5 Ways to optimize your contact center AI solutions

The state of customer experience is ever-growing, and considering where the space is heading is almost limitless due to AI capabilities. 

It’s uncommon for customer experience analysts to shy away when making bold predictions for what’s ahead, and the most eye-catching has been from Forrester. The prediction stated:

“CX (customer experience) becomes crucial for brands to survive, for them to avoid disintermediation, irrelevancy, blandness, and/or cluelessness about customer sentiment.”

While this statement may be true, there are many brands that struggle. It’s one thing to leverage the good ol’ dusty customer journey map that worked for the company some time ago; it’s another thing that the customer journey map is operationally useful, following customer behavioral trends, and actively engaging in CX management. 

Fortunately, this is all possible by implementing AI within your Contact Centers.

What is Contact Center AI?
So how does AI set contact centers apart from contact centers without AI? Artificial intelligence allows contact centers to make the lives of their customers and agents easier. 

Contact Center AI, or CCAI, allows organizations to really listen to their customer's wants and needs and allows customers to feel more connected. It enhances the efforts of live agents by providing them with updated information and historical customer insights at the time of the call. This allows the live agent to handle the call more smoothly, personally, and strategically. It eliminates the need for customers to reexplain their issues.

5 Ways You Can Optimize Your Contact Center AI to Enhance CX.
CCAI is moldable to any industry by assisting live agents, enabling self-service channels, and more. Here are 5 ways AI can bring businesses more success:

1. Provide An Elevated Automated Self-Service Experience.
   Leveraging an automated self-service experience can and will save customers time and frustration, it also expedites the time to resolve issues. For employees, an automated self-service experience would reduce workload pressure and improve efficiency within the contact center. This gives employees the bandwidth to provide better customer service by allowing them to focus on complex issues. 
   
   
2. Capture and Analyze Customer Insights
   With CCAI Insights, AI provides contact centers interaction data to be able to answer business questions or support the agent with recommendations to drive efficiency. With these customer insights, agents are able to identify investment opportunities ahead of time and more accurately. AI gives more clarity on the “why” the customer is calling.
   
   Google CCAI Platform is scalable to manage conversations across all agents and can classify and analyze them for accuracy purposes. This enhances the value of the analysts in the workplace and gives the compliance team the proper focus area to handle problems. 
   
   
3. Personally Interact with Customers Using Dialogflow CX
   Dialogflow CX allows enterprise customers to create advanced virtual agents within minutes. Google Cloud Assistant and Dialogflow CX allow these virtual agents to be able to seamlessly alternate between topics, handle supplemental questions, and operate across multiple channels around the clock, 24/7 to minimize live agent interactions. 
   
   This allows contact centers to deliver more natural customer experiences with virtual agents that can multi-turn conversations. It also supports the workload pressure and streamlines the complex situations that live agents are able to handle. 
   
   
4. Lower Operational Costs, Affordable Scalability
   A traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system was not built to compete with the current digital era and is costing businesses substantial overhead fees to upgrade and maintain. At the same time, these dated systems are pushing organizations to employ more live agents to handle customer satisfaction, and experience and overall add to their, now, ever-growing operational costs.
   
   Google Cloud CCAI has technologies such as AI and ML that empowers organizations to do more with less. These are cutting-edge solutions that leaders are reaping the benefits of in more ways than imaginable. With Google Cloud CCAI organizations saw reduced costs, improved productivity, and resources redeployed to higher-valued roles. It also eliminates the need to manage and finagle the legacy IVR systems and allows time and effort to be focused on newer and more profitable solutions.
   
   
5. Fast Deployment, Implementation, and Innovation
   The growing strain on contact centers leaves no room for a slow deployment, lagged implementation, nor a lack of innovation. A cloud-based solution provides organizations with a rapid resolution to increasing efficiency all while delivering a robust end-to-end solution. 
   
   CCAI gives organizations the opportunity to build and deploy a customized virtual agent in a short period of time. As mentioned, these virtual agents offer 24/7 support via voice and chat channels, giving your customers immediate conversational self-service options. 
   
   When enlisting a trusted consultant like our Intelligent CX team, you’re backed by not only the power of CCAI but the expertise and advisory from a team that solely focuses on projects as such.
   
   

How Google’s CCAI Platform Stands Out.
Google Cloud’s CCAI Platform unifies the advantages of AI, cloud scalability, multi-experience capabilities, and tight integration with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. This data unites sales, marketing, and support teams within the contact centers and across the customer journey. 

 Specifically, Google’s CCAI Platform provides intelligent customer experiences across multiple channels and devices. This allows companies to manage a larger volume of interactions, more complex interactions, and agent workforce challenges all within a single platform. Some other key features include:

1. Multimodal, omnichannel customer experience
   Web and mobile SDKs (iOS and Android) embed the support experience across all channels (VoIP) via WebRTC and PSTN, chat, and SMS for a consistent customer experience across all devices
   
   
2. Embeddable Experiences
   Provides the capabilities to not only embed voice and the digital channel suite into your application but throughout the entire customer journey. From visual navigation to interacting with agents to sharing digital media and making secured payments.
   
   
3. AI-Driven Routing
   AI-powered operations for contact deflection, predictive routing, agent productivity, and operational efficiency. This reduces handling time by providing deeper interaction context and turn-by-turn guidance on the conversation flow based on customer intent.
   

How the Intelligent CX Team at CDW Can Help
The Intelligent CX team provides a curated AI-powered Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) that allows organizations, like yours, to provide exceptional customer experiences. CDW experts put the best of AI technology to work and consult the best ways to leverage AI for your business. We optimize Google Cloud’s CCAI Platform and cross-layer it with your most critical customer journey processes to establish intuitive tools for your live agents. 

Watch our most recent roundtable webinars with our Intelligent CX team and Google experts as they dive deep into Google Cloud’s CCAI Platform, along with the CCAI Platform’s key features, and a live demo on how it eases the customer journey!