How does artificial intelligence improve contact center efficiency?

Businesses everywhere use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experience (CX). For contact centers, AI has been particularly transformative.

AI increases efficiency and cuts costs by automating routine tasks and helping agents solve issues quickly and accurately, which means contact centers can handle more inquiries without needing additional staff. Because AI can process, understand, and respond to human language, it can also help increase a contact center’s self-service rates.

Overall, AI can help contact centers resolve queries faster, reduce costs per contact, and provide a better customer experience. AI adds value at a scale above and beyond what humans can do—in at least one case, just one minute of AI saved a contact center up to $17,424 over a year.

How AI for contact centers makes agents more efficient.

In today’s fast-paced, digital-first world, empowering agents to deliver efficient and effective customer service is essential. AI technology helps save costs and meet rising customer expectations. Here’s how AI can transform contact centers:

Multitasking made easy.

AI-driven automation helps agents juggle scheduling, administrative, and routine tasks effortlessly. This allows them to concentrate on more complex issues, enhancing their productivity.

Seamless workflows.

With AI, agents get an intuitive, easy-to-use, “single pane of glass” workspace that streamlines workflows and provides rich customer context. This ensures they have quick access to all necessary information, reducing time spent on each task.

Fast and accurate routing.

AI minimizes hold times by swiftly directing customer inquiries to the right agents. No matter the reason for the contact, AI ensures the message gets to the best person to handle it, cutting down wait times.

Quick problem-solving.

AI can collect data and information about scenarios customers are calling about, quickly surfacing the best results. This innersourcing process empowers agents to swiftly identify the root cause of customer issues.

Smarter knowledge management.

AI equips agents with contextual information to troubleshoot and solve customer issues fast. All agents access the same up-to-date information, enabling them to address customer questions more effectively and potentially reduce average wait times.

Real-time sentiment analysis.

AI takes the guesswork out of tricky customer interactions by analyzing customer tone. This helps agents understand how customers are feeling and provide them with an appropriate response.

Real-time agent assistance.

AI guides agents through customer conversations by providing contextual information and suggesting next steps. This support helps agents resolve issues quickly and ensures a smoother customer experience.

How customer-centric AI boosts contact center efficiency.

By providing AI-driven self-service features, companies empower customers to access the information they need without contacting agents. Quadient doubled its customer self-service rates while enhancing the customer experience and significantly improving overall contact center efficiency.

Here are some essential AI-powered, self-service capabilities for contact centers:

Helpful virtual assistants.

AI-driven virtual assistants provide instant answers to customer questions through a natural voice interface. This seamless self-service experience helps customers get the assistance they need without waiting for a human agent.

Automatic conversation flows.

Conversational AI can handle simple queries in a helpful, friendly tone. Customers get answers to their questions quickly at any time, while agents can focus on more complex issues.

Self-service knowledge base.

When consumers turn to an AI-powered knowledge base to answer their questions, it reduces the need for agent intervention and speeds up query resolution.

How AI for contact centers improves efficiency KPIs.

AI is quickly changing the way companies track and interpret KPIs. With AI, companies can extend the traditional data collection process, providing contact center teams with new, actionable insights on improving customer experience.

At the same time, an AI contact center will also drive improvements in many efficiency KPIs, including:

Customer satisfaction.

Typically, call centers determine this score via customer surveys and quality assurance evaluations. Regardless of the approach, this KPI is vital for assessing the call center’s effectiveness and overall efficiency. AI powers effective and personalized self-service options, meaning customers don’t have to wait for a human agent to answer their questions. AI can also analyze customer interactions to identify common issues and sentiment trends, allowing contact centers to address problems and proactively improve CX.

Average speed of answer.

This KPI is crucial for managers to measure the team’s accessibility to callers. The average answer speed gauges the typical time for agents to answer inquiries over a given period. It accounts for the time callers wait in the queue and the time it takes for the agent’s phone to ring but excludes the IVR navigation time. AI helps reduce the average speed of answer by efficiently routing calls.

Average time in queue.

Long waits in a queue are frustrating for callers. To keep wait times reasonable and maintain customer satisfaction, track the average time in queue. This metric, which is the total time callers spend waiting in queues divided by the number of calls answered, indicates whether a team meets service expectations. Intelligent call routing ensures that callers reach the right agent without unnecessary delays.

Leverage AI to improve contact center efficiency today.

When AI empowers a contact center, the results can transform a company’s output. For example, Talkdesk helped JK Moving Services improve their first call resolution rate by 41%—which helped them scale revenue by 74%. Call volumes rose 650% in two years, but support agents maintained an average hold time of 28 seconds. They also used Talkdesk to add automatic callback options and integrate Salesforce to manage all customer interactions.

Talkdesk also helped Sysco achieve six-figure savings through proactive caller messaging. Sysco also saw progress across many of its internal customer satisfaction metrics, including ease of doing business, technology rating, and care and service metrics. These improvements helped the Sysco customer service team achieve their highest-ever customer satisfaction score (4.8 out of 5).

AI can transform the efficiency of a contact center team, providing agents with the information and context they need to address customer questions, expanding customer self-service options, and helping companies improve essential KPIs.

Learn more about the game-changing benefits of an AI contact center.