Many leaders who are looking to optimize their enterprise contact center face a few major challenges.
Agents and supervisors are often dispersed globally—which makes onboarding and training more complicated. Customer expectations are higher than ever in terms of wait times and service quality. And the sheer amount of data available today makes it difficult to filter through to the insights that are relevant and truly valuable.
But in recent years, there’s a solution that has proven itself capable of effectively addressing all three of these issues—and potentially more.
It’s AI. And already, enterprises across a wide range of industries are already using it in different ways to optimize their contact center operations. Here are a few ways they’re doing it.
6 ways to optimize enterprise contact centers with AI
From the customer experience to the agent experience, to analytics and insights, there are many use cases for AI in the enterprise contact center:
1. Improve call routing
It used to be that calls and messaging conversations were routed to simply whichever agent was available to take them. Then, more advanced routing systems like skills-based routing improved this process by sending customer conversations to the agents who had the right skills to help with their inquiries.
And now, AI has improved call routing yet again. Specifically, some AI contact center platforms can determine the category that a customer message belongs to, while filtering out messages that agents don’t need to prioritize (like thank you messages). Then, it’ll direct this conversation to an agent who is best suited to handling it, which increases the chances of customers getting their problems resolved as quickly as possible.
2. Understand call sentiment in real time
AI can also analyze the sentiment of a conversation in real time, which is extremely helpful for busy supervisors who oversee large teams of tens or hundreds of agents. They don’t have the time to manually listen to or check every conversation to make sure agents are handling customers effectively.
But with AI-powered sentiment analysis, managers can quickly scan a list of ongoing calls and see which ones are reflecting poor sentiment (perhaps the customer is frustrated or upset). They can then quickly intervene or message the agent to coach them in real time, and maintain a positive customer experience.
On a related note, if customers are expressing positive or negative sentiment about a recent feature release, for example, having the AI sentiment data can also be useful as feedback for the product or R&D team.
3. Provide agents with live guidance
Not only can AI help managers guide agents more effectively, it can also take on some of this work itself. More and more companies are experimenting with AI assists and agent-facing chatbots to help agents handle customer questions more quickly by automatically pulling up related content and information from disparate knowledge sources.
RingCentral’s RingCX, for example, has an AI Assist feature that helps agents live as they’re interacting with customers and suggests content and responses that they can use in real time:
Not only does this improve both individual and team performance, it also shortens ramp-up times for new agents. Whereas new hires may have needed a longer onboarding period to get familiar with products, services, and policies, they can now dive into serving customers sooner thanks to AI assist features that make sure they get all the answers they need without having to manually search multiple knowledge sources.
4. Allow customers to self-service (and deflect more conversations)
For most contact centers, a significant number of inbound inquiries are questions that can be easily answered by conversational AI or an AI chatbot. And unlike a static FAQ page, AI chatbots can even help customers with slightly more complicated—but routine—tasks like placing an order, checking a balance, or paying a bill.
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations.
RingCentral’s IVA (intelligent virtual agent), for example, can be built into your existing channels to provide answers and help immediately to customers, no matter which channel they reach out to you on:
5. Help managers review performance more quickly
One of the most time-consuming tasks for contact center managers is reviewing agents’ conversations and team performance.
With AI-generated score cards that automatically generate scores based on conversational analytics and keywords, coaches and supervisors can save hours every week because they no longer have to listen to every call recording from beginning to end.
MedCare, a medical equipment company, uses RingSense, an AI feature in RingCentral’s contact center platform, to save managers 92% of the time they used to spend on call reviews.
“For a manager to review an agent’s full call and summarize their findings, it used to take about 25 minutes. With RingSense for Sales, we can now review an AI-generated analysis in two minutes,” says Zac Shannon, MedCare’s IT manager. And it’s not just helping them save time either.
“One thing RingSense is spotting for us with its sentiment analysis—and we never even thought to look for this—is uncertainty. When an agent comes across as unsure about the guidance they’re giving to a patient, that can undermine the patient’s confidence as well. Now that we’re getting alerted to these moments of uncertainty on calls, we know where and on which topics to give our agents additional training or product knowledge.”
6. Integrate your AI tools with the rest of your tech stack
To further improve efficiency, connect your AI contact center solution to other tools that your team uses every day. This automates data and contact syncing, reduces manual back-and-forth work, and more.
Most modern contact center platforms should come with prebuilt, intuitively designed integrations with essential enterprise tools like CRM systems, calendaring apps, and ticketing platforms.
Optimize your enterprise contact center using AI
Whether your contact center needs to improve CSAT or NPS scores, scale up quickly in a new territory, or shorten onboarding times for new agents, there are AI features that can empower your team to do all of this and more—more efficiently and more effectively.
Book a demo with our team to learn more about RingCX and its enterprise-ready AI solutions! [link TBD]
Originally published Jan 06, 2025
