Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most promising technologies of the 21-st century. The same can be applied to modern call (contact) centers; some believe AI will improve call center functioning, while others claim it will cut human jobs. The actual situation, however, is much more complex.
Main Benefits
AI technology can provide good value for those who apply them to their systems. The same is also valid for call centers since AI technology enables and automates multiple functions that were previously unavailable or tedious to accomplish.
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables machines to understand and interpret human language – both written and spoken. With NLP, computers are able to detect language patterns and identify relationships between words to understand what people truly want. Virtual assistants (VAs) such as Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa, and Apple Siri are mostly NLP-based systems. NLP is also being applied in automated call centers.
Machine Learning
Using AI, the computers can program themselves and undertake autonomous decisions by analyzing the circumstances and performing their actions accordingly. That’s machine learning, i.e., a system that can adapt to needs in reality. However, ML systems need to be trained before they are put in a production environment.
Data Analytics
AI brings many advancements to the data analytics field. Data analytics solutions analyze the behavior of thousands of clients and hundreds of calls and will provide detailed call center insights on a large number of users. Visually presented insights are one of the benefits.
Possible Unemployment
One of the significant concerns about AI usage in call centers is that AI-based machines will never get tired and can work for hours without being paid. That makes it favorable for the business owners and causes concerns for many human workers who might lose their jobs.
There are obvious benefits for call centers that start using AI, and one of them is faster call resolution. IVR (interactive voice response) can resolve many fundamental call center problems. In addition, an improved AI can resolve even complex issues, which causes even more significant concerns for the paid human workers. For example, an independent study showed that a company that improves its first-call responses could efficiently save millions of dollars a year, even with few improvements.
Human Empathy
Besides the benefits it brings, AI cannot imitate human empathy. Yet, empathy may be one of the critical reasons for keeping human operators in the call center. Although AI provides excellent tools and offers faster resolution to general human queries, humans are still needed for the more sophisticated, complex questions to be handled.
Supporting Your AI Based Contact Center
Call centers will still require humans in the upcoming years, but the technological features in the BYOC model, like that offered by IDT, can provide many benefits for those human operators. IDT’s BYOC empowers your contact center with a cloud-native, highly customizable plugin that includes speed, agility, and reliability. With low-code, no-code, and custom-code development tools, you get the assurance of 99.95% uptime SLA and quickly scale to any enterprise demand. In addition, IDT’s BYOC integration is bundled with a highly experienced consulting and development team that helps in optimizing business processes, ensure business continuity, and delivering solutions to improve your contact center work.
