Here’s a fun fact: by 2025, 53.5% of customer interactions are expected to use AI combined with self-service and workflow automation to guide them to resolution (Nemertes Research). Are you ready for this shift to digital interactions?

It’s clear your customers are ready and willing to use digital self-service options. Here’s another fun fact: more than 60% of Americans prefer solving basic customer service issues through a self-service website or app (Forbes).

Have you considered adding AI capabilities into your customer service strategy? If not, let us share how AI-powered communications can deliver personalized, intelligent, and insightful interactions to improve agent productivity and boost customer experience. This means better ratings, increased revenue, and decreased operational costs. With the way time flies, 2025 will be here before you know it so why not get ahead of the curve and start now?

Upgrade customer support with self-service

Providing automated self-service options with virtual assistants over voice, SMS, social messaging, and chatbots is a great place to start because it can be the ultimate time and money saver. Bots can’t completely replace human interaction but what they can do is cut down wait times for customers and reduce the number of calls agents receive, allowing them to be more efficient. Easily reduce agent-assisted calls for simple requests such as:

Bots don’t know everything though, so it’s important to ensure a seamless transition to a live agent for more complex issues or when the bot is unable to resolve the issue. For example, a customer of ours is a travel company using a voice bot to gather initial booking information such as location and dates, then passes the caller off to an agent who can complete the reservation while providing concierge services. This is a win win scenario that improves the customer experience and lets agents focus on revenue-generating activities.

Power personalized experiences

You are probably sitting on an untapped treasure chest of customer data, but are you using it to your advantage? Customers don’t want to be treated like just another number, that’s why providing a personalized experience to each individual is a game changer when it comes to customer experience. Machine learning can uncover insights and provide the context for more personalized bot and agent interactions. By using details such as the customers’ name, preferences, location, or account history, you can show your customers you know who they are and give them that warm and fuzzy feeling of being valued. Leverage this data to your bot and the intelligent routing sends customers to the right place based on their needs or sentiment.

To really earn a gold star, gather and analyze your communications data to see how customers are interacting with your company and agents so you can make improvements as necessary and proactively provide that exceptional experience customers demand.

Enhance internal operations

As we can see, AI helps to provide more personalized experiences for your customers, but what about your agents? The key to more effective interactions is having the ability to make information actionable and available for your agents on demand. Let your agents work smarter, not harder and address issues more effectively with screen pops that provide context around customer preferences, past purchases, and buying intentions. You can also use agent-assistant bots to answer FAQs or surface product information from internal knowledgebases.

We didn’t forget about the contact center managers! You can make administrative tasks less time consuming by using machine learning to quickly see trends in agent performance and traffic volume and make better decisions on staffing. Get your very own bot that can automate scheduling and time off requests.

I predict Atmosphere® CPaaS in your future

Implementing Artificial Intelligence can take your customers and your contact center agents to the next level and provide customer service that meets modern expectations. And while it may seem daunting, it actually isn’t as tricky as it sounds when you have a partner like IntelePeer on your side. Easily incorporate AI into your communication workflows and get access to advanced analytics with Atmosphere® CPaaS. IntelePeer delivers a powerful and flexible cloud-based platform that can be layered on top of your existing contact center solution so you can innovate your contact center rather than replace it.

Contact us today to see it in action.

Dustin Gordon is product marketing manager at IntelePeer, the communications platform as a service provider of voice, messaging, automation, applications, APIs and analytics for enterprises.