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artificial intelligence

WEBINAR REWIND: How AI is delivering a new generation of CX Analytics

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Don’t worry if you missed TalkDesk’s recent webinar – You can now re-watch the entire session online!

Contact centres spend significant resources evaluating agent effectiveness and customer sentiment, but don’t always know if they are capturing the right data, creating the right KPIs and sharing the available analytics to allow them to improve agent and customer metrics. Has your approach to analytics been re-evaluated to take advantage of today’s cloud and AI technology?

In the webinar, Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC, and Rob Peterson, Head of CX Strategy at Talkdesk, pull back the curtain on the analytics “black box” and introduce a vision to measure technology as a leading indicator of exceptional CX and business outcomes.

Click Here To Watch Again

Talkdesk recognizes the importance of measuring and evaluating your KPIs, to make informed and strategic business decisions. The brand new 2021 Talkdesk KPI benchmarking report analyzes how contact center metrics changed during 2020 compared to 2019 and provides you with insightful tips on how to optimize your contact center and deliver superior CX. Download our KPI benchmarking report here.

Do you specialise in Virtual Contact Centre solutions? We want to hear from you!

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Each month on Contact Centres Briefing we’re shining the spotlight on a different part of the customer care market – and in July we’re focusing on Virtual Contact Centre solutions.

It’s all part of our ‘Recommended’ editorial feature, designed to help customer care industry buyers find the best products and services available today.

So, if you’re a supplier of Virtual Contact Centre solutions and would like to be included as part of this exciting new shop window, we’d love to hear from you – for more info, contact Carly Walker on c.walker@forumevents.co.uk.

Here are the areas we’ll be covering, month by month:

Jul – Virtual Call/Contact Centres
Aug – Training & Development
Sep – Knowledge Management
Oct – Web Self Service/Chat
Nov – Display Boards
Dec – CRM

For more information on any of the above, contact Carly Walker on c.walker@forumevents.co.uk.

Do you specialise in Artificial Intelligence solutions for contact centres? We want to hear from you!

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Each month on Contact Centres Briefing we’re shining the spotlight on a different part of the customer care market – and in June we’re focusing on Artificial Intelligence solutions.

It’s all part of our ‘Recommended’ editorial feature, designed to help customer care industry buyers find the best products and services available today.

So, if you’re a supplier of Artificial Intelligence solutions and would like to be included as part of this exciting new shop window, we’d love to hear from you – for more info, contact Carly Walker on c.walker@forumevents.co.uk.

Here are the areas we’ll be covering, month by month:

Jun – Artificial Intelligence
Jul – Virtual Call/Contact Centres
Aug – Training & Development
Sep – Knowledge Management
Oct – Web Self Service/Chat
Nov – Display Boards
Dec – CRM

For more information on any of the above, contact Carly Walker on c.walker@forumevents.co.uk.

Analyst Report: AI Helps Align Agent Performance with Customer Expectations

 960 640 Abby Monaco
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By Abby Monaco, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NICE

Using AI capabilities to deliver agent guidance in real time, at the exact moment it’s needed, helps contact centres maximize agent performance, delight customers and reduce costs. That’s the finding of a report by Aberdeen, which surveyed more than 300 contact center leaders across industries around the world.

Aberdeen found that the No. 1 priority of contact centres, regardless of industry, is to improve the customer experience, followed by reducing service costs to drive operational efficiency.  In the report, “The ROI of Real-time Agent Guidance: How AI Helps Align Agent Performance with Customer Expectations,” Aberdeen Vice President and Principal Analyst Omer Minkara details opportunities for improvement for contact centres considering implementing AI.

Aberdeen defines contact center AI as encompassing:

  • Artificial intelligence: Automated reasoning and decision-making capabilities based on insights uncovered through machine learning algorithms.
  • Machine learning: Technology applications that learn by themselves by analysing a pattern of historical and recent data.
  • Prescriptive guidance: Tools used to analyze structured and unstructured historical data to make predictions and suggest decision options.
  • Predictive analytics: Tools to predict future behavior of customers.
  • Automation: Tools used to automate the execution of tasks such as customer routing, agent scheduling and quality assurance.

AI enables organizations to monitor and analyse 100% of customer interactions in real time and give agents the contextual guidance they need to turn the conversation around in the moment. Supervisors gain relevant and accurate insights that help boost their productivity and inform the one-on-one coaching and guidance they offer to agents. In fact, firms using AI report a 2.9% annual improvement in the amount of time supervisors spend helping agents, compared to a 0.1% worsening by contact centers without AI capabilities.

The benefits of AI in the contact center extend to customers as well. According to the report, contact centres leveraging AI capabilities like speech analytics, text analytics and journey analytics enjoy superior CX performance improvements that include:

  • A 10.5% increase in customer retention (compared to a 3.2% improvement for contact centers not using AI).
  • A 3.5x greater improvement in customer satisfaction (10.1% vs. 2.9%).
  • An 8.8% improvement in customer effort score (compared to 1.1%).

“Modern contact centers leverage AI capabilities to take quality assurance to the next level,” Minkara wrote. “Instead of periodic reviews and subsequent agent coaching and guidance, they use AI capabilities to review all interactions in real time – using the resulting insights to provide agents with real-time contextual guidance.”

“This helps shorten the time to make necessary improvements in agent skills and activities to address evolving client needs,” he added. “It also minimizes customer frustration and churn due to inefficiencies in service delivery activities.”

Minkara concluded the report with a strong recommendation that contact centers not currently using AI to boost agent productivity and performance consider doing so. AI models can learn from and be trained using an organization’s historical interaction data, enabling quick results. Read the full report here.

How Analytics Can Help You Deliver Superior Customer Service

 960 640 Lauren Maschio
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Lauren Maschio, Product Marketing Manager, NICE

Consumers today expect world-class customer experiences, and delivering the fast, personalized service they demand requires that you build analytics into the core of your business. Analytics can deliver a competitive advantage by improving the quality of your interactions with customers, and with the contact centre the most vital point of contact between your company and your customers, that’s critically important.

Analytics encompasses far more than trends and insights, however; trends and numbers will get you nowhere unless your analytics program is driving the business outcomes you desire rather than simply identifying trends. Here’s what you need keep in mind to truly impact CX and CSAT:

Leverage the power of AI

AI technology has become the driving force behind innovation ranging from self-driving cars to e-commerce recommendations. In the contact center, the use of prebuilt AI technology for analytics has moved from a nice-to-have to an imperative due to its ability to transform customer service, both in terms of quality as well as efficiency. While machine learning examines and compares data to find patterns and explore nuances, AI takes it a step further, continually evolving in how it enables machines to behave in a way previously thought to require human intelligence.

In the contact center, that takes a variety of forms, including:

  • Autodiscovery, or the use of unsupervised machine learning to surface unknowns in interactions data, which makes it possible to focus deeper analysis on the topics that are most critical to your business.
  • Sentiment analysis, which is a proven predictive indicator of customer satisfaction such as tNPS or CSAT surveys.
  • AI behavior models, which score the agent soft-skill behaviors that influence the sentiment analysis on all interactions.

Move beyond speech analytics

Your agents’ interactions with customers are no longer limited to the phone; increasingly, customers are reaching out via chat, email, social media and more. If you really want to know what your customers are talking about, you must be analyzing interactions over all channels – text and audio.

An omnichannel approach that covers all channels of interactions enables you to analyze a variety of characteristics, including:

  • Speech time/non-speech time, or the presence and amount of speaking vs. silence in calls over a period of time. You can identify both the agents who have the highest speech or non-speech time as well as the reasons for call silence.
  • Agent response time in a chat, or how long it takes the agent to respond to a chat request.
  • Customer sentiment on social channels, including through text, hashtags and more.

Focus on outcomes, not data collection

When implemented in a way that drives outcomes rather than simply outlining trends, analytics offers tremendous potential to improve CX and CSAT, as one financial services provider found. After implementing an analytics program across its contact center, the provider discovered that agents were missing information, leading to long hold times. By training agents better, the provider was able to:

  • Decrease hold times.
  • Increase customer satisfaction.
  • Save more than $540,000 annually.

Keep evolving

If there’s one constant today, it’s that change is ongoing. Your sales and service models aren’t static, so your analytics program shouldn’t be either. Your business — and the language your agents and customers use when speaking about your unique environment, products and services – will naturally evolve, and your analytics program must be able to adapt in response.

To learn more about how analytics can give you the tools you need to drive the outcomes your business desires and the service your customers demand, download the ebook, AI-Enabled Contact Center Analytics For Dummies.   

Integration with existing business tools, the biggest blocker to improving Call Centre Operations

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By Frédéric Durand (pictured), Founder & CEO Diabolocom

In a live survey being run by Diabolocom, 67% of respondents have shared that the biggest barrier they for-see in 2021 to improving call centre operations is the need to integrate with existing business tools. When asked about their organisations planned investments for 2021, 80% indicated that they would be expanding video-conferencing capability and a further 63% would be exploring the integration of AI into their platforms.

So, in a world of cloud and AI, why is integrating with existing business tools perceived to be the biggest barrier for organisations? The answer is complex, many organisations have legacy enterprise tools that require weeks of development time to make changes. API’s have been added, bespoke work-arounds created and development coded into their systems. In some cases, organisations may have not or are not able to migrate to cloud systems as of today, and others do not want the disruptive change to their businesses. Underneath the shiny websites though, organisations can have complex and cumbersome IT ecosystems that can make technology improvements difficult to implement.

With all this being said, organisations must evolve to survive and thrive. A post Covid-19 world is the test case to prove this statement. Throughout 2020, organisations have had to turn into an almost fully remote workforce, with the demand for technology that can support this fundamental shift in ways of working increasing ten-fold. Customer behaviours have also changed. When budgets are tight, pressure to deliver greater than ever, and in an always digitally on mindset, it can be argued that customer communication and the tools required to support this needs to change also.

How then, can contact centre operatives pivot and thrive in this rapidly changing environment? The answer – a flexible and tailorable platform that is already set up to integrate rapidly with existing tools such as your CRM, can be accessed from anywhere, regardless of where in the world your workforce is, and has a simple and intuitive user interface that ensures the enhanced value to your operations almost immediately.

The argument for a platform such as Diabolocom is compelling for improving contact centre operations. A completely omni-channel platform that integrates seamlessly with existing business tools and can be deployed rapidly through the cloud overcomes many challenges to improving operational excellence. With built in integrations with the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and ServiceNow, the platform provides your agents with all of the information they need to continue thriving in a new contact centre world. Multi-channel and flexible to your needs, your agents and customers can communicate in more than ways than ever before, all captured and recorded using your existing CRM.

To feed into the live survey and share your insights into the contact centre industry, follow the link here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/diabolocom

To find out more about Diabolocom and why it might be the right tool for you to overcome barriers to operational success, visit www.diabolocom.com/en.

How real-time feedback helps drive lasting change

 960 640 Lauren Maschio
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By Lauren Maschio, Product Marketing Portfolio Manager, Enterprise WFO

How to give people feedback, according to Harvard Business Review, is one of the hottest topics in business today. A key problem with feedback, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall wrote, is that people are “unreliable raters of other humans.”

“This phenomenon is called the idiosyncratic rater effect, and it’s large (more than half of your rating of someone else reflects your characteristics, not hers) and resilient (no training can lessen it),” Buckingham and Goodall asserted.

Human listening is neither consistent nor cost-effective – two people evaluating the same call often disagree whether the agent showed empathy, for example. In the end, agents don’t trust the process because they’re being measured based on a handful of calls each month, and supervisors don’t trust the process because it puts them in the difficult situation of justifying their assessment of the calls.

To overcome this challenge, contact centers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to give agents immediate and accurate feedback. A comprehensive AI framework can provide a consistent, accurate and unbiased score of the agent soft skill behaviors proven through decades of research to drive customer satisfaction – on every single interaction.

AI contact center technology can deliver behavioral insights that reside in the so-called “big data,” where pre-built models have been developed based on millions of hours of customer interactions. AI is delivering dividends, too: A recent survey by Aberdeen Research found that contact centers using AI are enjoying 3.3 times higher customer retention, 3.5 times more satisfied customers and 2.4 times higher agent productivity.

By adding real-time interaction guidance, agents get immediate feedback on how to change the conversation when a customer is expressing frustration. That’s important because while contact centers invest a lot of time and resources into coaching agents to improve behavior, agents often struggle during interactions to retain, recall and apply skills learned in coaching sessions. In fact, research shows that people forget about 50% of the new information they receive in training sessions within an hour. A day later, they’ve forgotten 70% of the material, and one week later, they’ve forgotten on average fully 90% of the coaching.

With real-time interaction guidance, agents receive desktop prompts and specific recommendations, such as how to build rapport or acknowledge loyalty, to have a more engaging conversation. Real-time interaction guidance enables agents to self-correct in the moment and reinforces skills they have already learned in a coaching session.

“Feedback is most meaningful in the moment,” Shani Harmon and Renee Cullinan wrote in Forbes.  “Feedback loops are critical for individual and organizational learning. Without them, we cannot improve.”

Learn more about how contact centers are using AI-powered real-time guidance to help agents while an interaction is in progress, giving them the feedback and coaching

WEBINAR REWIND: 3-Step Guide To Scaling Your Business Using AI

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Don’t worry if you missed KantanMT’s recent webinar giving insight into scaling your business using AI – You can now re-watch the entire session online!

One of the most significant challenges, faced by the contact centres industry is on-boarding new territories and customers. Many contact centre managers will way say it takes too long, it’s expensive, and complex. And if the on-boarding process includes a multi-lingual dimension, then hiring agents with product expertise coupled with language skills can be a nightmare. Combined with increased costs associated with multilingual agent resourcing and rostering, it’s no wonder contact centre managers view it as a significant challenge in scaling their business!

Many contact centre managers are looking towards AI as a solution to help them rapidly scale their business and on-board new clients. This is especially prevalent in the context of providing multi-lingual support and services. These progressive contact centres are shifting the hiring focus away from languages with an emphasis on agent product/service knowledge and expertise.

In the webinar Jim Nolan, AI Evangelist, presents a 3-Step Guide to how AI is used by 1,500 agents at Keywords Studios, for the Gaming and Entertainment industry, delivering support in 12 European and Asian languages. The presentation explores how KantanSkynet is used to remove the language barrier, shifting the hiring focus away from language skills and driving the rapid on-boarding of new territories and clients.

Click here to re-watch the webinar.

If you require additional information, please contact Jimn@kantanmt.com.

WEBINAR: 3-Step Guide to Scaling your Business using AI

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Deploying AI in Contact Centres for rapid on-boarding of new business

By Jim Nolan, Sales Manager, KantanMT

One of the most significant challenges, faced by the contact centres industry is on-boarding new territories and customers. Many contact centre managers will way say it takes too long, it’s expensive, and complex. And if the on-boarding process includes a multi-lingual dimension, then hiring agents with product expertise coupled with language skills can be a nightmare. Combined with increased costs associated with multilingual agent resourcing and rostering, it’s no wonder contact centre managers view it as a significant challenge in scaling their business!

Many contact centre managers are looking towards AI as a solution to help them rapidly scale their business and on-board new clients. This is especially prevalent in the context of providing multi-lingual support and services. These progressive contact centres are shifting the hiring focus away from languages with an emphasis on agent product/service knowledge and expertise.

However, to do this successfully, they must remove the language barrier from all aspects of their service chain, ensuring that any agent, can service any ticket in any language!

By removing the language barrier, contact centres fundamentally change how they organise and deploy support teams. While traditional contact centres establish regional and/or language teams, todays progressive centres focus on product/service teams, where language is simply irrelevant.

To achieve this, progressive contact centres are looking towards AI to remove the language barrier and accelerate on-boarding. This results in higher agent productivity, happier clients, and enhanced business agility.

KantanSkynet is an AI platform that fuses the latest neural machine translation technologies, with a community of professional editors, removing the language barrier and helping contact centres scale.

Jim Nolan, AI Evangelist, will present a 3-Step Guide to how AI is used by 1,500 agents at Keywords Studios, for the Gaming and Entertainment industry, delivering support in 12 European and Asian languages. The presentation will explore how KantanSkynet is used to remove the language barrier, shifting the hiring focus away from language skills and driving the rapid on-boarding of new territories and clients.

Join us on Wednesday 16th September for our webinar and gain an insight into scaling your business using AI.

Click here to reserve you seat at the webinar.

If you require additional information, please contact  Jimn@kantanmt.com.

How AI and automation help contact centers be agile in the COVID-19 era

 960 640 Paul Chance
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By Paul Chance, NICE

As widespread shutdowns went into effect, contact centers had to make an overnight shift to remote work – a significant undertaking in an industry that has historically relied on physical office spaces to bring together and manage the agents who are critical to solving customers’ needs. Agents and contact center leaders, many of whom were taking their organizations remote for the first time ever, learned and adapted on the go.

Now, with many organizations starting to make plans for reopening and thinking about how they can adapt to a multitude of different in-office or remote work scenarios, it has become clear that new strategies and technology tools are needed to help contact centers stay agile.  There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future, and contact centers must put the right solutions in place to be able to react swiftly as business conditions change.

In this environment, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are making nimbleness a reality for contact centers by helping leaders adapt scheduling, planning, hiring, forecasting and intraday management to in-the-moment changes.

AI-driven workforce management enables more accurate decision-making

When AI is embedded into workforce management, contact center leaders gain tools that can accurately predict outcomes in a wide range of scenarios and take much of guesswork and time out of lengthy planning and research needs.

  • Long-term and “what-if” planning. With so much in flux today, determining the right staffing levels needed to meet specific KPIs is particularly challenging. AI makes it easy to incorporate a multitude of variables and specific business requirements into long-term planning and empowers contact centers to problem-solve between staffing requirements and performance gaps. Its meticulous predictions increase long-term forecasting accuracy by 6 to 10%.
  • Hiring the right agents. The lack of face-to-face interaction right now adds a new layer to hiring – how can contact centers make sure they’re choosing the right people? With AI embedded in workforce management, contact centers can use voice analysis to objectively assesses candidates’ aptitude, engagement and performance and determine which candidates are likely to be high-value employees.
  • Forecast accurately and effectively. Forecasting typically takes substantial research and knowledge of the contact center as well as deep expertise in numerous forecasting methods. AI-driven workforce management enables managers to focus their efforts on higher-value tasks by assessing which forecasting methods will be the most accurate in a given situation, pinpointing unseen patterns in data and automatically adjusting to new circumstances – ultimately increasing accuracy and efficiency.
  • Simulate real-world scenarios. The downstream impacts of staffing decisions are incredibly difficult to predict manually, but AI and machine learning can demonstrate exactly how changes to on-hand agent skills, call prioritization, routing and other variables impact service levels.

Automation makes real-time contact center schedule changes possible

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, customer demand can change in an instant – and so can the available pool of agents. Automation empowers contact centers to simulate impacts on KPIs throughout the day and several weeks into the future, after the schedule is published. It enables automatic adjustments to meet customer demand without overstaffing or understaffing.    

  • Fix staffing gaps. As staffing needs change throughout the day, automation within workforce management solutions identifies variances that lead to overstaffing and understaffing. It then brings staffing in line with contact center business needs by automatically offering agents shift swaps, voluntary time off, extra hours and more – but only when changes will benefit the business. There’s no need for heavy monitoring or intervention by a manager.
  • Increase agent engagement. Automation enables contact centers to eliminate some of agents’ biggest frustrations, such as missed shift or overtime opportunities, a lack of flexibility in their schedules and slow approval for schedule change requests. This increases agent engagement, a top driver of productivity, which is essential right now given the distractions agents face at home. 

Whether a contact center is fully remote, working from the office or some blend of the two, the ability to adapt quickly is essential right now – and AI and automation make it possible to do so with workforce management. Learn more about how technologies are empowering contact center agility right now in our ebook on Leveraging AI and Intelligent Automation in the WFM Suite.

For more information please click here.