How Can A.I. Help Contact Centers?

Customers have more choice of product goods and more communication channels than ever before and the customers are without a doubt, in charge. At the same time, companies are fighting with new digital products, which channels to market, business models, looking to get used to the hopeful digital world. While these market pressures were first noted in the travel, retail and financial trading services industries, they are rapidly becoming the norm in other industries. It is becoming progressively more apparent that companies must engage their customers on their choice of channels, or risk losing them to competitors who do offer those channels.

Enter OmniChannel, one of the hottest approaches to customer engagement in years. OmniChannel strategies seek to deliver a reliable and tailored experience to customers across all communication channels and store the info in a single silo. OmniChannel now affects customer service and support, as well as to all aspects of engagement in sales. The history of the word “OmniChannel” go back a few decades to leading-edge advertising firms, who then sought to deliver consistent communication across all marketing media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards and so on) hence the name OmniChannel.

Achieving success in OmniChannel is not easy. The seamless combination of consumer experiences in a customer’s pathway that cross mobile devices, PCs, phones, SMS, email, chat and social media is a massive ordeal. This is especially true where companies were just adding these separate silos of communication channels, as needed just to catch up with customer’s demands.

How does A.I. work with OmniChannel?

1. Classifies and Allocates - Incoming transactions are analyzed and allocated to available employees according to topic, skill, and urgency.
2. 100% Vision of Transaction History - Relevant background information from existing systems is displayed for customer support, tech support and sales.
3. Response Suggestions - The expert responses are learned from historical expert replies and are offered a small selection of text templates.
4. Sending and Archiving - Select the best reply channel (chat, SMS, Social Media messaging or e-mail) and automatic archiving – according to content in a single silo.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), which involves the design and development of applications that ‘learn’ based on flexible, evolving analytical models. One of the (many) areas where A.I. can make improvement is through customer engagement, and particularly for those seeking insights to optimize OmniChannel. These on-going evolutions, accomplished through algorithms that learn from repetitious data, are what really distinguishes A.I. OmniChannel is to identify hidden patterns and unseen trends without precise programming to look for these patterns and trends. As A.I. is exposed to new data, they adapt automatically, looking to produce reliable and repeatable answers.
Advances in computing technologies have fueled A.I. advancement, allowing many established A.I. algorithms to be repeatedly applied to enormous data sets with orders of magnitude boost the cost saving results. Today A.I. can be demonstrated in such notable areas as A Hong Kong VC fund has just appointed an algorithm to its board, Google’s self-driving car, online recommendation engines (such as Netflix using Amazon's A.I. cloud ), social media using A.I. and bank fraud detection by A.I.
Here is a list of: A.I. / machine learning / deep learning technologies companies:

• Add-Structure
• Angoss Software
•  Ascribe
• Attensity
• Attivio
• Basis Technology
• Bitext
• Brainspace
• Cambridge Semantics
• Clarabridge
• Content Analyst
• Revealed Context (Converseon)
• Dell, Digital Reasoning, EPAM
• Etuma
• Expert System
• FICO
• Fractal Analytics
• Haystac
• HPE
• IBM
• Infegy
• KNIME
• Knowliah
• KPMG
• Lexalytics
• Linguamatics
• Luminoso
• MaritzCX
• Meaning Cloud
• Megaputer Intelligence
• Northern Light
• OpenText
• Rant & Rave
• RapidMiner
• SAP
• SAS
• SpazioDati
• Squirro
• SRA International
• Taste Analytics

Let’s explore where A.I. promises to help OmniChannel Contact Centers.

1.    A.I. understands the customers’ pathways through the customer service or customer support process. Understanding customer experience from an ‘outside in’ standpoint, requires a regimented, controlled view of customers’ communications. Analysis of these pathways can highlight where procedure need to be improved by removing obstacles to customers accomplishing their goal. A.I. could take this one step further, predicting the customer’s goal through their actions, and providing faster track to improve their experience. Additionally, A.I. could improve customers’ experience while encouraging up-selling. A.I. could also be used to guide the pathways, to achieve a ‘win-win’ for both customer and supplier.

2.    A.I. can most obviously help product and service recommendations. We’ve already mentioned Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines as successful deployments, but these are early examples. Using A.I. along with analysis, history and current environment, A.I. could truly personalized product recommendations and tailored communication.

3.    Improving service and support. OmniChannel service and support are equally important to retain customers. A.I. can help in multiple areas:
       a.    Self-help can remove much of the more routine questions; A.I. gives opened questions and not boxed in choices that are answered with “Press 1”.
       b.    Based on current context and history, it could be used to predict why the customer is seeking support, speeding the response.
       c.     A.I. can provide recommendations for problem solving, both from the perspective of recommending a particular pathways, but also providing recommendations to the customer and support staff on how to address the problem, improving support effectiveness.
       d.    A.I. through continuous learning, it can refine these pathways and recommendations, optimizing the customer experience (CX).

In summary, A.I. promises significant breakthrough in improving customer engagement and experience, and OmniChannel is a clear target in need of application.

Please contact Call Center Pros, LLC for any call center technology need or telecom challenge.

Thank you,
James Wilson, CEO
Call Center Pros
+1-404 936 4000
james@call-center-pros.comr
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswwilson