Everything You Need To Know About AI and Virtual Assistants for Contact Centers

Contact center AI transforms experiences

More contact centers are using AI-driven technologies like chatbots, virtual assistants, natural language processing, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis to transform experiences. According to Fortune Business Insights, the rising use of these technologies will more than quadruple the growth of the global AI call center market over the next decade.

As the use of AI grows within contact centers, it will drive better agent and customer experiences in several ways.

Enhancing agent experiences

Using AI-enabled virtual assistants, contact centers can handle routine customer questions — whether it's about their order status, billing inquiries, or how to request a refund — which can reduce call volumes for human agents.

Virtual assistants allow contact centers to scale their operations, too, especially when demand spikes. With virtual assistants, contact centers can handle a higher volume of calls and offer 24/7 availability and self-service during non-business hours.

Advanced AI technologies, such as natural language processing and generative AI, support capabilities like real-time transcription and call summarization. This allows contact centers to automatically capture specific details about a customer's case that agents can refer back to during the conversation to speed time to resolution or to route customers to another agent who has the specific expertise to handle their issue.

For example, Vonage Contact Center Intelligent Workspace uses AI to facilitate real-time transcription of customer calls, advanced call queuing, and recommendations for the next best action that agents should take.

Customer experience benefits

AI facilitates omnichannel support across SMS, email, chat, phone, and social media to meet customers' needs using their preferred communications channel. Contact centers can capitalize on this functionality to enhance service touchpoints with customers and more efficiently and effectively address their problems.

AI can also support sentiment analysis, which provides real-time insight into customers' emotions. This enables agents to better recognize a customer's emotional state and take actionable steps to reduce their frustration, such as looping in a supervisor, issuing a discount, or offering sincere words of understanding and encouragement throughout the call to de-escalate any tension.

Companies increasingly have diverse, global customer bases. AI can address these needs, too, by supporting multilingual interactions through real-time language translation. This enables agents to engage with customers in their local language. Contact centers can also integrate these multilingual support capabilities into chatbots and virtual assistants to answer common questions and process requests.

Operational benefits

Along with these customer service enhancements, AI offers several backend operational benefits for contact centers. The technology can surface relevant information from internal knowledge bases to help agents deliver more accurate answers when they talk to customers.

It can also gather data across contact center operations and transform it into analytics that can help reduce call wait times and improve agent performance.

Unlocking the power of AI for contact centers

Customers increasingly expect fast, personalized service — 73% of them actually expect better personalization as technology advances, according to Salesforce's 2023 State of the Connected Customer report. AI complements the work of human agents to provide the 24/7 coverage and customized interactions customers now expect.

Adopting AI capabilities for contact centers may seem like a daunting task. For companies that are considering AI but unsure where to begin, here’s a recommendation: Start small.

Begin by leveraging AI-powered features that are easy-to-use but can have significant impact on the bottom-line. For example, consider using an AI-powered bot to address frequently asked questions (FAQs) during the self-service stage of customer interactions. This can help answer simple questions that do not need attention from a live or human agent — with the ability to escalate to a live agent if needed.

Cloud-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions often offer a full suite of built-in AI capabilities. Vonage Contact Center uses AI virtual assistants to help businesses empower human agents to deliver personalization and improve operational efficiencies — all while enhancing customer service across channels.

• Optimize agent time: Vonage AI Virtual Assistant addresses routine or frequently asked customer questions, freeing live agents to focus on and resolve more complex issues. This optimizes agents’ time and can strengthen customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

• Scaling operations: Vonage AI Virtual Assistant enables around-the-clock virtual receptionist or concierge services. Companies can easily scale this part of their operations to accelerate response times, streamline the booking process, and provide tailored recommendations to enhance customer interactions.

Get started today with a next-generation contact center experience

From automating routine tasks to providing personalized support, AI and virtual assistants are transforming contact center experiences. By fully embracing these technologies, companies can empower agents to meet growing customer expectations and deliver next-level experiences that help them maintain a competitive edge.

Explore how Vonage Contact Center leverages AI and other features to deliver better agent and customer experiences.