Scale up Your Customer Service with Contact Center AI

With the Christmas holiday season just around the corner, it’s more than likely that your business is looking at ways to scale up its customer service team over the next few months to maximize revenue and keep current customers happy.

This period can be a stressful time for many organizations, with the majority left struggling to meet the expectations of their customer. By successfully ramping up your customer service team this year you can not only acquire new customers but also tap into new profits.

This year, the National Retail Federation expects that holiday spending will be up between 4.3% to 4.8% over 2017 for a total between $717.45 billion and $720.89 billion. Each consumer said they will spend an average of $1,007.24 during the holiday season this year, up 4.1 percent from the $967.13 they said they would spend last year.

To counteract the boom in sales during this period, many businesses simply hire seasonal staff for the few months preceding and following Christmas day. However, for many businesses the missing piece of the puzzle is not a lack of staff. It’s a lack of innovative technology that will make the entire customer service process more efficient and effective.

Through the combination of industry expertise and innovative artificial intelligence (AI), an outsourced call center can help your business scale quickly - even in unexpected circumstances.

What technologies will a contact center use?

Many contact centers use different technologies and take different approaches, but the best ones for your business will use state-of-the-art AI technology that improves the customer experience, reduces customer effort and improves the performance of customer service agents by cutting down human errors and providing real-time data analytics.

New tools in AI have freed up customer service agents from routine support tasks and allowed them to focus on more complex queries that deliver a higher-value and better experience to your company’s customers.

Innovative contact centers will implement AI software into their daily operations, here’s just a few artificial intelligence technologies they may use:

Chatbots: Automated chatbots are being implemented by companies with the very best customer service, right now. Chatbots reduce the time it takes for a customer to receive an answer and lowers the customer effort by being available on whatever device they prefer.

Machine learning: Machine learning is implemented into some AI technologies, allowing them to adapt to different circumstances and data patterns. By using this technology AI software is able to detect sarcasm, mimicking, the change in volume and the change in pitch of a consumer to gain real-time insights into how a customer is feeling about a conversation.

Natural language processing: Natural language processing allows AI programs to understand language as spoken and written by humans, and reply to them as a human would. By using these complex algorithms AI software is capable of creating a back-and-forth dialogue with your customers.

The benefits of scaling your customer service through AI

Having the right technology in place will give your business a range of benefits, including:

• Being able to provide omni-channel support, on the device that your customers prefer to use.
• Offering a self-service approach to customer service that reduces customer effort.
• Provide customer service representatives with faster and better training.
• The use of operational intelligence and real-time data that empower customer service agents to go above and beyond for your customers.
• A personalized approach to customer service, with AI taking down important customer information before they are passed over to a live agent.
• Customer service agents are freed up to work on more complex queries, with AI and self-service technologies able to resolve generic and easier issues.
• Artificial intelligence can automate repetitive tasks that waste valuable time for your agents.

Having the right technology software and solutions in place can mean the difference between a good or bad customer experience, impacting crucial elements of customer service such as issue resolution and wait times.

Advantage Communications has more than 20 years experience in transforming companies customer service, and helping them to scale up during both peak and unexpected sales seasons.

Are you looking for more information about outsourcing your customer service to a call center in Canada, serving global clients? Contact us today.