8 Contact Center Automation Trends in 2024
1. Blending AI and human interaction
Even though customers are growing accustomed to AI and self-service, the majority still want to speak to a human if an issue is complex. For complex customer service questions or issues, 53% of consumers said they prefer speaking to a live human agent over an online chatbot. For more basic customer service queries, 46% of consumers prefer speaking to humans but are comfortable with the agent using AI in the background to improve the interaction.
Contact centers must recognize that obvious signs of automation may only be acceptable for some demographics. Others may benefit from background processes, but won’t ever be comfortable using a chatbot. As more and more organizations begin incorporating automation and AI, those that can maintain a good balance between automated efficiency and genuine human interaction will better appeal to customer needs.
Agent Copilot, available from Cognigy.AI, helps you harness the benefits of AI while simultaneously improving human interaction. The AI Agent fetches customer data, analyzes sentiment, provides translation, and creates contextual answers or guidance based on user queries – all displayed directly to a human agent’s dashboard to make them more productive than ever.
2. AI-Driven Sentiment Analysis
Before AI, automated systems could only direct customers through a process and could not read or adapt to sentiment. AI unlocks the ability to understand sentiment, which will be a critical factor in shaping how organizations can shape customer journeys that minimize friction and accelerate the chances of positive resolutions.
When dealing with customers, an AI Agent powered by Conversational AI can engage in realistic conversations. During these conversations, the AI will recognize and record changes in sentiment. It can take action if sentiment changes – whether that’s to add value by asking a satisfied customer to leave a review, or to avoid reputational harm by alerting a human agent if a customer becomes frustrated.
The automated nature of AI means that all of your case histories will be transcribed and stored, which means you can perform large-scale analysis on all of your customer conversations to identify patterns in sentiment or behavior. These insights, in turn, mean you can strategize and improve processes based on real-world customer attitudes rather than speculation.
3. Hyper-Personalized Customer Experiences
AI enables new levels of personalization when automating service processes. An AI Agent can analyze important information such as a customer’s personal data, past conversations, purchase history, etc., then tailor conversations in a way that feels specific to the customer.
The AI Agent will communicate with a customer in a human-like fashion, able to adjust to topic changes and react on the fly. Before AI, customers interacting with any automated system would often encounter errors or be unable to progress if they didn’t follow a specific path. AI Agents allow customers to talk freely and still reach their desired outcome, which adds to a feeling of personalized service.
4. Omnichannel Integration & Seamless Interaction
For most organizations, call centers are now contact centers – the demand from customers to interact via alternative methods is too great to have it any other way. Customers now expect to be able to contact customer service teams using their preferred devices and platforms.
Faced with greater demand than ever, contact centers must focus on supporting omnichannel experiences to meet customer needs. To achieve this, organizations must harness AI-driven automation to help track and respond to messages, emails, calls, or texts.
An AI Agent is not tied to any single channel platform and instead sits as an independent layer deployed on top of your enterprise systems and business processes. That means customers can interact with it through a wide range of channels such as WhatsApp, voice calls, emails, instant messaging, and more. The agent will recognize past interactions and can engage seamlessly with the customer – even if they’ve just switched from a phone call to a social media app.
Only by creating this seamless system can contact centers give customers the consistent and cohesive service experience they want.
5. Voice-Enabled Self-Service
Customers use self-service as a frontline solution to their problems. Where possible, they seek to solve the issue themselves using self-service platforms – with 69% of customers saying they want to resolve issues on their own and will use self-service to make that happen.
Where pre-AI self-service was more rigid and limited, the conversational capabilities offered by AI means organizations can provide an intuitive self-service system that a user can talk to in an organic way. Voice AI Agents recognize the intent behind a user’s query and can help carry out the intended task – even if it’s a complex request.
As more customers look to use self-service, organizations that can deliver engaging voice-enabled experiences will be more accessible and effective at dealing with customer requirements.
6. Predictive Analysis
Making decisions about vital service processes is never easy – but organizations that utilize automation have access to vast amounts of data to help strategize toward effective change. Not only can an AI perform analysis on your performance metrics and data, but it can also review past conversations to identify trends and topics that impact your customers and contact centers.
This also allows you to become more predictive, forecasting potential issues that may occur based on past instances. AI can even predict when a customer may be ripe for an upsell opportunity and automatically reach out to them to negotiate a new sale or agreement.
7. Proactive Automation
As mentioned above, AI can automatically reach out to customers to send reminders or alert them about upcoming renewals/offers/expiration dates, etc. But automation doesn’t stop at just alerting a customer – AI can engage in dialogue with them to guide them through the required action, all using their preferred device and channel.
For example, an insurer could alert a customer about an upcoming renewal date via WhatsApp. The AI would then prompt the customer to renew and negotiate if there were any issues. Once the customer becomes ready to buy, the AI Agent can process the payment without the customer ever having to switch windows or devices.
This proactive automated approach will become more valuable in a world where customers will quickly switch to a competitor if their needs are unmet. Proactivity helps protect future revenue and will help businesses grow their customer base without spending as much on outbound sales teams.
8. Employee Support
55% of executives believe providing great customer service without great employee experiences is impossible. Despite this, contact center teams have traditionally struggled with low morale driven by strict targets, demanding customers, and the added administrative burden of pre- and post-call processes.
We’ve already touched on the role of agent assist and how it can support agents in serving customers better, but AI also provides tremendous value when deployed to improve your agents’ working processes. Even a single change, like introducing an AI that can summarize calls and file the case in your CRM system, will save your agents vital time on every single call.
As labor costs rise, but the need for human support remains, contact centers will need to better utilize teams and prioritize retaining existing employees. The support offered by AI will play a key role in this, and organizations across every sector must now consider how to augment their team best.
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