How Contact Center AI is Shaping the Future of Customer Support

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has radically transformed the traditional contact center. With the help of automation, not only are modern contact centers addressing customer needs, but they’re doing it more effectively and creatively than ever before. 

Amit Kumar, a project manager at Google, and Vasili Triant, COO of UJET, recently appeared on the Google Cloud Platform Podcast to speak on how cutting edge contact center AI is changing the future of customer service and share exciting features brands can access via Google CCAI. This article was adapted from that conversation. 

Call centers before Contact Center AI (CCAI) 

Call centers are part of a legacy industry that hasn’t changed much in decades. Think about it – customers are still calling into businesses, still going through a tedious transfer process, and still waiting on hold for far too long. The customer experience has barely improved in the last twenty years, and it lacks the personalization found in other parts of the customer journey. 

If you look up a product online today, you’ll soon start seeing social ads serving you that exact product. Contact centers rarely provide that level of personalization. 

The call center of yesterday is a collection of niche technologies that have been integrated through third party connectors. This means that while a customer can email a business for a resolution and then call them to escalate, those two conversations remain siloed, creating more pain points for customers and agents. 

The current state of CCAI

Contact center AI (CCAI)  is transforming that tired customer experience by integrating niche technologies into a unified cloud platform that provides more context for agents and support for customers. 

Accelerated by the demands of the Covid-19 pandemic, cloud contact centers are one of the fastest growing software-as-service segments globally. The biggest companies in the world are incorporating AI into their call center tech, including Google, who has partnered with UJET to create a powerful Google CCAI platform that taps into device capabilities to provide an innovative approach to the customer experience. 

How CCAI is improving customer support

There are many reasons why businesses are shifting their contact center technology and service to cloud platforms like UJET’s CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) platform. Here are three main reasons: 

• It reduces cost, because it allows contact centers to be more scalable 
• It improves customer satisfaction by eliminating hold times and providing quick solutions  
• It improves agent satisfaction by moving workloads into the cloud 

With the help of CCAI, customer conversations can be handled in-app across all channels whether they’re happening via phone, chat, or SMS, and agents can tap into diagnostic tools that provide contextual information for each customer interaction. 

Rather than agents having to speak to a customer to exchange data, the platform is doing that automatically behind the scenes and arming agents with that context. Often, it’s providing solutions for customers through virtual agents that pick up customer context through conversational AI. This saves on man hours and costs of hiring more live agents.

Embedded in Google’s CCAI platform are collaboration features that allow agents to provide first contact resolutions (FCR). This makes customers happier and cuts down on hold times, saving businesses money.

Google and UJET’s CCAI platform gives businesses options. They can buy an end-to-end unified platform that gives them best-in-class integration, or they can build more tools into their contact center as they grow and their needs become more diverse. That scalability saves even more money. 

The CCAI of tomorrow 

As companies with more intelligent assets and engineering super powers enter the CCAI space, the tech is becoming smarter. Rather than customer data being used just for sales and marketing purposes, it’s being leveraged to provide customers with exceptional support. 

According to Triant, the future of CCAI is in proactive customer service. Brands will begin to look at intent and signals on their websites and mobile apps and proactively reach out to customers to provide the assistance they need before they even ask. 

“I think it’s very critical to give those customers a very, very delightful experience so that it leaves a long lasting impact and they become a customer for life, and I think that’s where the contact center is going,” Kumar said. 

So many services can be automated with a virtual agent that walks customers through support options or a live agent providing solutions to complex issues. Ultimately, the future of CCAI will help customers and agents feel more seen and elevate an already incredible customer experience. 

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn more about how CCAI is rewriting the future of customer experience.