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AI and the Contact Centre:

Contact centres have seen massive changes over recent decades. They began as voice only, with agents using binders of information to find answers for callers and writing on paper forms to submit customer orders into the sales process. Then they progressed to multi-channel, and now omni-channel. We’re now entering the age of analytics and AI. Aragon Research has released an assessment of 13 providers of intelligent contact centres.

By Lee-Ann Dittrich

Lee-Ann is a researcher and business analyst who oversees benchmarking studies.

Digital Labour

Digital labour is the performance of tasks, formerly performed by people that are performed by software applications with or without an associated robot. Intelligent contact centres rely on AI (artificial intelligence) which includes analytics and chatbots rather than GPS and robots that are used in a warehouse.

Analytics

Intelligent contact centres can use both content analytics and voice analytics. Content analytics review how users access and interact with content which will provide contact centre staff information about the user. Voice analytics records voice and analyzes tone, pitch, volume, tempo and emphasis to provide information about the emotional state of the caller.

Scorecard

Each vendor shown in the ratings graphic has been categorized as one of: leaders, contenders, innovators or specialists.

Leaders have comprehensive strategies that align with industry direction and market demand, and effectively perform against those strategies.

Contenders have strong performance, but more limited or less complete strategies.

Innovators have strong strategic understanding and objectives but have yet to perform effectively across all elements of that strategy.

Specialists fulfill their strategy well, but have a narrower or more targeted emphasis and may excel in a certain market or vertical application.

Notable vendors that were not included in the report include Amazon, Fuze, Google, Nextiva, RingCentral and Seranova.

Partnering

Many contact centre providers have chosen to partner with Google and others to provide conversational AI capabilities to integrate with their existing offering.

New Approach

Aragon suggests that contact center providers will need to focus on the new way of working: 

Faster first call resolution to Improve customer satisfaction and save the cost of follow-ups

Lower customer effort/time to improve customer satisfaction and reduce contact center resource requirements

Lower customer churn which results from achieving the first two requirements

Improved agent experience—reduced stress and frustration

Lower costs through improved effectiveness

Predictions

By 2021, 50% of enterprises will deploy content analytics for a specific business use case.

By 2022, AI-based contact centres will be able to identify the real issue a customer is facing 50% faster than traditional approaches.

This article was published in the November 2019 edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:6 Issue:3

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