Best AI Call Center Software for 2024: 7 Tools to Optimize Efficiency

Today’s contact center has come a long way since the days when customers dialed up their rotary phones with a product question for their local customer service department. According to a report by Saritha Rai for Bloomberg News, the Philippines is already confronting the reality of AI’s impact on jobs, particularly within its vast business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. This industry, which includes call centers and various other back-office operations, is expected to generate over $38 billion in revenue this year.

A mobile-first strategy provides agents access to customer data from a central repository using any device from any location. This approach helps IoT make any agent the “right agent” for a customer to contact because all parties have access to the same information. Consumers regarded 2023 as “just another year of disappointing interactions with brands that barely know, let alone care about, the customers they are serving or issues they are addressing,” Cantor reported. The overwhelming ChatGPT App majority of consumers feel their typical experiences are inefficient, inconvenient and impersonal. Cantor warned if businesses don’t deploy human-centric AI tools, “they will only compound the frustration their customers and employees are facing.” Business leaders are getting the message. Customer loyalty surveys conducted by management consultancy PwC revealed that 61% of executives ranked personalizing the customer experience a high priority — ahead of any other loyalty strategy.

With the conversational chatbot handling a significant number of customer conversations, the call load on human agents was reduced by 60%. The chatbot also helped reduce wait times and provided quicker, more accurate responses, leading to higher customer satisfaction levels. These speech-enabled, automated systems use voice prompts to help callers navigate call tree menus or access information without the need for a human operator.

Try Dialpad if you’re looking for AI call center software with broad third-party integrations. Nextiva has a clutter-free and professional user interface with a neutral ChatGPT color scheme that is easy on the eyes. It has a well-organized layout, displaying a clear view of important information related to various communication services.

Managing a comprehensive contact center is becoming increasingly challenging in today’s world, as consumers connect with businesses through a wide range of channels. They can also tap into valuable data and suggestions to help them solve more complex problems at speed, without the need to dive into multiple different resources. What’s more, they can leverage generative AI tools to compose messages and responses to queries rapidly.

Not Prioritizing Integration

IM and live chat products have been around for decades, but compared to traditional methods, contact center chatbots using AI don’t require human agents. While recent surveys show that contact center users still prefer to work with a human agent, this preference is quickly trending downward as customers get more comfortable with virtual agent interactions. Conversational AI chatbots and virtual agents are also achieving a level of sophistication to handle highly granular and complex customer self-service requests more accurately and in far less time. The infusion of generative AI into the contact center will provide a step function in the ability for brands to manage and improve customer interactions. This will improve operational efficiency and create a more seamless, personalized, and empathetic customer experience. As contact centers leverage generative AI, they stand to gain a competitive edge while fostering improved customer relationships and long-term satisfaction.

The AI revolution isn’t just driving the creation of higher quality chatbots (with generative AI). There’s also an incredible opportunity for businesses to leverage AI across a range of channels, including in the voice landscape. Now, the company can tap into every media stream, analyze discussions, and rapidly pinpoint consumer pain points, enabling a proactive approach to customer care. This data-driven and AI-powered process has led to a 50% increase in contact center efficiency, a 50% decrease in call handling time, and a call abandonment rate of under 1%. AI’s ability to deliver these benefits relies on its access and capacity to continuously ingest and learn from vast data sets. With the risks of inadvertently mishandling sensitive customer data, it’s important for businesses to find balance in their pursuit of AI-driven advantages.

But a machine will always be perfect when speaking from speech to text and text to speech. How you say ‘hello’ literally could change the way you talk to the person or the person perceives you. Meaning and a global AI expert known for building disruptive, revenue-generating products & services. While AI can be programmed to handle routine inquiries efficiently, it often falls short in complex scenarios that require critical thinking and a personal touch. Artificial intelligence (AI) has touched us all, from our personal tech to how we work and do business. Yishay Carmiel is the founder & CEO of Meaning and a global AI expert known for building disruptive, revenue-generating products & services.

By accurately comprehending customer intent and context, NLP takes the overall communication quality to new heights. Identified by some analysts as critical to the future of contact centers, conversational analytics extracts data from text and voice conversations between customers and human agents or chatbots. Customer interactions are evaluated in real time so agents can discover behavioral patterns instantly. Agents acquire a more in-depth understanding of each customer through past data and journey insights. Despite growing interest among many on-premises contact centers to expand their operations by adopting contact center as a service, most platform vendors are finding it difficult to become exclusive as-a-service providers.

The AI Revolution and the Value of the Human Touch

For instance, bots can remind agents to ask for permission before recording a call, or notify supervisors when employees reveal potentially sensitive information. If you choose an innovative vendor for your certified Microsoft Teams contact center, you can even unlock additional tools like sentiment analysis and intelligent routing. The great thing about choosing a Microsoft Teams contact center for your CX strategy is you don’t just get access to all of the latest contact center features offered by your vendor. You can also leverage the intuitive capabilities of the Teams platform, including its AI capabilities. For an outstanding solution, you’ll need to find a solution that can adapt and change to handle different languages, voice channels, call flows, and requirements simultaneously.

Sales and marketing teams particularly benefit from the platform due to its AI-powered customer profiling, contextualized prospecting workspaces, and lead management. Additionally, sentiment analysis and conversation intelligence help understand customer impressions, leading to improved services. Artificial intelligence call center software can improve customer service, reduce costs and maximize efficiency. This is important because CX is now the top brand differentiator, with many consumers switching loyalties because of a single bad experience. Though it’s true that the contact center providers have delivered new capabilities such as omnichannel communications, self-service tools and more, consumer satisfaction with contact centers remains low.

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Statistics show, 72 percent of consumers expect personalized interactions when they contact a company’s call centre and 65 percent of customers have switched to a different brand after a bad experience. Krithivasan believes that bots will be able to achieve this via integration within a company’s customer transaction history – essentially completing the work currently being done by human agents. When you run a contact center, you want to ensure your customers are getting the best help possible and end every call satisfied.

For instance, generative AI can make it easier to monitor email inboxes and social channels, and respond to customer queries rapidly. Consumers want more than just “fast” responses to queries, they want companies to anticipate their needs. AI solutions offer an incredible opportunity to enable proactivity in the contact center. No more wasting time inputting the same numbers you’ve provided the last 10 times you called your bank or auto loan servicer.

Communications

Agents need to be good listeners and communicators, but they also need to be proactive in resolving the customer’s issue. Traditional call centers existed before the advent of digital communications and use the phone as their primary channel of communication. Contact centers are multifunctional operations that rely on multiple channels, including the phone, email, texting, mobile apps, social media, live web chat and video.

Bautista eventually left the industry and found work in sales, but he remains convinced that AI will soon replace many jobs across the BPO sector. NVIDIA offers a suite of tools and technologies to help enterprises get started with customer service AI. It’s even possible to use these bots to ensure that agents adhere to industry and internal compliance standards.

AI has enormous potential for good, creating a positive social impact and addressing some of the most pressing global challenges. We asked Michelle Schroeder to share more of her marketing insights about revitalizing brand perceptions. “The world went from digital first to mobile first to AI first, but voice is the most intuitive way to use technology,” said Ankush Sabharwal, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoRover. Yip stated that Singtel’s 5G SA network currently powers a number of use cases in different segments such as auto making, chipmaking, ports and warahouses. “There is a lot more innovation that needs to come,” she said, adding that the low-latency offered by 5G SA networks are best suited for use cases for enterprises. The telco completed the rollout of this network in the city state in 2022 after having launched this technology in May 2021.

An AI startup is turning call centers into a successful model of using AI to support human employees.

They can summarize conversations rapidly, highlighting the most important topics and action items. Any Voice AI system you implement should be able to easily transfer a customer to a live agent, when necessary, to preserve the customer experience. Look for tools that can analyze customer sentiment and intent, and determine when to transfer a call. For instance, “Agent Assist” tools can monitor conversations and send real-time guidance and directions to your employees and supervisors, boosting workplace efficiency.

Call center artificial intelligence is already helping contact and call centers in a wide range of areas, from agent performance and assistance to automation and the customer experience. It is frequently the most frustrating experience a consumer can have with a company – one that businesses are constantly trying to resolve by improving their call centre operations. Quality customer service that gets to the root of the problem and provides accurate solutions quickly is a powerful differentiator, driving increased loyalty and connection to customers. Considering most customers reach out to call centers in moments of frustration or distress, this emotional intelligence is necessary. In such situations, a human agent’s ability to empathize, listen actively and provide reassurance can make a significant difference in resolving issues and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Looking at the larger market for contact center software, that’s not completely unreasonable. According to analytics firm Mordor Intelligence, the sector was worth $61.07 billion in 2024 and could climb to $145.20 billion by 2029, driven in part by contact center operators wanting to cut costs. Depending on how the platform’s configured, it can show hints to agents throughout a conversation with a customer, like a reminder to authenticate the customer’s identity. While stories like Bautista’s are currently isolated, experts warn that they may become more common. Avasant, an outsourcing advisory firm cited by Bloomberg, estimates that up to 300,000 BPO jobs in the Philippines, many of which are in call centers, could be lost to AI within the next five years. Yet, the same analysis suggests that AI could also create around 100,000 new jobs in areas such as algorithm training and data curation.

• On a broad scale, innovations in AI and automation not only help companies reduce operational costs, but ensure they can adhere to evolving customer requirements.
• Boasting a client base of more than 160 customers—including Fortune 1,000 companies—RingCX has demonstrated its market leadership.
• An op-ed in The Guardian reveals how call centers often become “electronic panopticons” where staff are constantly watched, and where minor errors are used to discipline and fire workers on the spot.
• RingCX takes the number one spot in our list because it offers a comprehensive and user-friendly platform for businesses of all sizes.

With that said, Genesys Cloud CX has numerous features that may be too complex for small businesses. However, these extensive features also make it a compelling choice for enterprises looking for an advanced contact center platform with extensive capabilities. Generative AI is great at automating resource-intensive tasks within contact centers, which can be used to automate tasks and simplify workflows. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Examples include many after call processing such as call logging, updating customer records, and assigning tasks. Generative AI can automate these and remove the burden from people, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks. With traditional contact centers, understanding CSAT is neither an art nor a science – it’s just broken.

Analytics software can sort through all of your data at lightning speed and then generate call scripts based on your set parameters. Great call scripts can improve conversion rates by supporting agents in overcoming customer objections or working through complaints. They ensure consistent quality across your team, giving everyone the same conversational framework. The ai call center companies only problem is that they take quite a bit of time to create and perfect — or at least, they used to. A friendly, helpful interaction with a human agent can turn a disgruntled customer into a loyal one. While AI can result in expedient resolutions and satisfied customers, as its current capabilities stand, it’s missing a big opportunity to drive repeat customers.

Advanced analytics tools powered by AI can analyze vast quantities of data, identify new insights, and determine new ways to improve performance and customer satisfaction. Despite the range of technologies and features available to improve contact center efficiencies and customer convenience, the reality is that businesses still have a long way to go to achieve customer experience perfection. Generative AI, while still in its infancy, possesses unlimited potential for the contact center. At present, however, it can create problems that range from hallucinogenic responses to data privacy concerns. McKinsey estimates that applying GenAI and other technologies to customer service functions can potentially automate work that currently takes up 60% to 70% of a worker’s time.

Therefore, contact centers must have an automatic call distributor that intelligently routes contacts from multiple channels. They’ll also need a workforce management system that can accurately predict volume levels for different channels as well as agent-facing tools that provide agents with the necessary customer data and conversation history. Although the terms call center and contact center are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important distinctions between the two entities.

Knowing the challenges and considerations in implementing generative AI in contact centers is as important as understanding how to effectively deploy this technology. Failing to address GenAI-related issues can lead to operational inefficiencies, legal repercussions, and diminished customer satisfaction. Amr Talaat, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, has witnessed the signing of a cooperation agreement between his ministry and Xceed, an Egyptian information systems company.

In scenarios like these, human agents are essential for catching errors and ensuring that transactions run smoothly. So, if no human supervisor can possibly review 100 percent of calls, and their reviews may be biased, what’s the solution? The key is to use AI-powered quality assurance technology that can quickly analyze every call, using Natural Language Processing to understand the conversation and accurately score them based on predetermined criteria. An op-ed in The Guardian reveals how call centers often become “electronic panopticons” where staff are constantly watched, and where minor errors are used to discipline and fire workers on the spot. “We have seen increasing interest among contact centers for using IoT devices especially for supporting use cases in manufacturing, retail and health care,” Lazar explained. “Agents can have real-time access to help with telemedicine scenarios where they can read data from a diabetes sensor on their arm up to cases involving technical support questions among health-related companies.”