Building an Intelligent Contact Centre: Listen, Understand and Guide

Contact centres are a crucial direct link between businesses and their customers, with 65% of business leaders stating that customer service positively impacts growth.¹ That’s because by nurturing better customer service interactions contact centres can promote customer engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

However, as consumer communication technologies and customs evolve, contact centres have to keep up. Fortunately, there are solutions to ensure that modern day contact centres don’t fall behind.

The contact centre software market is projected to be worth $149.58 billion by 2030.² As a result of this growth, a range of tools and platforms are now available to optimise processes and workflows in order to help contact centres:

• Manage consumer conversations
• Track and optimise resolution outcomes 
• Control operating costs
• Refine engagement processes

Given these advancements in technology, it’s worth considering what the future of contact centres looks like. For many, this is giving rise to something referred to as the intelligent contact centre.

That’s why in this blog, we’re going to take a closer look at the concept of the intelligent contact centre alongside its features and benefits. Let’s dive straight in. 

What is an intelligent contact centre? 

As an emerging trend, the concept of intelligent contact centres can be tough to pin down. The contact centres of the modern era are still evolving, and software providers are constantly devising new features that transform customer service delivery.

It’s best to think of an intelligent contact centre as any form of a contact centre that uses cutting-edge tools, technology, or software to improve customer service outcomes and internal processes.

Features of an intelligent contact centre

A truly intelligent contact centre should come equipped with a broad range of innovative services. Whilst these might differ across contact centres, the latest technology gives contact centres access to numerous features that can help optimise the way they deal with customers on a daily basis. Let’s examine some of these in detail.

An omnichannel approach

Customers are infamous for sticking to their preferences — including in how they reach out to businesses. An intelligent contact centre should empower organisations to keep the conversation going smoothly regardless of whether consumers choose to reach out via phone, email, video, chatbots, or social media. 

Using software frameworks to integrate customer interactions across multiple channels, contact centres can unite cross channel data without disrupting the agent or customer experience. This makes it easier to seamlessly resolve queries regardless of consumers preferred channel of communication.

The utilisation of artificial intelligence

It isn’t easy to keep track of hundreds of conversations at once. Contact centres that do however, can have their finger on the pulse of their customer relationships. Intelligent contact centres contextualise the data using two critical types of artificial intelligence (AI) — speech and voice analytics:

• Speech analytics applies machine learning to recognise what’s being said. It can then extract spoken conversation from audio files into readable blocks of text, revealing custom keywords that businesses can flag to zero in on specific topics. 
• Voice analytics is a similar term with a critical difference. Instead of just exposing conversational content, voice analytics tools unveil the underlying semantics. These insights help marketers and customer service managers determine the emotional intent and sentiment that give conversations meaning.

Combined speech and voice analytics let intelligent contact centres create optimised customer experiences by flagging situations that might need human intervention. They can also take a more proactive approach towards improving the wellbeing of their agents. By analysing their performance, they can start to build a healthy, rewarding workplace. 

Dynamic call scripting

Scripting is common practice for contact centres. Some of the most successful conversations with support agents unfold according to a predetermined framework or script.

There are several reasons why traditional contact centres use scripting. First, it can help ensure that calls are handled in a consistent manner that promotes positive customer experiences. Scripting also makes it easier for call centre agents, particularly those who lack specialised product or service expertise, to effectively handle customer queries. 

Scripting tools also have the power to improve the overall efficiency of a contact centre. Today’s advanced tools give agents all the information they need to field questions in a timely fashion. What’s more, they can do it without having to:

• Look things up
• Toggle between different systems
• Repeat themselves

Transform outcomes with analytics

Conversation-management solutions should systematically promote improvements to justify the investment. For instance, it’s simpler to refine phone system performance, coach agents on how they can do better, and control overheads when your communication tools help you connect the dots.

Smart software dashboards link data and people to further numerous performance improvements. For instance, with visualisation, users can see patterns and trends they might normally miss. Automatic case-detail capture features (like speech recognition that helps confirm consumer IDs) cut out small tasks to save a lot of time in aggregate.

Call centre software even promotes collaborative efforts that let managers, agents, and decision-makers work together on projects and share ideas and information. For example, a contact centre team might examine commonly asked consumer questions to highlight and improve confusing elements of its products or services. 

Remember that call centres are all about bettering customer relationship management (CRM) practices. Any tools that help you understand internal bottlenecks, objectively gauge contact centre performance, and uncover customer needs are good to have in your arsenal. Intelligent systems grant you dynamic control over not only the flow of conversations but also how they impact your brand’s public perception and agent job satisfaction.

The benefits of an intelligent contact centre

We’ve covered a lot, but the takeaway is clear — intelligent contact centres have the potential to improve the way you work, regardless of your business model. By building an intelligent contact centre with the latest technologies you can:

• Reduce agent training time: Intelligent contact centre tools are easy to integrate into existing training management systems or use as the basis for a fresh start. They make it simple to seamlessly transition between training sessions and real conversations, improving your odds of a smooth onboarding experience.
• Manage agent wellbeing effectively: Agent wellbeing is integral to mutually satisfactory customer conversations. Intelligent dashboards provide your agents with the resources they need to be successful, such as answers, support, motivation, and transparent access to performance metrics.
• Boost engagement satisfaction rates: Properly trained agents who are equipped to handle customer inquiries can devote more effort to keeping their customers and coworkers happy. Intelligent contact centre tools let you uncover the factors that define effective agents and promote those characteristics workforce-wide.
• Optimise first-call resolution rates: Nobody likes having to go back and forth with a support agent. Good software contributes to proper agent training and provides on-demand access to the resources needed to resolve customer issues. These intelligent features increase the chances of clients getting things done in a single conversation.
• Guide agents to the next best action: It’s not always easy to handle a serious complaint, calm down an angry consumer, or fix a problem remotely. With the latest contact centre platforms, you can increase agent efficiency by supplying appropriate hints on how to meet customer expectations. You also gain the power to conduct more regular quality assurance checks to help identify areas where improvement is needed.

Build an intelligent contact centre with Awaken

Intelligent contact centres keep businesses organised and efficient by managing customer enquiries and complaints — but it takes work to create the ideal CRM solution. Awaken lets businesses build intelligent contacts that shine, customising their outreach practices to achieve unique operational goals and promote healthy organisational growth.

With Awaken’s AI-powered solutions, you can zoom in on fine details or view the big picture of customer-agent interactions with equal ease. You’ll minimise agent training time without compromising quality, cultivating a savvy team that handles queries faster and with less frustration. 

Build a better contact centre that makes it easier to hear, empathise with, and guide your customers towards rewarding resolutions. Kick off the kind of conversations that make for worthwhile customer journeys. Book a demo with us today and start building a contact centre that can truly listen, understand and guide. and understand.

¹ CX Trends 2022

² Call Center Statistics That Are Truly a Wake-Up Call in 2022