AI Will Enable Contact Center Automation at Every Level of Operation

Identification and Verification through AI Contact Center Automation

Before you can offer a customer any assistance, you need to make sure that they are who they say they are. These identification and verification processes are commonly referred to as ID&V. When ID&V is conducted over the phone, it often takes the form of a security question, asked during an interaction.

This method seems like common sense but suffers from a number of flaws. If a customer’s passphrase or security question answers are leaked online, for instance, there’s nothing stopping fraudsters from getting in contact, and pretending to be a customer. Similarly, it’s an unfortunate fact that many of your customers won’t practice proper password management, and may forget the answers they gave, locking them out their own accounts.

An ideal ID&V process, then, should be impossible to break into through stolen information, and accessible at any time to the customer. Contact center automation provides a possible solution:

• Voice biometrics leverage AI to assign a digital ‘fingerprint’, unique to a particular customer's voice patterns. This can be done when a customer first signs up for a service, by asking them to repeat a phrase via voice call.

• From here, every time a customer calls up, they can repeat the passphrase and be verified by the system. They don’t have to memorize the phrase, because it’s not the phrase that matters: it’s the voice.

• Voice biometrics make it much harder for fraudsters to steal details. They raise the barrier to entry significantly; criminals need either the person at hand, or a highly realistic replication of their voice. Both of those will be costly and difficult to get hold of and serve as a deterrent to the overwhelming majority of scammers.

Under legacy systems, ID&V can take up as much as thirty seconds (and even longer if it doesn’t go to plan the first time). Cutting that down to ten seconds is a 20-second saving, which has a dramatic knock-on impact on overall contact center efficiency.

Intelligent Routing With Contact Center Automation

Once you’ve identified the customer, you need to figure out what they need. Routing customers is a famously taxing challenge. Traditionally, customers would call up and be presented with a list of options and asked to pick between them (think, press one for…). This method is referred to as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and is quickly becoming outdated, for a number of reasons:

• It’s time-consuming. There’s nothing worse than listening to a monotone, robotic voice list numbers and explanations; often it takes such a long time, that by the time you reach the end, you’ve already forgotten what the initial instructions were.

• It’s limiting. You might know the terminology of your business, but the customer doesn’t. Often, they’ll understand their problems in different terms, and the list you provide will seem confusing. If they don’t know which route to take, your customers are going to hang up.

The IVR will soon be a thing of the past because AI offers a better solution:

Rather than provide a list of possible solutions, let the customer tell you themselves. Begin with a pre-recorded message, asking the customer to state their problem. Natural Language Processing can pick out the key elements of their response, and align it to a possible customer journey. All this can be done in seconds, based on a spoken statement of intent for the customer. No IVR, no time wasted; AI can cut thirty seconds of pre-recorded explanations, and skip straight to the interaction.

Complete Self-Service through Contact Center Automation

Most customers want to speak to another human being, but not every customer inquiry requires human intervention to resolve. A large proportion of incoming customer contacts will be simple inquiries for information or small updates that customers can make themselves if you give them the tools to do so.

• Customers can be intelligently routed to fully-automated chatbots. These can be powered by generative AI, if appropriate guardrails are put in place to prevent hallucinations. These chatbots can operate over a webchat, SMS, or even voice, through text-to-speech.

• Chatbots can adopt a ‘persona’ – that is, a tone and communication style that mirrors the customer's own. These personas can be demographic, varying their diction (or even language) to make the customer as comfortable as possible.

• AI-powered chatbots like these allow a significant proportion of interactions to be fully automated. This has knock-on cost savings; less time spent on simple, repetitive inquiries means more time to resolve the issues that matter most; which in turn means a reduced workload and reduced labor costs.

The AI-powered chatbot is the main engine of contact center automation. The more customer inquiries that can be resolved through chatbots, the greater the reduction of costs for your contact center.

But AI adoption isn’t all about switching on a chatbot and calling it a day. You need a tailored approach that supports AI adoption across your business, driving value at every stage of your operations. To help you realize that strategy, you need an AI partner.