E-Handbook: Contact center AI opens new frontiers for customer engagements Article 1 of 4

Call center to CX center to profit center on the wings of AI

When consumers interact with a business, first and last impressions count at the point of contact. And more than ever, contact centers are taking on greater importance and complexity to meet and even predict the needs of today's savvy and mobile consumers who demand more satisfying experiences in the moment over the channel of their choice.

Gartner identified three contact center priorities for 2020: digital channels and infrastructure; customer service representatives; and data, voice of the customer and customer service metrics. The common threads among these three goals are process automation; knowledgeable human agents assisted by chatbots; emerging AI technologies to collect, dissect and analyze data as well as personalize the customer experience; and cloud-based services to elevate contact center innovation.

With the aid of AI and automation technologies, contact centers are evolving from simple call centers into more complex CX centers. Contact center AI tools like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and neural networks give contact centers an important edge in automating processes, discovering behavior patterns, making predictions, providing recommendations and optimizing the workforce to improve interactions with customers and transform customer service into a more viable profit center.

By 2023, 45% of Global 2000 B2B and B2C enterprises will include personalization in context-based customer engagements using AI, big data and conversational computing technologies, according to IDC. And, by 2025, the research firm predicted that 60% of leading consumer brands and retailers will use emotion detection and management in their customer engagements. Grand View Research sees AI, especially in business analytics, as the primary catalyst in a global contact center software market expected to grow nearly 20% annually and surpass $72 billion by 2027.

This handbook examines the influence of contact center AI tools in the multidimensional CX center. First, learn about four important steps that ensure the successful implementation of contact center technologies. Next, we report on trending contact center tools that improve customer engagements. Finally, the omnipresent chatbot plays a key role in seamless contact center workflows.