find the solution that will help you provide a customized and personalized customer experience to your customers through intuitive solutions.

You can check out interface.ai to understand how their intelligent virtual assistant is enabling AI call center automation for credit unions and banks.

Also Read: The Growing Role Of Artificial Intelligence In Business