The rise of AI in the contact centre will lead to a new generation of 'supercharged agents with additional skills', according to 8x8 Vice President of AI and Machine Learning Ali Arsanjani.
"AI will never overturn the wealth of human experience and customer insight that contact centres have built over decades," he said.
"AI will augment the human insight of contact centre agents with the depth and speed of data analysis through technology."
AI is enabling contact centres to provide a more personalised approach to the customer experience through a combination of sentiment analysis, engagement context and customer value, noted Arsanjani.
He added: "It's traditionally been difficult to make sense of the volume of voice data produced by a contact centre, but AI-enabled natural language capabilities - through both language processing and speech analytics - is helping businesses analyse customer interactions for both sentiment analysis and keywords identification, as well as mining them for customer insights.
"For example, in the event of a product launch, a high-tech company may notice an increase in the words 'trial' or 'try', indicating greater interest in a free trial of the solution.
"Machine learning algorithms can also help do things like detect anomalies and alert call centre agents when the agent to call ratio is low, enabling humans to take action."
AI also resolves the issue of customers being passed between multiple agents to have their query answered, pointed out Arsanjani.
"AI is helping agents to be more relevant and respond to calls quicker," he added.
"With intelligent call routing the caller can automatically be identified along with their reason for calling and connected by AI directly to the right expert to resolve their call first time.
"AI can also automatically show detailed information on previous interactions and a complete customer history while the caller is on the line, so agents can handle their query quickly and efficiently."