AI is changing the way organizations in every industry interact with customers and their data. One area where the technology is already having a big impact is through its integration and use in contact centers – the main customer service and communications hub for most companies – regardless of the vertical.
From providing quicker, smoother customer experiences, powering self-service, delivering secure billing and payment solutions and augmenting agents, to cutting down on fraud risks, AI is revolutionizing the contact center. Let’s take a closer look at some of the opportunities for embracing this fundamental shift in customer service technology.
AI-chatbots and voicebots
According to Salesforce a rapidly growing proportion of service organizations expect to use AI-powered chatbots – and for a good reason! Salesforce found 64% of agents with AI chatbots spend most of their time solving complex problems, versus 50% of agents without access to AI technologies. In simple terms, chatbots can do the repetitive tasks that can otherwise take up valuable agent bandwidth that could be better used building rapport with customers and solving their more complex issues.
Another growing area for call centers is using AI-chatbot payments solutions to handle customer interactions involving secure payment and personal data transactions.
These simple substitutions provide a considerable cost and time saving for organizations looking to provide real-time and always-on customer service, while ensuring PCI DSS compliance for customers’ payment journeys – balanced with the need to deliver higher-valued customer engagement by their agents.
AI-chatbots, voicebots and the latest generation of interactive voice response (IVR) systems can answer customers’ FAQs and execute routine actions – such as secure PCI compliant payments, purchases and returns. They can begin the data input process with the agent completing the transaction or inquiry. The technology can also be used to identify customer needs and route calls and interactions to the correct department or representative – providing live agents with all the information they need on an inquiry and the customer at-a-glance.
Conversational AI technology can also be used to augment an agent’s people management skillset and get ahead of potential customer conflicts – this is achieved by identifying customer sentiment based on the tone of their voice and language patterns. If a customer sounds frustrated, they can be routed to an experienced agent for immediate assistance.
Many organizations that implement AI-powered chatbots have improved their customer service scores, agent job satisfaction, % retention and increased their revenue.
AI for data analytics
AI is a powerful tool for providing real-time data and analytics surfacing insights that would probably never be visible by using legacy technologies or human intuition. With its ability to ingest data from many disparate sources, process and visualize trends, and present useful information it can be used to improve sales and marketing effectiveness, customer retention, support and service activities, and provide valuable direction and data for research and development.
In the contact center specifically, AI solutions can help gather data from customer calls, customer service representative (CSR) actions, and payment transactions over time. Using this data, it can then provide detailed reporting that can help improve operations, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance and payment security, average handling times (AHT), first contact resolution (FCR) rates, call duration & efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
AI for fraud prevention
AI is the ultimate investigator. AI-powered fraud solutions can pattern match across mass amounts of data – regardless of channel or location – and highlight anomalies that can pick fraudsters out of the crowd.
Before AI-powered fraud solutions were available, legacy systems would only be able to analyze historical fraud patterns without being able to predict fraud actions in the future. But with today’s AI technology, fraud systems can ingest historical data and utilize it to create a clear prediction of future fraud acts and patterns. Contact centers that use AI-powered fraud systems can automate the system to take actions in real-time, like rejecting flagged payment methods, to reduce potential fraud and ensure payment card industry compliance
AI can also be used to reduce friction during the customer verification and purchasing process. AI solutions can assign a risk score based on a customer’s previous actions and recent verifications. For example, if a risk score is low, customers can more freely move through the purchasing and payment acceptance process. If a risk score is high, customers can be prompted to provide additional methods of verification for large purchases. AI-powered fraud prevention solutions help keep customers safe and organizations out of the data breach headlines.
The compliance and security dangers of AI
As helpful as AI can be to a contact center, organizations must also pay attention to the security and compliance risks presented as well. When AI systems analyze call recordings and chatbot conversations to gather insights into how to improve processes, sensitive customer data can be captured, potentially causing the scope of compliance with data security regulations to spiral out of control.
The best way to combat these security and compliance challenges is to utilize solutions that remove sensitive customer data, such as payment card details, from the call center completely – before they touch other AI solutions – effectively masking the data from digital payment wallets so it is out of reach from malicious hackers or insider threats and descoping the sensitive data for PCI DSS compliance for example.
By using solutions such as Sycurio.Digital, organizations that utilize AI-powered chatbots are able to generate secure payment links on demand, which are then sent to the customer through their AI-chatbot interaction. The customer simply clicks the link and enters their payment details or uses a digital payment wallet such as Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal. Their payment details and other sensitive data are then encrypted and securely routed directly to the payment service provider (PSP). As a result, none of their payment data ever touches the AI-chatbot system or the organization’s network infrastructure, creating a completely secure payment process.
With this approach, organizations can use AI solutions freely without having to worry about security and compliance because no sensitive payment data has been ingested into their systems.
Don’t forget, you still need humans
Integrating AI will drastically reduce the number of repetitive and low-value tasks humans have to perform. AI helps organizations get the most out of their people and their data – enabling agents to focus on critical tasks and cross-selling/upselling versus tedious data collection and processing. Processes that used to take hours will become automated and take seconds. But this does not mean AI will take away all jobs from call center employees – humans still like to talk to humans, and that creates value and differentiation for any organisation.
AI technology could be considered as the ultimate example of “you get out, what you put in.”
It’s clear that AI tools need intelligent operators to make sure the data they ingest can be turned into useful information that can be acted upon. And, customers need personable, friendly and empathetic humans to engage with.
It is also important to recognize that when deploying these powerful systems that CISOs and compliance officers need to ensure they understand and have solutions to avoid the capture of personal and sensitive payment data. These need to be established well before contact center and third-party AI-solutions start to ingest it – if they want to avoid complex and expensive security and compliance headaches down the road.
