Recent stories in "AI"
Unexpected Lessons from the 2020 Contact Center
About a year ago, I tried something that we would all agree now was a bit foolish: predict what the 2020 contact center would look like. Before the COVID-19 pandemic sent agents home on a massive scale, before economic disruption reinforced the need for consistent, digitally enabled customer experiences (CX), I outlined several ongoing trends […]
Equipping the Enterprise for the AI-Powered Human Agent Era
From 1990 to 2010, some 4,400 children in the United States 17 years of age and younger made trips to the emergency room annually for the treatment of injuries resulting from amusement park rides. What does this have to do with contact center agents, you ask? I think many would agree that working in the […]
The New World for Contact Centers May Be Where We Were Already Headed
So far, 2020 has been nothing short of challenging for businesses. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, we all scrambled to adjust to the new state of the world. Virtually overnight, hundreds of thousands of agents transitioned to working remotely and the approach, management and infrastructure of contact centers were completely restructured. In the […]
How Intelligent Virtual Assistants Are Leading the Transition to the Intelligent Enterprise
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) have proven themselves to automate the handling of customer and employee requests and tasks. They are quickly becoming a fixture in the organization’s customer service workforce, becoming the “MVP” of the customer care team. But IVAs aren’t content to rest on their laurels; increasingly, they are being directed to serve an […]
How AI Can Make the Holidays Bright
The winter holidays aren’t always “the most wonderful time of the year” for the contact center. Time-off requests and spikes in call volume, especially in the retail industry, can bring forecasting and scheduling headaches that rival those induced by too much eggnog at the office party. New technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can change […]
Making AI Work in the Contact Center
In the late 2000s, right around when videosharing platforms were really coming into their own, there was a curious trend among marketing executives. “Viral videos” captured the zeitgeist, and every brand decided they needed to have one—even if they didn’t fully understand what made a clip “go viral” or how to be strategic with its […]
Hiring for Retention: Using AI to Predict Which Job Candidates Will Be Successful
Do you have trouble hiring quality agents? Retaining the superstars? You’re not alone. Surveys suggest agent attrition is a top concern year after year. And no wonder: the ramification of bad hires is expensive. The average cost to recruit, hire and train each new agent starts around $6,500 depending upon vertical. Poor hires mean higher […]
Chatbots in the Contact Center
With consumers increasingly expecting anywhere, anytime access to conduct simple transactions, more businesses are deploying chatbots to handle routine and repetitive customer service tasks. Automation has enormous appeal as an efficient, affordable option for companies that lack the human staff to effectively manage the workload in the contact center (one of the top 3 challenges […]
Target Those Manual Processes with Automation
Automation, from Dictionary.com: “The technique, method or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means, as by electronic devices, reducing human intervention to a minimum.” Way too many centers still have way too many manual process steps, negatively impacting the customer experience and the cost of doing business. Long handle times are […]
How to Put Your Machine Data to Work
As consumer goods become increasingly commoditized and compete on features and pricing, many businesses are focusing their attention on delivering excellent customer service to build customer loyalty. For many businesses, this will require a reinvention of their approach to customer service. It can no longer be just a “support” function—it needs to evolve into a […]
Does AI Make Agents Happier?
The growth of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered self-service in contact centers understandably raises job-security questions for agents—will my job still exist in five years? Three years? Next year? The reality is that AI is far more likely to serve as a resource assistant to agents than it is to take over their jobs. Today, and for […]
How AI Will Change the Nature of Contact Center Work
There is no doubt that artificial intelligence, robotics and automation in the contact center offer the potential to drive faster, more consistent around-the-clock service and deliver higher customer satisfaction. Or that senior executives are enthralled with the possibilities for enhancing products and services, automating routine tasks and improving decision-making. While organizations forge ahead with plans […]
THE EVOLUTION OF CUSTOMER SERVICE: LANDLINE TO AI
Back in the day when you had to call for a cab instead of opening up the Uber or Lyft app, the only way to contact customer service was by calling… from your landline. We’ve come a long way and today the typical contact center now supports an average of nine communication channels between voice, […]
Imagining The Possibilities With AI
“Remember that AI is not going to just run on its own. You need people involved for the ‘human- assisted learning’ to determine how to act on the insights and opportunities the system discovers.” Artificial intelligence (AI) is breaking the hype meter in the contact center industry. While it’s only in the early adopter stages, […]
Cognitive Collaboration, Artificial Intelligence and Music Nerds
Cognitive (adjective) cog·ni·tive 1: of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning or remembering) —Merriam-Webster Dictionary Cognition is the way by which we, as humans, acquire knowledge through thought, experience and the senses. Cognitive learning, which typically involves all of our human senses, is entirely different from machine learning. Machine […]
“Unleash AI’s Power to Elevate Customer Experience” recommends Altitude Software at MECC 2018
Altitude Software, a global provider of omnichannel solutions to deliver great customer experiences, today announced that it is joining the Middle East Contact Centre and Customer Experience Conference to be held in Dubai from April 24 to 25, 2018. As most countries in the MENA region have embarked on a range of reforms to diversify […]
AI: Streamlining Contact Center Technology
“Integrating AI into daily call center business operations has the potential to reshape the workplace and provide unimaginable opportunities for growth.” It is hard to believe it now, but artificial intelligence used to be nothing more than a futuristic dream. It was portrayed in old movies as the vehicle that would completely change the world […]
Blending AI With Human Support
The future of work and the impact that artificial intelligence will have on the workforce has been a hot topic lately. The publicity has been a bit unsettling, though, given the tendency to couple the acronym AI with the word “replace”—as in “AI Will Replace Half of All Jobs in the Next Decade” or “Could […]
Automation, AI and Analytics: Big Data Gets Bigger
Although the term “Big Data” has actually been around since the 1990s, it was only in the last decade or so that it became common terminology in the contact center industry. Big Data originally referred to data sets that were too large or complex for traditional data processing applications software to deal with, like recorded […]
