Today there is a need for companies to empower their agents to make decisions and provide them with necessary AI-powered tools, as collaboration of AI and humans produces better results by fuelling the efficiency of the agents and giving them the necessary bandwidth to handle queries that require human empathy. ClearTouch, cloud-hosted contact center platform provider enhances the potential customer experience of organizations across multiple sectors like Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, BPOs, ARM/Collections, e-commerce, and Automotive and helps enterprises to fuel the efficiency of their agents. Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President, ClearTouch shares his insights on how they assist organisations in the same and how AI and data analytics are helping the contact center agents to improve the customer experience.
- What is the current state of artificial intelligence adoption in the contact centre industry? Can you elaborate on some of the most prominent trends?
Contact centers are the backbone of an organization around which the entire perception of a business is formed. This segment currently accounts for a 33.4% share of the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Call Centers market, and it will continue to grow.
There are various trends that are emerging in this space. In the pandemic led lockdown, contact centres have witnessed the rise of omnichannel, and virtual assistants to handle the growing customer requests. The agents have moved to remote work in significant numbers, making cloud platforms more critical than ever. And as these new realities converge, it is fascinating to consider what lies ahead in the evolution of contact center technologies. There’s a boom in hyper-personalization- which essentially unites real-time customer data with AI to generate insights that can be further enhanced by the Enterprises in a useful manner. For example, while monitoring the sentiment of an individual in real-time, if through insights it is known that that the customer is unhappy and the business is at risk, the contact center can trigger a discount offer; or alternatively the contact center can add that customer to an outbound list for a more personal touch, so a human proactively makes amends. Another one of the key emerging trends is that of contact centers adopting tools like Conversational AI which basically refers to the use of AI-powered chatbots and voicebots. This technology helps in automating a large portion of the query resolution through conversational intelligence. Conversational intelligence works by applying advanced analytics techniques to text and voice conversations which in turn helps in uncovering hidden data and insights. Then there’s this trend of evolving our good old softwares like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and IVR and getting so much more out of them than usual. Like IVR turning into intelligent bots and evolving from traditional menu systems/algorithms into smart ‘voicebots’ which are capable of handling complex customer queries.
- How does AI collaborate with humans and aid in offloading their tasks?
What differentiates a successful business from an unsuccessful one is customer experience. In the past few years this has not only proven due to the increased demand for a personalized customer experience, but also has pushed businesses for a faster response to their customers. So, businesses these days are naturally facing challenges in bridging the gap between the expectations of their customers and their delivery and on top of that, ensuring that happens smoothly without hampering the efficiency of their agents is too much to ask for. This is where AI comes into the picture. AI helps to analyse and map the needs, wants, desires, and behaviour patterns of the consumers and enlightens the human agents about the same, making their tasks easier by decoding the customer well using technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP). It helps in resolving Tier 1 customer service issues by redirecting them to the website’s FAQs, or the chatbots which in turn helps in filtering out the queries and unloading the agents off repetitive calls and gives the bandwidth to the agents to focus on the queries that demand human emotion and empathy. At its core, AI provides the context to accurately guide automation—whether led by humans or machines.
- What are the ways in which artificial intelligence and data analytics are helping contact centre agents to improve the customer experience?
AI improves the customer service journey in various ways, including tracking conversations in real-time and providing feedback to service agents. There are multiple benefits that Voice Analytics can provide to a contact center. As data is collected from each call, managers can see where their call center agent is lacking in customer service and how to improve. It might be that the agents need to learn more about the product or service, or it could be that consumers are unhappy with how they are treated. Voice Analytics can pick up on these small details and give managers ideas on how to improve customer service. AI powered Voice Analytics software takes the recorded voice and breaks it into structured data that is further analysed using high end technology to recognise words, tonality, acoustic measurements and even the amount of quiet in a conversation. It also helps in guiding the agents towards next best actions with in-call coaching alerts that accelerate resolution and pinpoint cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Automatically managing promises made on calls, such as ordering replacement parts, scheduling service calls and more- which leads to customer delight as his query was resolved in the blink of an eye.
ClearTouch’s Voice Analytics tools can help reveal deep business insights that are hidden inside every customer interaction. For instance, one of our banking service customers used our voice analytics to deep dive into thousands of recorded calls to identify the commonly asked queries. This helped them set up a self-service platform, and they used our solution to raise red flags by identifying words and phrases based on lists predefined by the users.
- What are ClearTouch’s offerings and how do they assist in differentiating their CX?
We support more than 1500+ enterprise customers around the globe and over 25000 agents in India, and to meet the ever increasing demand of the plethora of industries we cater to, we’ve been adding a lot of holistic and easy-to-use set of tools to our portfolio. For the past five years, we have been the only company in India to provide a pure and managed cloud contact center platform with free customization. We provide an omnichannel experience to the enterprises, meaning you get one view of your customers irrespective of the channels they use to reach you. Then one of our most unique tools is List management- that helps the enterprises to handle all the consumer touchpoints and interact with the data gathered in real-time ensuring greater visibility into your call center. Services like Workforce Management and Optimization that ensures you have the right support in place when the demand spikes and also helps in enhancing the productivity of the agents by training, coaching, mentoring, rewarding, and for adhering to Service Level Agreements (SLA) with the end customers. Solutions like inbound and outbound that essentially helps in routing the customer queries based on their skills, timing, and location. ClearTouch’s “always-on” cloud-based delivery model provides customers with immediate access to the newest version of the ClearTouch platform as well as the ability to easily scale up or down adjusting to evolving business needs
