Reshaping the Contact Center, Agent, and Customer Experience with AI

Key Takeaways

• AI is changing contact centers, moving them away from high-volume voice support.
  • Gartner projects the rate of automated agent interactions will increase by over 6x, reaching approximately 10% by 2026, up from 1.6% in 2022*.
• By focusing on outcomes instead of just solving immediate customer challenges, companies can get the most from their technology investments.
• AI can help deliver highly-empathetic CX, reduce costs and deliver desired outcomes—improved customer retention, reductions in Average Handle Time, drive operational efficiency—without increasing costs.
• Humans train AI to meet companies’ goals, setting guardrails, and continually fine-tuning to optimize its efficacy.

The AI-empowered Contact Center

Contact centers have come a long way—in a relatively short time—from high-volume voice support. In just the past few years, technology has propelled contact center capabilities forward, empowering frictionless, seamless, multilingual digital experiences that dramatically improve customer loyalty and boost brands.

Digitally-savvy companies are harnessing technology to drive revenues, improve operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, and more—and digital-first partnerships are central to their success.

Understanding AI and What it Can Do for You

There’s a lot of confusion around—and oftentimes fear of—AI, but it’s critical to understand that AI works for you. The technology isn’t capable of autonomously taking over and making its own decisions, let alone taking away jobs from human workers. Organizations—and the people behind them—determine what AI does by setting parameters and guardrails and curating the content used by large language models (LLMs).

Keeping humans in the loop ensures that AI responses are continually optimized and fine-tuned to meet organizational goals, curating knowledge bases to create new opportunities for better service. After all, it’s humans who train AI; companies who lean into its capabilities empower their employees as much as their customers.

In the contact center sphere, AI-enabled Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms provide full visibility into customer intent, illuminate the entirety of the customer journey, and empower agents with the tools they need to deliver vastly improved CX.

AI bots and conversational AI drive measurable improvements—reductions in Average Handle Time (AHT), increasing speed of resolution, harnessing predictive engagement and routing to find the best-fit live agent support—significantly reducing costs while streamlining and simplifying the customer journey.

AI-powered tools like Agent Assist help frontline agents by providing next-best actions to empower more efficient support, improving customer loyalty and engagement. Conversational AI bots can also pull from fortified knowledge bases to engage with customers directly, offering empathetic support for a cost-effective, quality alternative to high-volume voice support. As a real-world example, based on our legacy as a digital transformation business process leader, AI helped a leading skincare giant achieve:

• 15% call containment in voice channels
• 18% call containment in chat
• 11% improvement in customer retention
• 2x the call volume routed to best-fit agents

Finding the Right Solution for Today and Tomorrow

For companies considering harnessing AI, it’s essential to think beyond just the contact center and focus on desired outcomes—reducing costs, increasing customer retention, continuous quality improvement—with a firm understanding of the importance of the customer experience.

Investments in AI technology should build for today and deliver for tomorrow, ensuring that immediate needs are met while creating a world of new possibilities to solve future challenges. Digitally-powered solutions that deliver seamless CX, like Alorica IQ, make it easy for contact centers to improve delivery and reduce costs.

Technology partnerships empower clients to use AI to drive improvements across their entire organization—beyond just the contact center floor—while reducing costs and delivering greater capabilities than ever before. Having a trusted partner who has a holistic view of your business, and integrated solutions to drive digital transformation, will help guide you towards the best solutions—and outcomes.

Discover more about Alorica IQ and AI-powered digital CX transformation.

* Gartner