THE CALL CENTRE THAT THINKS FOR ITSELF?
Is there such a thing as a thinking call centre? Whilst some disgruntled consumers might consider that to be a bit of an oxymoron, it is clear that Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to take on a more significant role in the contact centre strategies of companies everywhere – especially those with large customer bases or that retain substantial amounts of customer information across increasingly complex databases.
This is the view of Dr Nicola Millard, Customer Experience Futurologist at BT, whose recent study on the contact channel preferences of customers reveals huge potential for the further deployment of AI or intelligent applications by organisations with customer service functions.
"The research I conducted was really about painting a picture of how and why customers use the channels they do," says Nicola Millard. "I wanted to better understand what was going through their minds when choosing to use different channel options and what their beliefs and behaviour means for organisations in terms of how they evolve their contact strategies."
"What became clear in the findings is that consumers seem increasingly progressive about using alternative channels. If this drives companies to offer multiple contact channels in greater numbers, then intelligent applications are going to become more and more commonly utilised." INTELLIGENT STEERINGArtificial Intelligence and intelligent applications are already starting to be used in contact centres up and down the country. For example, intelligent call steering applications that try to work out what customers want through using natural language speech recognition capabilities, have already been implemented for applications like share trading, ticket booking and train timetables. They recognise key words and then use intelligent steering to divert the caller to another application or a person that will solve that problem.
Intelligent applications are also being used to make sense of customer data – in particular trends or patterns hidden within collected data.
"A popular application of this type is one that tries to detect when customers might be about to churn," says Nicola. "It understands what a churning customer looks like and then hunts around a company’s interactive database looking for similar customers."MULTI-CHANNEL STRATEGIES"The increasing deployment of multi-channel strategies and the customer’s enthusiasm to use alternative channels will lead to more sophisticated AI applications being developed in the future," she says.
"In particular they will be deployed to support two key areas. The first is more effective contact routing, or deflection and direction, and the second is to improve the way in which companies can make sense of customer data to give them a competitive advantage."
"If we look at the first area," continues Nicola, "an example of where AI can help in the future would be matching a channel to a mood. At BT we are already looking at ways in which channels can be co-ordinated with a customer’s state of mind. By analysing the voice patterns of callers, we can detect factors such as stress and then fast-track that customer to a person rather than make them press lots of different buttons." LOCATION-BASED SERVICES "The second area brings with it the possibility of intelligent location-based services and applications. One example might be where a customer’s mobile phone uses GPS to let a company know they are in a particular high street. The database can then call up a transactional reference to a product that the customer is looking for and then text the customer automatically to let them know the product is available in a shop around the corner from them. AI can do this because it can cope with all the complexities that humans cannot."
Concludes Nicola Millard: "Businesses with contact centres should be aware that an increase in the number of channels being used by customers will lead to an increase in the complexity of data being collected. AI applications will help companies sort through the data and turn it into a valuable tool to change the way that they serve customers. Communications Providers will be a big part of this – especially because of how competitive their industry is and also because customer data is critical to them. Business drivers such as the need to balance cost efficiency with high quality of service mean that many companies employ self-service systems for lower value transactions," explains Nicola . "It’s less expensive for the businesses, customers can benefit from getting quick access to what they want and agents are relieved of some of the more mundane elements of their job."
Between The Lines will be returning to this subject in future issues and talking again to Dr Millard about her views on the changing nature of the customer experience and taking a closer look at its implications for Communications Providers.