Pfft… humans. Who needs 'em?

They're always cluttering up the place with their so-called "bodies" and making unreasonable demands for "air" and "food". The sooner the machines take over, the better, we say.

Of course, we're joking. We love humans. We even employ a few here at Yoozoom.

But if you manage a contact centre, it's worth asking yourself: "are there some jobs that machines can do better than people?"

We're not talking about replacing all your agents with robots. Instead, we mean thinking about ways to streamline your processes so staff can focus on the things that matter – taking calls, closing deals, and delivering that personal touch that only card-carrying homo sapiens can provide.

How? With cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, that's how.

These techniques might seem futuristic, but they're already getting results in call centres across the globe…

Speech recognition and sentiment analysis

AKA: clever robots screen calls so you don't have to.

Yep, you read that right. Today's AI technology is clever enough to understand what agents and customers say on calls.

Athena, our call centre AI, not only records calls but transcribes them too. These transcriptions are searchable, so it's easy for you to screen calls for training, development, or conflict resolution.

But – here's the really clever bit – you don't even have to manually screen calls, if you don't want to.

Athena is smart. She doesn't just write words down – she understands the meaning behind them too.

Every call is given a positive or negative sentiment score. This means it's really easy to see, at a glance, whether customers are happy with the service you're providing. Or, you can drill down to an individual agent's sentiment score to monitor their performance and construct training pathways.

AI sales optimisation

AKA: a clock-watching robot that's tuned in to customer preferences.

If you run an outbound call centre, this will be a familiar story.

You call a customer or prospect, but they're busy – it's not a good time, and besides, they've told you already that they can't take calls between one and three.

Oops. Now they're cheesed off, and – worst-case scenario – that lead you've been nurturing might go stone cold.

It's not your agents' fault. Keeping track of customer preferences is tricky. When you're making dozens of calls a day, the task becomes positively titanic.

But robots… they never make mistakes.

Our AI tunes into customer preferences and remembers them like the world's best secretary. It not only lets agents know the best time to call, but each customer's preferred mode of communication, too.

The results? Happier customers, more fruitful conversations and – ultimately – a healthy boost in conversions.

AI chatbots

AKA: FAQs, but clever.

So you've got a team of agents handling live chat interactions from your website. Great. For many customers, this is now a favoured way of getting in touch.

But how many of those interactions boil down to answering mundane, frequently asked questions? 70%? 80? More?

The problem is clear. Your agents don't want to churn through the same, mind-numbingly tedious conversations again and again. And besides, their time would be better spent answering those complex queries that require real human brainpower.

You know what to do: "Igor, release the chatbots".

Now, you've probably heard of chatbots already. They pop up, talk in a robotic manner, and as soon as the customer goes off script they go "brrfftt" and fall over… right?

Wrong. Our chatbot not only talks like a human, but it learns and improves as time goes on.

You can feed it some stock responses, sure. But it can also gather useful material from existing sources, such as your website, email archives, and previous customer chats. This means it's always up to date on the latest info, without you having to spend time programming or fine-tuning it.

And if it's out of its depth, it knows to escalate the query to a human agent. He or she can step in seamlessly, so customers won't have to wait around.

Workflow automation

AKA: a giant robot brain that's trained on HR.

If you thought the previous examples were impressive, get a load of this.

Our workflow automation technology (or "AI HR") can intelligently predict staffing requirements based on historical trends. It learns peaks and troughs of staff attendance and call volumes, and lets you know how many bums need to be on how many seats. Very clever.

You might be thinking, "but humans can do this". Sure, but at a fraction of the speed, efficiency and accuracy of our software.

Letting AI handle the complicated maths frees up HR staff to focus on the stuff that robots aren't so good at – like recruitment, compliance and pastoral matters.

Even annual leave requests – the bane of any HR manager or team leader – can be automated, ensuring you always have the staff you need to deliver your SLAs.

Sounds complicated…?

Don't worry. It might sound like science fiction, but it's quite easy to make these AI techniques an ROI-boosting reality.

With a little help from us, of course…

See, all these tools are built into our cloud-based call centre software. We'll send our expert engineers to help you get set up, and then… well, the world of AI is your oyster.

Best of all, because it's cloud based, you don't have to faff about with on-site hardware installations or software updates. If a mind-blowing new AI feature is rolled out, you'll get instant access without having to lift a finger.

And we haven't even mentioned all the other cool stuff our software can do, like next-gen predictive diallers and robust omnichannel reporting…

Want to know more? You can get all the facts on our call centre page.

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