Using AI to transform contact centre performance
Contact centres are under pressure. They’re tasked with improving customer experience while also keeping costs under control. Whether they focus on sales, after sales, customer service or payments, contact centres are often being asked to achieve more with less. One way they can square that circle is through the intelligent application of technology. In particular, modern AI tools allow contact centre leaders to scan mountains of data for valuable insight into customer satisfaction and agent or campaign performance. What’s the practical application of that? Well, before this kind of technology was available, team leaders in contact centres would download the recordings of a small percentage of customer interactions as a quality control measure. Listening to these recordings was a hugely time consuming and somewhat thankless task, but it allowed them to check on agent performance and customer sentiment, albeit in a very limited way. They could check that agents were remembering to read out statutory legal information, for example, or that customers were not being left on hold too long. This was useful-ish, but far from complete. It used a tiny subset of interactions which may or may not have been representative (and given random chance, probably not). But it was the best many contact centres could do with the time and technology they had. The AI revolution is coming to contact centres Compare that with today. Now, AI-powered tools can scan every interaction customers have with your organisation, checking them against a range of performance indicators like speed of resolution, upselling targets or the success of scripts. They can produce reports that clearly show whether you’re meeting targets and where weaknesses in your customer communications may lie. And it’s to harness the power of AI that we developed Elisha Insights, our AI-driven customer analytics platform that is designed to transform how contact centres operate. Elisha Insights offers a host of features already, but it’s a work in progress. We’ll continually add new capabilities to the solution as they become available. Elisha Insights includes: ● Sentiment analysis: Easily monitor the tone of conversations with your customers. Elisha Insights will look for words or phrases that suggest satisfaction or dissatisfaction. If customers are unhappy, it can tag interactions for further investigation. ● Omnichannel analysis: Elisha Insights accepts customer interactions from various sources, including email threads, chat, voice, and video transcripts, and supports multiple languages. ● Customisable performance indicators: Assess how your sales agents upsell to customers, track the resolution of technical support questions, analyse conflict handling, compare interactions against your script or call flow, and much more. ● Seamless integration: Elisha Insights is designed to be used with your current contact centre software and other IT solutions. We offer APIs and embeddable code snippets that facilitate rapid integration. The acceleration of innovation There are plenty of others, but suffice to say that Elisha Insights brings AI-driven tools to your contact centre in an easy and accessible way. Nor do you need expertise in using AI tools or interpreting their results. We carry out the analysis on your behalf, and you simply pay for the analysis you need. You can scale the service up and down to suit your requirements at any given time. At Elisha, we’ve been in the telecoms business for decades, starting right back when VoIP was new and connectivity was sometimes sketchy. We’ve seen so much progress in that time, but AI has the potential to be the most revolutionary innovation of all. These tools are already helping contact centres meet targets and create better customer experiences without piling on cost. With Elisha Insights, we are adopting AI early, and offering our clients and resellers an easy way to get ahead of the game.
Elisha Telecom and its Pioneering AI services in Comms Dealer
Elisha Telecom and its AI Services is featured in the October 2023 issue of Comms Dealer magazine. Comms Dealer magazine, the pioneering publication in the UK convergence channel, is an important resource for the comms and convergence community. Its expert team of journalists and channel specialists ensures readers stay informed about the latest developments in the ICT channel, including new opportunities and technologies and emerging market trends. The Comms Dealer website offers real-time news, comprehensive content, interviews, market analysis, and valuable insights. The article highlights the pivotal role of Elisha Telecom CEO, Jeff Green, in the transformation of contact centers through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI). Jeff Green, with a background in ICT, emphasizes the importance of AI integration rather than standalone AI tools. Elisha Telecom, established by Green and Mike Torres in 2006, has grown to serve both large end users in the Philippines and smaller UK businesses through resellers. Green recognizes that AI is not just about the tools but the seamless integration of AI services into business processes. Elisha Telecom’s latest offering, Elisha Insights, is an AI-based metrics solution designed to revolutionize contact center operations by harnessing data and AI-driven insights. Green acknowledges the evolving landscape of communication services, with a transition away from traditional desk phones towards softphones, WebRTC, and mobile devices. He places particular importance on MS Teams in this shift and ensures that his company adapts to these changing technologies. Green anticipates Elisha Telecom becoming a market leader in AI-generated metrics thanks to early adoption and the accumulation of priceless insights. He draws parallels between the potential of AI and the transformative impact of the microchip.
Shaping the future of business interaction: AI-Powered Unified Communications
Business communications are changing, and not just in the number of channels businesses now need to integrate to effectively communicate with customers, colleagues and partners. Unified Communications solutions have been touted as a major enabler of innovative business communications, but what exactly does it mean, how does Artificial Intelligence support that innovation, and what does that process entail? Keep on reading to find out! What is ‘Unified Communications’? Unified Communications (or UC for short) is a major component to the future of communication services, amalgamating all your separate communication channels under one application, so your team only has one app for everything. Voice Video Social Media Messaging Conference Email Typically delivered via an app for laptops and mobile devices, UC solutions also enable robust and secure remote or hybrid working policies to be put in place, guaranteeing productivity while delivering a better work/life balance for employees. Especially when combined with futureproof technologies, merging AI, 5G and UC, for example, businesses have the perfect foundations to build innovative new experiences for customers and ensure the highest satisfaction rates, hopefully increasing the chances of customers returning for additional purchases too! The Role of AI in Unified Communications AI trends are everywhere, from content creation to stock trading, helping automate and enhance processes, just like in the telecoms industry. AI in communication solutions can help businesses do more with less, while providing rich insights into performance to help businesses improve processes even further! AI-powered UC solutions provide more value by enhancing collaboration tools and ingesting massive volumes of interaction information to help surface insights that would be indecipherable otherwise! ChatbotsMinimise incoming calls by delivering automated responses – via websites and voice calls – to common issues and questions. Natural Language Processing (NLP)Natural Language Processing essentially means automated listening and transcription – enabling AIs to listen to callers’ needs (like in the next example) as well as collate everything that’s said across all of a business’ calls, to help identify areas for improvement. Voice recognitionPrioritise calls and ensure they’re directed to the right department, which is sometimes called ‘Automatic Customer Interaction Classification’ reducing transfer volumes and increasing first-time resolutions. Further Benefits of AI-Powered Unified Communications Data Analysis from Multiple Sources and LanguagesOnce NLP is in place, contact centres can deploy sentiment analysis, trawling that massive volume of conversations to highlight common phrases and keywords. Whether positive or negative, the results help decision-makers know what works and what isn’t and where to reallocate resources for the greatest impact. Customisable Performance IndicatorsContact centres can better assess performance of individual team members (and teams on the whole) with KPIs updated in real-time, from call lengths to wait-times, satisfaction scores to sale success rates, ensuring managers and staff can all see how they’re doing in the given moment. Privacy ProtectionAI is also really good at keeping sensitive information anonymous, whether via encryption or other forms of anonymisation, ensuring biases don’t work their way into reporting or staff surveys for example. But Ai isn’t without its challenges, from creating Machine Learning engines in the first place to identifying regional variances in pronunciation and vocabulary, even ensuring AI-powered decision making doesn’t take a drastic turn and send callers down an incorrect calling journey! So, if you want AI to help as much as possible, rather than hinder, Elisha Telecom can take all the complications away and develop the automated processes that help your team do more with less. Call 020 7100 1114 or email info@elishatelecom.com today to see what’s possible with an AI-powered, fully managed UC solution!
Generative AI: The Future of Customer Service is Now
What is Generative AI? Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been around for years. Machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and the like are now ubiquitous in the IT applications we use on a daily basis. However, only with the advent of various Generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, MidJourney, DALL-E, and Bard has AI claimed the spotlight and headlines across the Globe. Generative AI is a type of Artificial Intelligence that can create new, and arguably “original”, content based on the models it was trained on. It has revolutionized what AI can be used for and how accessible it has now become. Before, AI was a niche field useful to organizations that generated large amounts of data and had the resources to hire data scientists and build powerful servers to analyze them. It is now a tool that can be used and prove useful to practically anyone. From the students asking ChatGPT to help with their homework, to graphics designers who can now create in a matter of seconds what took days if not weeks before, and to office workers who can ask AI to create and summarize worksheets of data into a report they can pass on to management. Generative AI in Customer Service A key segment of your business that can greatly benefit from Generative AI today is customer service. Unlike traditional rule-based chatbots that operate based on pre-defined scripts, generative AI has the ability to understand context, learn from data, and produce human-like responses that adapt to the unique needs and preferences of each customer. Personalized Interactions Generative AI is unique in that it improves its answers to your customer’s queries as the conversation develops. The more information it has about your customer, the more tailored its responses will be. For instance, when a customer contacts a retail company regarding a previous purchase, generative AI can use the customer’s order history and preferences to suggest complementary products, providing a seamless cross-selling experience. 24/7 Global Availability Your business is often limited to interacting with customers in your time zone and in the language you are familiar with. Generative AI effectively eliminates this barrier by being available 24/7 to customers who speak different languages. Generative AI not only detects and translates the queries of your customers for you; it can also reply to the customer in his or her native language. As such, Generative AI has the potential to open up completely new markets for your products and services. Handling Complex Interactions Generative AI can learn from the vast amounts of data your business generates. It is capable of handling customer service scenarios that previous chatbots could not. As the AI interacts with customers, it learns from each interaction and gains a deeper understanding of nuanced queries. This empowers the AI to provide accurate and relevant responses even to intricate questions, contributing to a smoother and more efficient customer service experience. Unlike the previous generation of chatbots, which were completely dependent on the script they were following, a Generative AI chatbot can actually assess the intent, mood, and flow of the conversation and automatically escalate the interaction to a human agent if the need arises. Generative AI Customer Service Use Cases Limitations of Generative AI and how to overcome them Risk of Misinterpretation and Miscommunication Generative AI relies on generating responses based on the the data it has. While it can detect some sentiment and intent from its users, it does not have true understanding of emotions. As such, it could have a tendency to produce incorrect responses or ignore emotional cues that can cause frustration for the customer. To address these issues, it is important not to be over reliant in AI for all interactions. For example, once a negative conversation is detected, this should trigger an alert for a human agent to take over the customer interaction. Continuously monitoring interactions and fine tuning the AI through training and updating can also help address and prevent issues from repeatedly occurring. Inability to Handle Unforeseen Situations When faced with unprecedented or highly unique situations outside of its training data, an AI may struggle to provide accurate and helpful responses. This causes the AI to have “hallucinations” or make it appear that the AI is lying to the customer. The solution to prevent or at least limit hallucinations is through thorough fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and training of the Generative AI. You can also program them to limit responses to only the custom trained data and to self analyze their response before replying. It is critical that the AI interactions are regularly reviewed and any issues remedied through fine tuning. Privacy and Security Concerns Customer service often involves handling sensitive information, such as personal details or account credentials. Generative AI’s ability to generate human-like text raises concerns about data privacy and security. If not properly managed, there is a risk that sensitive information could be mishandled or exploited. Compliance to existing privacy and security regulations must be at the top of the list when deploying a Generative AI system. Proper data encryption and storage should always be practiced and where applicable anonymization and proper filtering of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) should be conducted. Finally, ensure that the AI requests and shares only the minimum personal information needed to address the needs of the customers and make all customers and users aware of the risks involved when utilizing the system. Dependency on Quality and Quantity of Training Data The quality and timeliness of the the training data is what will define the capabilities of your Generative AI platform. Incomplete, outdated, and inaccurate data will reflect in the responses of your AI to your customers. Hence, maintaining and managing your Generative AI platform is an on-going concern. Fine tuning, monitoring and updating should be done on a regular basis. Thorough testing of the system before pushing it live to your customers should be a priority. Generative AI is not General AI While it can generate very informative and useful responses, Generative AI
AI Analytics: Empower Your Customer Service Now with Elisha Insights
Elisha Insights offers real-time AI analytics and evaluation of customer service interactions for your business. Leveraging the latest advancements in Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing, Elisha Insights stands as the most sophisticated customer service analytics platform available in the market today. Elisha Insights accepts customer interactions from various sources, including email threads, chat, voice, and video transcripts, and supports multiple languages. Its default Speech-to-Text engine can automatically detect over 50 languages, and optional third-party integrations can extend this to over 120 languages and dialects. Elisha Insights AI Analytics Features Define categories for customer interactions effortlessly, and let Elisha Insights automatically classify them. With built-in sentiment analysis, monitoring the tone of conversations with your customers becomes easy. Clients can tailor Elisha Insights to their preferred set of performance metrics and modify them as needed. You can assess how your sales agents upsell to customers, track the resolution of technical support questions, analyze conflict handling, compare interactions against your script or call flow, and much more. Privacy protection remains a priority, as Elisha Insights incorporates built-in Personal Identifiable Information (PII) filtering to ensure the security of your customers’ privacy. Additionally, Elisha Insights does not keep or record any transcripts or recordings it analyzes by default. Elisha Insights is designed for seamless integration with your current IT systems. It offers APIs and embeddable code snippets that facilitate rapid integration. The payment model is based on per analysis, allowing you to pay for only the transcripts we analyze. This approach enables you to scale up or down, knowing your costs will follow suit. Charges are determined per minute of recording or per page of text (500 words) sent for analysis. Elisha Insights revolutionizes your customer service approach. It harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence to provide valuable insights, improve interactions, and boost customer satisfaction. Schedule your demo today by emailing sales@elishatelecom.com and experience the future of customer service with Elisha Insights!