AiThority Interview with Brian Steele, VP of Product Management at Gryphon.ai

Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving new innovations in the contact centers. A majority of the call centers utilize AI technologies to improve their customer experience and service management through personalization, voice automation, reporting, and process optimization. Having AI in the middle of your command center can help you quickly solve complex problems that plague any contact center. To understand AI’s transformative role in the modern cloud contact centers, we spoke to Gryphon.ai’s VP of Product Management, Brian Steele.

This is the full excerpt of our conversation with Brian.

Why is an AI-assisted customer service plan better than human-only efforts?

The current economic forecast as well as the continuation of flexible work has made the role of customer service increasingly important, as well as complex. As companies are competing more on customer experience, leveraging AI provides agents with an advantage over competing service and support teams. Conversation intelligence and AI-powered analysis are providing customer service representatives with real-time insights on customer sentiment during live conversations, enabling agents to better build relationships and more easily personalize the conversation while on a live call. Sentiment analysis is also guiding organizations in delivering a more valuable empathetic touch.

Empathy is one of the most important sentiments to implement in customer service interactions as consumers expect a human face behind it all. AI-powered technology can help instill empathy and build upon the human touch by analyzing positive or negative feedback to help reps better anticipate the customer’s response and provide the right experience. Humans make mistakes and can struggle with understanding the customer’s needs or their relationship to the brand — but by arming agents with tools to alleviate friction and reduce stress, customer relations can become more seamless for both parties.

What are the critical components in a call center where AI can drive the highest quantifiable results?

Customers expect fast and frictionless service. However, when reps don’t have the insights they need at their fingertips, it hampers their ability to address customer questions swiftly and efficiently. This leaves customers feeling frustrated and irritated, likely reducing retention rates in the long run.

One place in the call center where AI-powered technology can drive high quantifiable results is improving agents’ customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) by accessing real-time conversation intelligence to help guide conversations. Once reps can leverage real-time data and analytics, they can focus on providing strategic recommendations while personalizing the customer experience. AI will help reps deliver on customer expectations, increasing CSAT scores in the process. These scores are also critical to a brand’s reputation and bottom line — making any improvement to CSAT scores a critical business objective.

Along with boosting customer satisfaction, AI-powered technology can help call center reps reduce average handle times by surfacing in-the-moment insights to help agents provide faster responses. In addition, AI can alleviate time-consuming tasks such as searching for answers and flagging key moments, so reps spend more time addressing customer needs.

By decreasing the time spent on certain conversations or tasks, AI can help reps handle a higher volume of calls more effectively, optimizing their productivity and reducing overall wait times for customers. Similarly, when reps efficiently address customer inquiries during the initial call, it improves first-call resolution rates by reducing the need for follow-up calls. As a result, this enhances customer satisfaction and retention. All in all, AI-powered technology and sentiment analysis can help empower call center reps with the insights they need to enhance the customer experience while optimizing business efficiency through improved response and wait times.

Thank you, Brian ! That was fun and we hope to see you back on aithority.com soon