How to Transform Contact Centres using AI

As the customer service industry continues to evolve, contact centres are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline and enhance their customer experience (CX).

Among the many AI features available, we think four stand out for their immense potential:

• AI-enabled speech-to-text transcribing,
• Sentiment analysis,
• Personalisation for different local dialects, and
• Automatic after call work (ACW).

In this blog post, we’ll explore how they could help contact centres provide more efficient, effective, and personalised service to their customers.

AI-enabled speech-to-text transcribing

Using speech-to-text technology, customer service agents can easily transcribe phone conversations and chats in real-time, allowing them to focus more on the customer’s needs and less on taking notes.

This enables the agent to be more present in the conversation, providing a more empathetic and personalised experience for the customer.

Let’s take a use-case in the financial services sector:

When a customer calls their bank with a question about their account, the speech-to-text feature can transcribe the conversation in real-time, enabling the following:

• Agents can see the exact words the customer is using
• The AI can predict the intent behind the text query, then suggest relevant products or services that match the intent
• Flag important information such as account numbers and ID numbers so that the agent doesn’t need to ask these details again

This allows the agent to adjust their tone and approach accordingly, providing a more positive CX.

With Toku Contact Centre’s speech-to-text functionality, you can generate text repositories of past customer conversations and real-time interactions, giving you a gold mine of data to understand your customers’ pain points and address them proactively.

Sentiment analysis

More businesses today are realising the importance of understanding customer emotions during an interaction in order to up their CX game. One key tool in achieving this is sentiment analysis technology.

This feature allows businesses to essentially “see” customer emotion, either in real-time or as a recording, then gain insight into customer satisfaction levels, pain points, and areas where they excel or fall short.

In the contact centre setting, we have a large volume of customer interactions, including phone calls, emails, chat sessions, and social media messages. It can be challenging to manually analyse each interaction and identify trends or areas for improvement.

However, with sentiment analysis, contact centre managers can quickly and easily understand the overall customer sentiment towards the business.

For example, using Toku Contact Centre, a call centre manager may notice a trend in negative sentiment among customers who have interacted with a particular agent. By reviewing the recordings of those interactions, the manager may identify that:

• The agent is using an ineffective script or
• Has a communication style that is not resonating with customers

Armed with this insight, the manager can provide targeted coaching and training to help the agent improve their communication skills and ultimately, provide a better CX.

Likewise, the manager could use Toku contact centre to identify areas where customers are expressing positive sentiment towards the business.

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Customer service: The contact centre platform can pick up on customers’ positive feelings about an interaction if they use vocabulary associated with helpfulness, friendliness, and efficiency.

Convenience: Want to know how easy it is for customers to use your app or website? The contact centre solution can identify comments in your interactions talking about how easy and convenient it is to access and use these platforms.

Now the manager has real data to identify what’s working, document it, and where applicable, replicate the best practices across other parts of the business.

Personalisation for different local dialects

In today’s globalised world, it’s essential for businesses to be able to communicate with their customers in their local dialect. However, this presents a challenge for contact centres, many of which are supported by agents who may not be familiar with a particular dialect.

Not anymore with Toku Contact Centre.

Using our contact centre software, businesses can train the model based on the local version of the language they require, so that they are better equipped to handle calls from customers speaking in different dialects.

Imagine a customer from a small town in Indonesia calls a bank’s contact centre to inquire about opening an account. The customer speaks a local dialect that is not commonly used.

However, with Toku Contact Centre, the system can immediately identify common phrases and language patterns unique to the dialect, then combine the knowledge with text-to-speech and sentiment analysis functionalities to help the agent provide more personalised and relevant assistance.

Why it matters: For any enterprise looking to expand operations in APAC, a contact centre solution that helps agents to better understand and respond to customers speaking in local dialects will help to improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Automatic after call work (ACW)

Another really cool feature we’re seeing now in many AI-powered contact centre platforms is Automatic Summary. In the past, agents would spend a few minutes after every call laboriously taking notes on the interaction to hand over to the next agent.

However, thanks to text-to-speech and generative AI’s superb ability to summarise raw data, agents now can get the interaction’s main points automatically summarised for them.

Not only that – as mentioned earlier, sentiment analysis can predict and tag the summary with the right customer intent.

Why it matters: Instead of scrolling through the entire conversation transcript, the new agent who takes over the interaction can quickly read the summary, understand the intent, and start helping the customer right away.

Conclusion

By incorporating AI into their operations, contact centres can significantly improve CX, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

As contact centres continue to embrace AI, these four features will likely become increasingly common and essential for delivering top-notch customer service. Importantly, we believe they will become almost indispensable to agents, empowering them to deliver more seamless, truly transformative customer experiences.