What challenge can AI adaptation bring to your contact center?
The latest technologies like AI, natural language processing, chatbots can give more powerful possibilities that every contact center would like to have. It can help to deliver more personalized customer experience, faster, around the clock support, facilitate customer journey on every stage, and stand out of the crowd like customer support innovator. It’s said that companies with AI can boost employee productivity by up to 60% while reducing service costs 30% percent. While numbers seem crazy not many businesses know how to adapt these new tools and what to expect from them. Therefore, a portion of companies are still waiting to see how new technologies can merge into already existing practices.
While some are fast to jump in the novelty, it does not always result in desired outcomes. Maybe everything was considered properly, or technology is just not ready to offer good decisions for your company specifics. But the ones who wait too long are later pushed by the simple need of customers, who very soon get used to faster, easier communication.
To help these in doubt about how AI will transform their contact center, we offer to look through some insights, thoughts, and statistics about the interaction process to help you grasp how it will change the lives of business, employees, and customers.
Contact center specialists
Let’s start with ones who will be closest to contact center redesign. AI is promising to improve the career of some and seems to frighten others to their place. Not long ago, IBM published that chatbot can answer up to 80% of questions on their own. While these numbers can be very fascinating for companies, horror can be seen in the eyes of customer support, whose main job was, well… to answer customer questions. Hence no, they don’t have to pack their luggage anytime soon, since 50% of businessmen surveyed by a chatbot analysis said they did not implement chatbots due to the lack of usage options (yet). But service specialists should get ready for changes. There is a huge market of little bots, ready to talk to multiple customers at one time, day and night, learning new things every minute. So what to do when one of these chatbots will take most of the work?
First of all, chatbots cannot operate completely on their own. Customers will always need the possibility to talk with a live person. But there will be a lot of free time to fill. Customer support specialists are expected to focus on more added-value, analytical activities. Everyone talks about raising job satisfaction and productivity. While this may sound fun, in reality, it means that customer support will have to work on new skills and abilities. Job-specific will likely change, therefore requirements too. Fara Haron (KAS) in the interview to Contact Center Pipeline magazine said that new technology implementation into agents’ work is providing an opportunity to up-level the position and offering a chance to learn new skills. Therefore companies are expected to update clients’ support specialists with more competences.
With the changing nature of work qualities like fast learning and technological understanding can be mentioned as your personality skills in the CV, if you search for work as a customer service specialist.
Companies
A lot of nice statistics states that companies with AI technologies can reach better results, save costs and make clients more satisfied. While this is all nice, better opportunities mean more expectations, since customers are aware of changes, and demand them everywhere. According to Forber, around 70% of Millennials are expecting to see a chatbot on company’s websites. So there is a need, but not many things are secure.
It may be challenging to choose the right technology because not all chatbots can perform as efficiently as needed. According to surveys, 58% of respondents believe that chatbots were not as effective as expected. A piece of advice for choosing AI tools is that it should be clear how they will actually work and in which ways exactly they will change company’s contact centers.
While employees can worry about technology changing their job places, another task for the company is to communicate all the possible changes clearly, be transparent and open about their plans. It can cause a lot of confusion if support teams will find out about changes one week before.
Recruitment will be affected. New job vacancies will appear for bot trainers and data analysts, but customer support specialists will need new skills too. Customers now are more adapted to solve simple problems alone. They can check the FAQ on your website and know how to troubleshoot. This means they will contact support services for more sophisticated tasks. Therefore, there will be a need for adjusting expectations for recruitment and hiring.
AI will change company’s infrastructure too. It will be easier to communicate, and valuable information about what customers are like and what they need, will not be lost in support agents’ heads. The company will be able to partner across different departments. This way, it will be possible to adapt to customers’ needs faster, and with more accuracy.
Customers
Customers cannot choose if they want AI-powered support or not, but they will be the ones most affected by it. Communication will change, and hopefully, for good. Sometimes markets and their clients think about the same thing differently. Especially about technology, because, let’s face it, not many of us understand it completely. While the majority of customers still would prefer to talk to a live person instead of a bot, because they think the human will understand their better, 64% of business respondents believe that chatbots allow them to provide a more personalized service experience for customers. Well, this is interesting. Every time different understanding about the same thing arises, there is possibly misunderstanding somewhere. Or lack of context. We won’t deny that anytime soon there will be some other form of life (or code) that could understand a human better than a fellow human. But until some point, sophisticated understanding is redundant. If customers will be properly informed, that behind a chatbot, a person waits to help anytime in need, they will happily talk with the bot without fear of misunderstanding.
Companies should not forget to pay attention to security questions. With certain issues arising from personal data usage, some customers may be concerned about the new technology, which you will implement to analyze their data. New trends show that by 2022, banks can automate up to 90% of their customer interaction by adopting chatbots. While we are all taught not to share any passwords or other sign-in information with the bank via phone, customers may have fear how much data they can safely unveil to chatbots. Be sure to adopt bots with proper security parameters and don’t forget to inform your customers about it.
Right now, AI technologies in customer care are just trends of innovations, that most successful brands are fast to adapt. Companies can still choose, whether to invest in them or not. But with the fast-changing customer relationship that digitalization brought, there is not a lot of time to consider. Sooner or later, companies will have to choose if they adopt these changes, or be left behind. More customers are warming up or expecting the companies to use AI technologies in interaction, while most of them want to get more personalized service, in exchange for loyalty. While AI technologies can be a challenge for a company, a proper investigation, and understanding, how will it affect every aspect of a company’s environment can make your company ready to face difficulties.
