Ask a User Experience Designer: Top Use Cases for Contact Center AI

Now more than ever, organizations must be more customer-focused and integrate modern technologies into their contact centers to communicate via social media, email, voice, and other digital channels. As enterprises are challenged with meeting today’s tech-savvy consumer demands, cloud-based platforms, AI-powered agent assistance, and intelligent virtual agents are vital to delivering a seamless, personalized, and quick customer experience across various channels.

In a recent blog penned by Adam Matthews, Maven Wave’s UX Manager, he reviewed the Top 5 Benefits of a Cloud-Based Contact Center. In the below Q&A, we sat down with Adam to take a deeper dive into Google Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI), a cloud-based solution that leverages Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, to discuss how it can transform an organization and use cases to support it.

From helping healthcare organizations schedule COVID-19 testing and appointment flow to assisting IT departments with complex calls, CCAI is changing the way contact centers operate. Keep reading to learn more about the impact CCAI is having throughout industries. 

What are some of the goals organizations are trying to achieve when implementing CCAI into their contact centers? 

First and foremost, to improve customer satisfaction scores. Additionally, companies are looking to increase self-service so that general inquiries and issues can be resolved more quickly, reducing the amount of time live agents are needed, which allows them to focus on more complex matters and be more proactive across the board. 

Businesses are also looking to move away from outdated solutions that require higher maintenance and have a greater risk of costly downtime. Ease of use is also of utmost importance; organizations need fast implementation and adoption to seamlessly inject technology into the contact center and the user experience. Integration into existing IVRs is also a goal that many businesses are looking to achieve. 

CCAI delivers all of this and more. 

Recent events have caused an overwhelming strain on healthcare. How has CCAI assisted organizations to rapidly become more efficient and keep up with the increase in demand?

CCAI was deployed across healthcare organizations at lightning speed at the onset of the pandemic. While many healthcare providers were already using virtual agents and bots in some capacity, CCAI played a vital role in helping patients schedule COVID-19 testing and automatically collecting responses to the screening questions. CCAI can also be leveraged to provide resources instantly to millions that require real-time answers. With a ready option to speak to someone live and the ability to detect sentiment and escalate, CCAI delivers critical benefits to healthcare now, into the future, and beyond. 

Scheduling appointments, scheduling flow, and finding a provider can all be offloaded, creating a better patient experience and driving value to the organization. This value allows healthcare providers to be more focused on treating patients and using the AI and ML that is powering CCAI to focus on scheduling across digital channels to make it easier and faster for people to make appointments and access care.

As retail businesses battle to thrive and provide a pleasant customer experience that will contribute to increased satisfaction, and ultimately, retention, how will CCAI play a role?

When it comes to retail and other similar businesses, communicating with customers across social media and the internet has exponentially grown. Without the ability to do so effectively and retain information from one channel to another while using that data to drive the conversation and resolution, businesses will get left behind. 

When a customer has a complaint or inquiry online via a bot, that bot can use the information provided in the chat to inform the live agent of the situation. This immediately helps both the customer and the live agent resolve an issue or provide a more detailed solution rapidly, rather than wait on hold or be transferred around. We all know how unproductive this can be on both sides of the fence. 

In another example, retail businesses can see an immediate impact in call volume, as before CCAI, calls that were meant to be routed elsewhere within the company were going to store locations. Moreover, customers can contact one platform, and then the system decides where the customer should be within that brand. With CCAI, organizations have a centralized place to manage everything, which reduces the amount of maintenance and improves consistency. With the holidays approaching, an API can pull changes made to hours and other information from the website and convert the time into a prompt that can be played back for customers when they call. Two or three weeks before a holiday, the system will automatically start notifying customers who call in of the upcoming change, giving that time back to those teams.

There’s no question IT departments are more critical to today’s digitized environment than ever before. In what ways has CCAI increased efficiency and helped resolve complex issues rapidly?

From initial intakes to lost laptops to troubleshooting, CCAI is transforming the way IT departments and service desks operate. Service tickets can now be produced from virtual agents, and ordering new devices has never been easier. When more complex issues come into play, CCAI can use its AI-powered capabilities to trigger escalation and route the call to the appropriate department. IT needs to use its resources to accelerate productivity and steer digital transformation, not recover passwords and restart devices. 

CCAI helps accelerate excellent customer service without teams having to go through all of the typical steps: double-jacking with agents to listen to conversations, analyzing, and refining the approach. With CCAI, a lot of this happens natively as the platform is constantly learning and improving.

IT will continue to be in high demand, and cloud-based, secure technologies are vital to resolving issues both large and small, especially as multiple devices are keeping businesses connected and alive. 

From an ROI perspective, how does a cloud-based contact cloud center migration with CCAI contribute?

The ability to scale is very prominent with these technologies. By allowing businesses to work smarter with less resources, they can scale faster and eliminate the need for additional agents. Over time, companies can reduce the amount of staff dedicated to continuously improving the platform in future years. 

The improved CX that is delivered has a potential impact on customer lifetime value (CLV), average order size, and customer loyalty. In turn, this will increase revenue and provide significant ROI. 

Flexibility should also be held in regard as a driver of ROI. CCAI has the unique ability to integrate with other leading solutions, channels, and data sources. This flexibility is especially key for future use cases and ROI. Additionally, it enables organizations to develop highly customized and functional automated bots and capabilities for customers. 

Google is constantly evolving its solutions. In what ways have recent enhancements helped enterprises solve challenges?

The recent edition of Dialogflow CX – Google’s natural language understanding platform that helps design and integrate a conversational user interface into mobile apps, web applications, devices, bots, IVRS, and more – can now solve more enterprise-level challenges. Dialogflow CX can handle multiple conversation topics at once, responding to a user with follow-up questions to fill in details as needed.

Events handlers are first-class types with powerful controls and explicit error event handling built-in to your agent. 

Thanks, Adam! Moving away from legacy systems and creating value while driving productivity and increasing customer satisfaction is no small feat. In the long run, it’s the only way to stay ahead. With the expertise and experience to navigate and integrate CCAI into your cloud-based contact center solution, Maven Wave will help you achieve your goals. With 10 Google Cloud specializations, we’ll keep your contact center ahead of the curve while improving your customer experience, which in turn will increase brand loyalty and revenue. 

To learn more about CCAI and how it can transform your contact center, contact us today.