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Your contact center serves as a key gateway through which customers interact with your brand, so you want to ensure that each customer’s interaction is smooth, fast, and informative. They should not only achieve their desired outcomes but have a positive experience along the way – one that makes them want to come back. 

That’s why businesses are finding more and more ways to apply AI in their customer experience planning. They love the many ways it can help them architect the desired experience for customers and employees and achieving and competitive edge… all while creating game-changing efficiencies.

Let’s look at a few examples.

AI reduces contact center costs and complexities while increasing efficiencies  

Chatbots and Natural Language Processing, or NLP, are driving billions in annual customer support cost savings. AI capabilities such as screen pops and real-time transcription shave off seconds from every customer interaction that collectively save millions of dollars while increasing first call resolution (FCR) and reducing handle time. AI-powered virtual agents and call deflection further reduce costs and keep call queues lighter for customers who need to speak with someone quickly. AI can even auto populate the notes section of your CRM to speed after-call work for agents. AI takes what’s complicated and makes it simple, with a proven ability to reduce costs over the long term.

AI gives customers what they want most for a superior service experience

AI supports effortless interactions with a personalized touch that keeps customers coming back, from front-end solutions like conversational AI and call deflection to back-end applications that customers have no idea are working behind the scenes to elevate their experience. For example, real-time transcription via speech-to-text that enables agents to know exactly what the customer is saying the first time, every time or identity-centered security that lets customers skip repetitive verification questions without compromising security or compliance. When done right, AI makes communication more effortless and drives more personalized engagement for long-term loyalty.      

AI helps you expand your pool of talent and create “super agents” 

Work is no longer somewhere that you go, it’s something that you do. A coffee shop, a co-working space, or a dining room table easily qualify as suitable agent workspaces in a post-COVID world. AI delivers next-level training and coaching that can be done from anywhere, so your company can cast a wider net and hire top-tier talent while creating an environment where agents know they can be successful. 

Toolwire, a member of Avaya’s Experience Builders ecosystem, crafted Spaces Learning, an AI-powered learning and development solution that offers learners more timely access to relevant, focused training and skill-building materials through both self-paced on-demand and real-time collaborative learning options. The platform features a carousel of micro-learning-oriented course content, sandboxed training environments for hands-on access, assessments, and AI-based insights on how employees, both in and outside of the contact center, are retaining and expanding their skillsets to better serve customers across the entire organization.  

AI in your contact center with Avaya

AI solves for so many challenges in the contact center related to employee retention, customer expectations, and the explosion of the surface area where customers and employees interact. Here’s how Avaya brings contact center AI to life:

 We have a rich ecosystem of AI partners like Google and Journey, a digital identity verification and authentication platform provider, who strengthen the value of the Avaya solutions we deliver to our customers. For example, in healthcare, a provider can use Avaya OneCloud to simplify routine interactions like appointment and bill pay reminders by securely sending notifications across the channel of a patient’s choice, with patients being able to make payments directly from those notifications with high veracity authentication via Journey. This delivers the kind of experience the patient wants (easy and frictionless) while improving identity verification, decreasing false acceptance ratio and costs associated with fraud.Avaya OneCloud – our composable, cloud 3.0-enabled experience platform – includes our award-winning Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, which speeds the creation and delivery of new processes and experiences, even for very narrow use cases. You can customize or make things easier by leveraging our pre-built apps (ex: Avaya Virtual Agent). You have full control over how you bring AI to life within your contact center.  Not ready to go off-prem? You can ease into the cloud with hybrid solutions, keeping core services in your data centers while augmenting them and infusing cloud-based AI innovations. You’ll get all the disruptive benefits of AI without the requirement of a disruptive platform shift. One of our customers delivering outsourcing programs for some of the largest companies in the country chose a hybrid solution with Avaya OneCloud. Combined with meetings and collaboration from the cloud within the Avaya Spaces browser experience, this all-in-one solution provides everything in one convenient place for the customer, as it replaced multiple systems previously used throughout the company, saving them over $1M.The Avaya Media Processing Core delivers faster AI innovation that creates the kind of competitive experiences I walked through earlier (ex: AI transcription). 

Customers and agents are beyond tired of experiences that underwhelm and frustrate. Aren’t you? The contact center is the single most impactful place an organization can implement AI. I can tell you from firsthand experience working with our customers, your customers, agents, and your entire business will love the results. 

See what you can start doing in your contact center today. Find out more here. 

Data Center

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The contact center has traditionally operated through on-premises servers and software, but shifting it to the cloud can help CIOs improve the customer journey. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) options now give enterprises more confidence that they can better deliver high-quality customer experiences.

However, there are potential challenges around moving contact center services, especially if the business has spent years cultivating good relationships with its customers. For many organizations, even a 1% drop in the performance of an Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) system can result in a surge of support calls for live agents, who are already under enormous pressure due to workforce shortages.

Here are the top three factors to consider before migrating your contact center to the cloud:

Avoid a rush to the cloud: Contact center software that has been optimized over the years cannot simply be rewritten and moved to a new CCaaS platform. Specific and careful planning must take place to keep optimizations intact and avoid breaking the customer experience. For example, many systems have carefully constructed call flows, routing rules, and natural language libraries featuring customer terminology. Those were refined over time and can’t be immediately replicated in a new system from day one.
Ensure portability to avoid vendor lock-in: Several CCaaS providers offer services that utilize a specific cloud host, making them inflexible. Any cost savings from moving contact center software to the cloud could be negated if an enterprise decides to change cloud providers due to market or technology changes, mergers, or other events. Choosing the right CCaaS provider means looking for options that are cloud-agnostic, as well as nimble enough to move should the need arise.
Enable AI systems that can handle demand spikes or other changes: New technologies that integrate natural language processing and machine learning algorithms can provide flexibility for companies experiencing an influx of new customer interactions. AI software that can learn with each customer engagement helps to ensure that the system recognizes the optimal action for the next customer who inquires about a new topic. For example, early in the pandemic, banking institutions needed to add messages about lobby closures and longer hold times, but many companies began receiving inquiries about stimulus check status that the system couldn’t quickly answer. A solution that can recognize new questions from customers and quickly react with answers is one of the benefits of an AI system that is constantly learning.

Careful planning combined with a strategy that continually prioritizes the customer experience will enable enterprises to achieve a smooth, optimized, and efficient transition to the cloud. IT leaders should partner with well-established experts to guarantee the best experience in that transformation.

To learn more about open, extensible, and collaborative contact center solutions, explore the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform powered with Nuance AI, Teams, and Dynamics 365, here.

Cloud Management

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All-inclusive vacations. Personalized tours. Packed sports arenas. These are the kinds of experiences that engage us, excite us, and leave us feeling satisfied. CXOs, CIOs, and others entrusted with and empowered to make CX decisions should want the experiences that flow in and out of their contact centers to be just as engaging. They should be pleasantly surprised by their communication options. Customers should be floored by how easy it is to get things done with self-service tools such as a virtual agent. They should be excited that they didn’t have to answer the same repetitive security questions. So excited, that they’re willing to engage more deeply with a business and tell their friends and family about it. 

Today’s contact centers are no longer transactional in nature. Customer experience leaders should be actively working to build an experience-driven contact center. Here’s what to consider…

Building an experience-driven contact center requires experience thinking. 

Experience thinking means placing experiences at the heart of all changes to operations by focusing on the core of human interaction. By doing this, companies can consistently give customers what they need, many times, before they think to ask for it. This is crucial in today’s age of the Everything Customer. Coined by Gartner, the Everything Customer represents a customer who wants every mode of engagement at their fingertips for getting the help or answers they need. Customers should be able to use whatever channel or touchpoint works best for them in the moment, which can change at any time depending on the need or circumstance. 

One day self-service might make sense. The next day, in-person at a physical location. Even in a physical store, there are many ways customers can engage, connect, and be serviced. Businesses can’t presume to know how a customer will reach out, but they should be prepared to deliver a seamless, effortless, and personalized experience every time and in line with their desired outcome. 

To compete on experience thinking, companies need an Experience Platform. 

Many companies try to do the right thing by using technology to meet customer demands only to move farther from them. That’s because they are using monolithic, generic apps that don’t enable them to deliver personalized experiences. What businesses need is an Experience Platform that is open, flexible, and composable in nature, allowing them to build their own experiences as well as leverage “pre-built” experiences that can be quickly tailored to fit their customer and business needs. In essence, the cloud becomes a toolkit for digital transformation instead of a destination to migrate to. 

Let’s say you work from home (cheers to remote work!) and need a latte from your local coffee shop to get through the day. You open a food delivery app on your phone to place your order, but notice the shop is out of your favorite drink. At this point you’re able to tap on an icon at the bottom of your screen and chat with a bot in real-time to confirm if it’s the topping that’s unavailable and, if so, what options you do have. You’re surprised by how easy it is to talk with the bot. The conversation is natural, seamless, and humanlike. You learn which toppings are available and finish placing your order. This is a simple example of experience thinking in contact center design. The customer is empowered with the information they need, with a fantastic experience, and the coffee shop doesn’t have to use costly in-person resources. 

The kinds of things an Experience Platform can do in minutes is more than a typical company could develop and enable in months. In the example above, in which the food delivery company offered a virtual agent through its mobile app, the company could build its own from scratch or deploy a cloud-based, pre-built virtual agent that can be customized and scaled to deliver seamless transactions in a matter of minutes. The Avaya OneCloud™ Experience Platform enables this kind of innovation and can also connect users with our Experience Builders community to provide access to all the technical expertise, skills, and resources they need to develop incredible experiences for their customers and employees. 

An Experience Platform also supports a vendor ecosystem, giving businesses instant access to a pool of innovative, readily available solutions from industry-leading vendors. Gartner predicts that by 2025, the average organization will be exploiting the benefits of this ecosystem approach to create better customer and employee experiences. 

Let’s say you’re a healthcare or financial organization that’s heavily reliant on identity and data security. Every time a customer reaches out to pay a bill, manage their account, or make an appointment, they must answer frustrating security questions often related to their personally identifiable information. Avaya OneCloud supports Identity-centered security and biometrics by Journey as part of its Experience Builder ecosystem. Patients and users can verify their identity through the use of biometrics to simplify the authentication process with higher veracity, reducing costs by as much as $3 per call while improving the customer experience. Avaya OneCloud enables effortless transfers across all physical and digital channels (ex: chatbot to agent), and Journey carries this authentication forward so the service experience continues without missing a beat. There’s no need for patients or users to reauthenticate themself every time they speak with someone new. This is a notable example of experience thinking in the contact center. 

An experience-driven contact center gives your customers what they want and what you want for your business.

An Experience Platform provides everything businesses need to create an experience-driven contact center that thrills and satisfies. Tools and building blocks to build their own experiences, pre-built apps to deliver value more immediately, a global community of experts for support as needed, and a growing Experience Builder ecosystem to further simplify, enhance, and differentiate experiences. It’s a powerful piece of technology that takes what’s complicated and makes it simple so that businesses can focus on experiences and outcomes. 

Learn more about Avaya OneCloud and Avaya Experience Builders. 

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