AI has made huge strides in nearly every industry, and this impact has been keenly felt in contact centers. Contact center artificial intelligence (also known as CCAI) is one of the industries where AI has made significant waves and is revolutionizing productivity and customer understanding and satisfaction.

What is Contact Center AI (CCAI)? 

Contact Center AI is the use of artificial intelligence to automate and streamline contact center operations for increased efficiency and cost savings. 

Contact Centers are complex operations and the backbone of how many companies keep a pulse on their customers’ satisfaction levels and pain points. A contact center that runs smoothly is an indicator of the overall health of your business. 

Contact centers are crucial for so many organizations, but a traditional contact center model requires extensive staffing and availability for 24/7 call center or chat responses. What results from these extensive needs is a contact center solution that puts your company in touch with its customers, but that depletes resources at the same time. 

CCAI solves this problem by using AI to monitor calls, run reports, and automate chat or call interactions

Types of Contact Center AI Solutions

Contact center AI doesn’t refer to a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather a multifaceted set of capabilities that can be tailored to your organization’s specific needs. 

The main types of contact center AI solutions are: 

Reporting

Contact center reporting is used during customer interactions to gather data that is then analyzed and delivered to your organization for insights into customer trends and metrics like average call time, abandonment rate, and CSAT scores. 

Speech Analytics

While contact center reporting is focused on the hard data surrounding call center metrics, speech analytics is an AI capability that analyzes customer interactions through the lens of language patterns, common words and phrases, and even a customer’s emotional state at different points in the conversation. Speech analytics is a valuable tool that takes call center reporting a step further by understanding customer emotions and behaviors.

Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA)

An IVA is a voice or chat service that uses AI technology to simulate conversations by mimicking human speech patterns to find solutions for customers in real time using internal knowledge. Many contact centers use this helpful service to free up time for customer service representatives and provide a streamlined experience for callers.

Testing 

While contact center AI provides an entire host of solutions, it also introduces new use cases that need quality assurance testing. This testing can be automated and used to simulate a variety of possible contact center customer interactions to ensure the AI is enabling a smooth process from start to finish of every call.

Contact Center AI Recommendations 

Contact Center AI solutions are necessary for contact centers to stay relevant and successful, and every variety of CCAI is useful in unique ways. 

Some of Kenway’s top tips for implementing or refreshing CCAI in your organization are:

• Consistent monitoring and training to prevent AI hallucination and ensure data governance. 
• Capitalizing on your CCAI reporting and speech analysis capabilities. The insights your CCAI solution provides for you will only be as useful as the changes you implement based on those reports. 
• Consider implementing conversational AI for your contact center solution if you haven’t already. This AI capability will help your organization keep customers happier while keeping costs down and is a great alternative to IVR models, which can often leave callers frustrated with a lack of specialized service.
• Automated testing like Cyara’s Botium uses AI to test AI. This ensures seamless performance without adding complicated manual testing to your to-do list.

Implementing AI Throughout Your Organization 

AI can feel overwhelming, especially if your organization has never used contact center AI. But the benefits of automated reporting, speech analytics, and increased productivity far outweigh the unknown that comes with implementing CCAI.

Focus on starting small, maintaining data security and governance throughout your implementation, and educating your team to use AI to their advantage. 

If your organization wants extra support in the process of implementing CCAI, the Kenway team would love to help. Reach out today to learn more about how your organization can unlock the potential of your contact center!

FAQs

How is artificial intelligence transforming contact centers? 

AI has transformed contact centers from call centers with capabilities limited by staff availability to dynamic contact centers that can field high call volume, answer customer questions, direct callers to proper experts, and provide expert insights all at once. 

What is CCAI?

CCAI is the abbreviated term for contact center artificial intelligence, which is the use of AI to aid in contact center reporting, data collection, and customer service. 

Another related but different term is Google CCAI, is a Google owned cloud-based platform that uses AI to help organizations with customer service and operational efficiency.