Contact centers face several critical challenges in the current market. Staffing shortages lead to longer wait times for customers, which drives agent burnout and increases churn. Additionally, customers have elevated demands. They expect to be able to connect with their favorite brands and receive seamless support at any time via the channel of their choosing. Contact center managers and administrators increasingly use AI and automation tools to address these issues.
While still in its infancy, AI technology has proven innovative in the contact center space. At CBTS, we have noticed several core automation trends driven by AI that are already influencing contact centers across sectors.
Learn more: AI and automation solutions in contact centers: The evolution of CCaaS
The automation trends shaping contact centers in 2024
Trend 1: Agent assist
AI-enabled solutions that help agents do their jobs more effectively are vital to combating agent burnout. Agent assist features include a function that “listens in” to calls and offers real-time suggestions. Some AI tools prompt agents with relevant knowledge base articles or products that boost opportunities to cross-sell to existing customers. Others provide sentiment analysis to help agents quickly tap into a customer’s mindset.
Additionally, AI can generate training and management data, including auto-scoring, automatic wrap-up code, and call categorization. This technology automatically classifies why customers are reaching out and how the agent resolved their call.
Trend 2: Advances in self-service
Another response to staffing shortages is to rely more heavily on self-service options to solve common customer problems. The next generation of interactive virtual agents (IVA) and interactive voice responders (IVR) are helping advance new levels of automation in contact centers. The trend has shifted from “dumb” chatbots to intelligent IVA that better understand customer intent. Self-service AI tools are more and more capable of sorting intent and intelligently routing calls while remaining channel agnostic. In fact, IVA is expanding to new channels, such as social media, across the Apple and Android operating systems.
Trend 3: Enhancing the call experience
Contact centers also benefit from AI tools in the digital workplace. Agents and customers enjoy better audio or video call quality from backend AI enhancements like embedded noise cancellation. AI is also making video meetings more immersive with enhancements like gesture recognition.
Additionally, real-time transcription is a game changer for agents and managers. Recorded calls are not only automatically transcribed and stored in the CRM of choice, but AI tools also generate a summary of the call that is searchable and divided into chapters.
Trend 4: Predicting the customer’s needs
Contact center automation tools are progressively capable of predicting customer needs. For example, an electricity utility might send a text alerting customers of a potential outage before the customer is affected.
Personalization also allows contact centers to shift from support to marketing by generating personalized offers or special promotions based on customer history. An example is a customized message (or chain of messages) to a customer who cancels a subscription, offering a discount for keeping the service or resubscribing.
Trend 5: Real-time translation
Enterprises with global workforces also reap the benefits of automation in the form of real-time translation, which breaks down communication barriers. Employees across countries can see real-time subtitles and respond in their own language without relying on a human translator.
Trend 6: Advances in security
As AI advances, so do AI-powered threats, such as deepfakes. AI can now convincingly create duplicate voice imitations of organizational leaders. Threat actors sometimes use these voice copies to fraudulently request large financial transfers.
To combat this threat, cybersecurity teams are developing advanced voice biometrics. This technology creates a unique “voice print” for each user, similar to a fingerprint. When paired with a code phrase, this voice print creates a unique security measure based on many inputs beyond the basic modulation. An automated tool measures dozens of qualities to generate this unique identifier. Already used in finance, we expect to see greater use of voice biometric authentication across healthcare and other highly regulated industries in the coming months.
Learn more: Modern data management: Infrastructure solutions for AI and data-driven decision-making
Trend 7: Expanding what a contact center can do
Traditionally, a contact center deals primarily with inbound requests–support calls from customers and users. However, AI automation tools have led to a new trend: contact centers supporting outbound communications. For example, it is traditional to follow up with customers, asking for their input on a recent call experience. Automation can follow up not just in the immediate aftermath of a call but for weeks and months after, personalizing messages to craft custom marketing promotions.
What will the contact center of tomorrow look like?
Future contact centers will likely be able to address more support requests with fewer live agents. We may see a shift in the role of the contact center. Contact centers will no longer simply provide support; they will be more involved in guiding customers through the entire buyer’s journey.
However, with an increased reliance on automation tools comes the added pressure to get the most out of your AI-enabled tools while maintaining strict security protocols and compliance. Additionally, it can be challenging to decide which technology to implement first and how to do so effectively in terms of time and budget.
CBTS provides innovative advice and support for responsibly implementing AI tools and automation workflows in the contact center. CBTS has the experience and vetted methodologies to help your team seamlessly deploy new technology wherever the trends may lead. Questions? Get in touch with one of our automation experts today.
