CONTRIBUTED ARTICLE
By Grace Lau
Director of Growth Content, Dialpad
Contact centers deal with large numbers of customer interactions across multiple channels. Due to the multi-faceted nature of contact centers, streamlining workflows is essential for providing a fast, reliable, and well-organized service.
Cloud telephony and AI are becoming popular contact center tools to enable and improve existing workflows. Throughout this article, we’re going to explore these tools in more detail, look at their role in the transition toward remote and hybrid working, as well as the various benefits they bring.
What Are Cloud Telephony and AI?
Cloud technology is everywhere. According to Gartner, global end-user spending on cloud solutions will hit almost $600 billion in 2023. The cloud simply means that you are connecting to a remote server rather than in-house hardware.
Source: Gartner
Cloud telephony, therefore, is communicating with a telephone via the cloud. In other words, you are relying on an internet connection to make and receive phone calls. Cloud telephony will typically require a third party to host the service.
AI (artificial intelligence), on the other hand, is machine technology that can mimic human intelligence. Part of this is often collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. AI then uses its ‘intelligence’ to unpack that data and interpret it. An example of AI is a chatbot. A chatbot will collect a customer query, analyze it, and provide a human-like response that it deems appropriate.
When we talk about mixing cloud telephony with AI, we are not necessarily talking about replacing a human agent with a machine. Rather, they are tools that a human agent uses to resolve problems efficiently. Moreover, businesses use the data AI gathers to optimize their services, whilst the cloud element facilitates a transition towards remote contact centers. These factors combined help to boost call center productivity.
A Shift Towards Remote and Hybrid Work
Remote and hybrid work styles offer benefits such as being cost-effective and are often preferred by employees. Therefore, like many other industries, remote and hybrid work options have become increasingly popular amongst contact center teams.
A recent study found that in 2021 64 percent of agents were working remotely and that contact center leaders foresaw this as a permanent change. Meaning that AI and cloud telephony aren’t just tools, they’re also changing the way contact centers are operating by enabling this transition.
This is because, whether you are conference calling from Canada via dialpad or sitting at home on your desktop, cloud telephony makes communication easy. The beauty of the cloud is that employees can connect to it from anywhere. With cloud telephony, a call center agent does not need to be sitting in a specific office, connecting to a telephony line. It is all done through the internet.
Source: Zippia
Therefore, as long as they have a stable internet connection and all the right login details, employees can do the same job from home. Working from home cuts the commute to and from work. It can provide a better work-life balance which, according to Zippia, increases employee morale, employee retention rate, and the overall health of employees.
Benefits of Cloud Telephony and AI to Contact Center Workflows
Whether you’re considering remote options or not, there are numerous ways that cloud telephony, and AI can improve contact center workflows. Let’s take a look:
Quick and Reliable Customer Interaction
One of the most prominent improvements of using cloud and AI technologies in a contact center is the quick and reliable customer interaction it facilitates. AI can give fast and accurate responses to customer queries across a range of channels. This includes web chat, emails, and apps. What’s more, it can also be harnessed for voice calls.
Many call centers have a database of common issues and solutions. Additionally, they have systems where information is provided based on an inputted keyword. AI rapidly sifts through these databases and presents the appropriate information to the agent. The agent can then quickly relay this back to the customer, thus improving efficiency by reducing the time spent on each call.
Unique Business Insights
The process of collecting and analyzing data is behind every successful online business. When you collect and analyze data, you can gain information and insights that wouldn’t be possible without it. AI is all about processing data.
The combined use of cloud telephony and AI together allows the AI to pick up patterns in customer queries. By extension, you can find out the common pain points of customers in your products or service.
For example, you may receive many phone calls asking for tracking information. As such, making tracking information clearer and more accessible could save your business time and money because you are reducing the need to contact you.
AI keeps track of each customer’s buying behavior and communication with you. It can assess future behavior, making you better able to tailor your marketing efforts to individuals.
More still, call center agents can use speech analytics in their telephony setup. This is a type of AI that listens to a phone call after it ends. It analyzes the customer’s tone of voice to evaluate their attitude throughout the phone call. It can learn patterns from this to detect when a caller is annoyed, for example.
Simple Integration
Lots of applications can be integrated into cloud telephony and AI. While integrations can be time-consuming — and even challenging — for onsite setups, cloud-based solutions are specifically designed with application integration in mind. This means that you can seamlessly connect your AI and telephony system with solutions like:
- Calendars
- Email accounts
- Helpdesk software
- Chatbots
- CRMs
Contact center software
This saves agents a lot of time switching back and forth between applications. It also further demonstrates how these systems facilitate a home set-up, as it helps create a more accessible set-up that is indistinguishable from onsite operations.
Wrapping Up
For contact centers taking on the challenge of adopting AI or considering remote or hybrid options, cloud telephony and AI go hand-in-hand. These technologies can optimize performance and productivity and can save users valuable time by assisting with customer queries quickly and efficiently. AI diligently gathers data that companies can use to improve their business, services, and customer interaction as well as being available from anywhere.
The bottom line is that cloud telephony and AI can be utilized to greatly improve your team’s workflow. It is a flexible, adaptable, and scalable contact center solution.
For quick reference:
Photo provided by Pixabay
Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud
communication platform for better and easier team collaboration using a Toronto-based phone system. She has more than 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. She is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content.
CONTRIBUTED ARTICLE
