What is an Intelligent Contact Center?

Intelligent contact center is the term for a contact center that uses cutting edge technologies to provide an exemplary customer support journey –  and to support its own internal processes and employees.

Many contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms have emerged to fill this need. These platforms provide all of the services of a traditional contact center, without the physical infrastructure. Instead, these systems are cloud-based, AI-powered, and use an omnichannel approach to streamline customer service.

Curious to learn why an intelligent contact center is best for your customers, your employees, and your business’s bottom line?

Key Takeaways:

• An Intelligent Contact Center can help your team increase productivity, reduce costs, and serve customers more effectively.
• Many customers appreciate the benefits of AI-powered systems because it gives them more autonomy and flexibility.
• While there is a high upfront cost to an Intelligent Contact Center, it can pay off in the long run.

Key Elements of an Intelligent Contact Center

Intelligent contact centers support the human element of customer service by leveraging the power of AI and the cloud. This way, businesses meet their customers’ high expectations while still providing human-to-human support.

Leveraging the power of AI

Important Features of CCaaS

Contact Center as a Service platforms perform essential services for businesses. Customer service agents and customers benefit from some key features.

• Omnichannel Integration: This key functionality of CCaaS fully integrates communication channels such as email, SMS, live chat, phone calls, and others into a single dashboard.This whole-picture view provides insights for creating an exemplary customer service experience, resolving problems, and positively impacting the center’s KPIs.
• Data, Analytics, and Silo Prevention: CCaaS presents real-time data, and the history of a customer’s support journey. Data is communicated transparently so it’s easy to spot patterns, predict and answer customer questions, and make active decisions for the company.
• Automated workflows: Trigger phrases, if-then, and canned responses all make it easy to guide a customer to the solution they need.
• Call Routing: Based on a number of customizable criteria, callers are sorted and connected with the best resource or agent to resolve their concern.

Helping Management With CCaaS

These same features that support customers can also benefit your managers, helping them accomplish the same tasks in less time. Some examples are:

• Training: Recording calls can provide ample training material for managers to use both in onboarding new employees and providing continuing education for existing team members.
• Monitoring: If you have received reports of a specific issue, AI features can assist you in identifying why that might be happening and how to take action against it. These features can also help you see trends in which channels customers are using, helping you identify how your customers prefer to communicate with you.
• Gathering data: CCaaS tools can help you gather customer sentiment analysis data, which can help you evaluate how your customers feel when they call you and how successful your systems are at building a positive sentiment over the course of a call.

While there are still many tasks managers need to do each day to keep systems running, CCaaS features can help them do more in less time and prioritize what is most important to your customers.

Giving Customers a Better Experience

Self-service AI tools such as chatbots, help save customers time and frustration. For most simple or straightforward tasks, customers appreciate simply and seamlessly conducting their business.

These tools are available around the clock. Customers can ask questions whenever they need to, get answers almost instantly, and move on… all without having to interact with a person or voice their business out loud.

For the 57% of customers who still prefer to speak on the phone to a live agent, voice analysis is going to route a caller to the agent who can best meet their needs. This eliminates the need to pass calls around until a solution is found.

As these tools evolve to understand human language and intention, they’re better able to help customers solve problems.

Reducing Costs for Your Business

Implementing an automated intelligent contact center can be a costly decision, but it can also lead to potential long-term savings. This system can significantly lower costs by automating many common types of customer interactions and routing calls to the appropriate individuals.

These systems not only minimize operational expenses but also improve customer satisfaction. AI-powered chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems handle common inquiries such as checking the status of orders or resetting passwords, reducing the need for human intervention. Similarly, advanced call routing algorithms connect customers to the most suitable agent, which significantly reduces call handling times.

You can reap many benefits from intelligent contact centers such as significant cost savings through automation, improved resource management, and superior service efficiency.

Agile Customer Service Strategies Using CCaaS

Unlike traditional methods that often require time and resources to implement updates, AI-driven CCaaS solutions allow for relatively quick and straightforward updates. These platforms are cloud-based, which allows for a rapid deployment of new features, updates and improvements without extensive downtime and complex installations.

Are you concerned about errors? AI tools significantly reduce the incidence of human error in customer service operations. Automated systems have the benefit of handling routine tasks with high precision, ensuring accuracy in responses. Additionally, AI-driven solutions can provide real-time insights and recommendations, allowing you to make informed decisions and reduce the likelihood of mistakes.

Supporting Your Customers With an Intelligent Contact Center

Intermedia’s platform is here to support you, your team, and your customers with the same amazing intelligent contact center systems. If you’re ready to provide better customer service with less work, contact Intermedia today to get started.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.