Contact center AI

Chatbots definitely have their place. Acting as virtual agents, they can often provide answers to simple questions about opening times and returns policies, or help customers deal with tasks like paying a bill, getting info about an account, making an appointment, signing up to a newsletter, or scheduling a callback from a live agent.

There are plenty of customers who like to start with this option instead of using the phone to contact a business, as they can keep the chat going while they multitask—and interacting with a bot can prove faster than speaking to a real person. Some people just don’t like to talk on the phone, and who are we to judge?

However, chatbots aren't 100% perfect. Some types of queries may still be too complex for them to handle, and although the latest versions include a degree of machine learning, it will take a bit of time for them to get up to speed. This is where conversational AI comes in, since it can learn and improve on its own—think of it as a much smarter chatbot. Reach out to learn how we designed Dialpad's conversational AI to address chatbot's biggest weaknesses!

(Even small businesses often need more than one point of contact for customer support. Because every customer is different, it's best if you can offer omnichannel support—that means phone, email, SMS/MMS or instant messaging, social media, and even video calls. Fun fact: Dialpad Ai Contact Center is used by both small businesses and enterprises because of its intuitiveness and cost-effectiveness.)

We’ve already talked a little about voice recognition being one of the elements of AI. Many software providers have developed their own version of artificial intelligence technology, and Dialpad is no exception. We call ours Dialpad Ai.

We built Dialpad Ai using NLP, so it can process incoming conversation data to not only accurately capture the words but also determine the sentiment behind them. It does this in real time, and transcribes it into a text format that you can read instantly. That means call center supervisors can keep an eye on active calls and jump in to help if needed.

This speech-to-text technology also delivers real-time transcriptions of your meetings, which you can use instead of closed captioning. Not only is this more accessible for people with hearing difficulties, it’s great for attendees taking calls in noisy places, or who simply need a written record.

Dialpad Ai is the brains behind our RTA cards and speech analytics, too, meaning it’s there working in the background the whole time. After the call, it automatically compiles a summary incorporating the transcript, action items, highlights, and notes. It’s easy to recap important discussion points and follow up with teammates or customers. You can keep the transcripts to help agents in future interactions, or for training.

If you want to track the keywords that come up in conversations, you can create “Custom Moments” that tell Dialpad Ai to highlight every time a certain word or phrase is mentioned. You could use this to inform your FAQs, or identify a high volume of complaints about a particular product.

If there’s a confidential conversation that you don’t want to transcribe, you can turn off Dialpad Ai with one click. (We should point out that “call recording” is a separate feature, which you can also turn on and off.) The only people who can access the transcripts are you and any other participant who was using Dialpad Ai during the call.

Finally, Dialpad Ai is equipped with built-in machine learning, so it will learn from your conversations and improve over time to become even more accurate.

Although there will always be times when a customer needs to speak directly to a human agent, self-service options are a great way to empower customers to solve issues themselves. They have the added bonus of freeing up agents to handle other inquiries and tasks, too. AI enables smarter self-service solutions, and ensures that customers are only directed to this option if it’s the most suitable for them.

By using conversational AI and voice recognition in IVR menus, your system can determine the nature of the inquiry and provide a simple answer—for example, if a customer was calling to ask about store opening hours, an agent wouldn’t need to get involved. It can point them toward the FAQ section or knowledge base on your website, or give them the option to leave a voicemail if there’s a queue. AI can also give customers the choice of requesting an in-queue callback, where they leave their details and an agent is notified to call them later.

Using AI’s analysis of data and automated reports, you can view how your customers are using self-service options and make adjustments to improve the experience. (It’s also a great way to build and continuously refine your self-service options. If your records show certain questions come up a lot, you can make sure there’s a written answer easily available, which will reduce the number of incoming calls you’re likely to get!)