6 priorities for building an effective AI contact center strategy

Welcome to the new era of contact centers.

While contact centers of the past were solely staffed by humans, an artificial intelligence (AI) contact center combines AI efficiency with human empathy to offer an improved customer experience (CX).

An AI contact center offers more capabilities for improving CX than a traditional contact center. For instance, smart features can automate support services while operating 24/7, enabling customers to resolve issues on their own timelines. Many AI features are also scalable without requiring agent oversight.

Overall, AI capabilities offer a better CX, deeper data insights, better risk mitigation, and increasingly personalized interactions—but only if the underlying strategy is up to par.

Discover some of the most important priorities to consider when building a contact center strategy.

1. Implement generative AI that saves agents time in their workflows.

Contact center agents have a lot of responsibilities, such as after-call summaries, that take up significant time. That’s why incorporating generative AI into contact centers can be such a game-changer. AI can automate key parts of the workflow, relieving agents of some of their routine, time-consuming tasks.

Useful generative AI features include real-time generative knowledge and automatic interaction summaries, automatic topic and sentiment trend identification, and automatic dialogue generation.

For instance, generative AI can automatically analyze customer interactions and generate summaries, providing agents with vital insights regarding customer sentiment and pain points, without the hassle of manually collecting and reviewing that information.

These summaries can even flag the action items that agents should take. In fact, AI workflow automation technologies can help agents reduce after-call work by completing follow-up tasks like ticket creation, email notifications, and new contact creation in a CRM system.

Generative AI can also boost the use of self-service features by enabling automated chatbots and more conversational, flexible interactive voice response (IVR) systems. This helps customers efficiently and independently resolve issues, leaving agents free to address more complicated customer queries.

2. Train agents for effective customer interaction.

While it can be tempting to rely on AI to guide contact center agents through customer interactions, it’s still vital to carefully train all agents.

During contact center agent training, instructors must give agents the skills and knowledge they need to handle customers and their requests successfully. This means ensuring all agents know correct call center etiquette. After all, first impressions matter—and agents have to keep the interaction quality high throughout the entire interaction.

This also means teaching agents how to be active listeners and build rapport with customers quickly. The same goes for other methods of communication. Whether agents are talking on the phone, chatting over SMS, or writing emails, they should be pleasant, empathetic, and engaged. Adding a touch of personalization can also go a long way.

The good news is that contact center technology can simplify agent training. Enhanced integration technologies like speech and text analytics provide insights into agent performance and quickly pinpoint areas where they may be struggling.

3. Analyze customer interactions to improve future performance.

An organization can’t improve its AI contact center or develop a winning AI contact center strategy if it doesn’t know how customers currently feel. That’s why reviewing and analyzing customer interactions is essential.

One easy way to gather feedback is by conducting a customer service survey following an interaction to understand better how agents are doing and how customers feel. This can help the organization make more informed decisions moving forward, which could result in increasingly helpful, efficient, and meaningful customer interactions and better customer experience.

Organizations can also access real-time interaction analytics to gain insight into a customer’s mood, the topic of the conversation, keywords, and more. This gives those in charge a better idea of the real root cause of a customer’s issues. It can also help them understand friction points and misunderstandings between agents and customers.

Leverage these real-time interaction analytics features to improve AI contact center strategy:

• Dashboards: Dashboards can provide key insights regarding intent, trending topics, customer sentiment, and more at a glance.

• Sentiment analysis and mood insights: By collecting and analyzing information about customers’ sentiments or moods, organizations can better understand where things are going right or wrong and the overall customer experience.

• Transcription cards: These integrate speech-to-text and natural language processing to highlight key details in transcriptions, ranging from customer intent to the context behind the interaction.

• Utterance audio players: For teams dealing with many calls, utterance audio players can streamline the process of identifying what causes customer issues without forcing a review of the entire transcription.

4. Empower agents with intelligent, real-time assistance during each interaction.

Customers expect high-quality assistance at all times, and organizations can provide that by crafting an AI contact center strategy that carefully balances AI assistance with agent contribution. AI can help guide and assist agents throughout each interaction, resulting in faster resolution and happier customers.

More specifically, AI can offer agents contextual recommendations and next best actions during live interactions with customers, and save them the hassle of finding information on their own while simultaneously handling customers. It can also suggest relevant and on-tone responses for chats or emails.

This sets up agents to quickly and accurately answer customer inquiries, boosting operational efficiency while lowering overall contact center costs. This seamless collaboration between AI and human agents ensures that customers always feel heard and valued, receiving the high-quality assistance they expect.

5. Personalize customer interactions with communication across preferred channels.

These days, customers not only appreciate but expect fully personalized interactions—and that doesn’t just refer to the messages themselves. In addition to going beyond generic messages, organizations need to communicate with customers via their preferred method.

Some people rarely check their email but are happy to communicate via chat, while others prefer to talk on the phone. That’s why an essential part of any successful AI contact center strategy includes multiple channels for communication:

• AI chatbots: Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence can operate 24/7/365, allowing customers to receive help at the times that are most convenient for them.

• Live chat with an agent: Like AI chatbots, live chats provide real-time support, but ensure there’s an agent on the other end.

• Phone support: Speaking with an agent automatically adds that personal touch many customers crave and can give agents deeper insights into customers’ emotions. Plus, it’s ideal for complicated situations where typed text may fall short.

• Social media: By taking customer service to social media, organizations can meet them where they are. Plus, social media allows for incredibly casual and friendly interactions.

• Email: Email is ideal for issues that don’t require immediate response or resolution. The format allows customers to describe questions or issues in detail.

• Mobile messaging: Some customers prefer to receive support over a mobile messaging platform, so it’s important to include SMS as a support option when designing an AI contact center strategy.

An AI contact center strategy that allows for omnichannel engagement gives customers incredible flexibility and the power of choice. They can receive help when and how they want it, which makes a difference in a world where 76% of customers value engagement in their preferred channel.

6. Ensure safety and ethics are top of mind.

Another essential part of any AI contact center strategy is responsible, ethical use of AI. Companies must establish vital guardrails and help pinpoint areas for improvement to ensure AI-generated responses are ethical, unbiased, compliant, and accurate.

To make the most out of AI while ensuring quality and safety, companies need a human-in-the-loop tool that provides control and visibility, helping protect the brand from poor AI experiences.

On the other hand, AI itself can improve safety. AI features can fight fraud through measures like customer authentication via voice biometrics and analyzing the phone numbers of incoming calls.

AI can also help maintain compliance in a contact center environment. For example, an AI-based tool can learn from historical patterns, develop a baseline of user behaviors, then flag unexpected events and present next best actions.

Build an AI contact center strategy that moves the needle.

Building an effective AI contact center strategy means embracing a number of priorities. Use generative AI to streamline workflows, train agents for better customer interactions, leverage analytics for ongoing improvement, provide agents with real-time assistance, personalize communication channels, and ensure the safe and ethical use of AI.

By following these priorities, a contact center can meet and exceed customer expectations, setting a new standard for service excellence. Upgrade customer outreach strategy today and experience the transformative power of AI in action.

Want to take your AI contact center strategy to the next level? Discover Talkdesk AI.