AI and Video Customer Engagement Are the Future of Customer Experience

This post was co-authored by Damien Simonneau, Director of Financial Services Solutions Marketing at Vidyo, Inc.

Artificial intelligence (AI) already has a huge impact on how organizations conduct business. To lower costs, contact centers mainly use AI to shift calls to self-service or to a chatbot. However, there’s a lot of potential to use AI for higher-value conversations. This is especially true when you combine AI with video.

To illustrate this, here are some scenarios that combine these two technologies to deliver tremendous value to customers and service providers. And this isn’t a futuristic vision; the scenarios below can be delivered today or likely will take shape in the not-too-distant future.

Predictive Routing

AI-powered predictive routing engines apply historical performance data and match customer and employee attributes to predict which contact center agent is most likely to achieve targeted business goals. With video customer engagement, you can identify the most valuable inquiries and route them to video-enabled agents who have the right profiles to address the situation.

Next-Best Action

Real-time, next-best action suggestions made to contact center agents using AI are based on an analysis of the customer profile, the type of inquiry and keywords from the conversation. The next-best action can be anything, but in a video-enabled contact center, the suggestion might be to switch to video to enable a more engaged and effective conversation that will facilitate closing a deal. It also could suggest that a Tier 1 agent should escalate a complex inquiry, or that an inquiry was initiated by a potential high-value customer to a video-enabled Tier 2 agent who can offer red-carpet treatment.

Chatbot-to-Human Escalation

To keep their contact center agents focused on high-value transactions, many organizations have deployed chatbots for lower-value interactions. However, even as chatbot technologies rapidly improve and can address basic needs, they can’t establish a personal connection that builds confidence and drives customers to engage further. What they do well is identify pivotal moments, such as when customers’ emotions run high or when they need advanced expertise and escalate the conversation to a video-enabled agent. That agent then can personally handle the request with face-to-face engagement.

Biometric Identification

Verifying a customer’s identity is a fundamental step in closing a transaction remotely. And it’s even a compliance requirement in a number of industries. While video customer engagement already allows customers to present an ID that the agent can take a snapshot of, the use of facial-recognition software is the next step.

AI-based software can verify that the photograph on the identity document matches the face of the individual holding it. The technology also facilitates and expedites the process of checking that the document hasn’t been forged, digitally tampered with, lost or stolen.

Real-Time Sentiment Analysis

Concurrent analysis of video and audio streams in a contact center interaction will enhance customer service by giving an agent clues about how a customer feels. Facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and keywords reflect underlying states of mind. Uncovering them in real-time can feed more informed suggestions to agents who then can act more effectively.

Simultaneous Interpreting

Video interactions, combined with technologies like speech recognition, automatic text translation and speech synthesis will enable participants to speak their own language but see on-screen or hear a translation of what the other party says. For businesses, this means being able to easily serve a global customer base and always having the best expertise on hand, regardless of location or language differences.

Analytics

Contact center executives are constantly looking for better ways to collect and analyze the content of customer-agent interactions to improve the quality and effectiveness of their services, provide more value to customers and identify relevant post-contact actions. With speech recognition, the audio content of a video conversation can be transcribed into text, stored and then analyzed like the content of a text-based interaction. 

Combining AI and video will improve the customer and agent experience in virtually any industry—especially when inquiries require a human touch. Vidyo currently offers three technologies that feature video through an integration with Genesys. Learn more about how Vidyo helps you leverage the power of video customer engagement and how to embed a high-quality video channel in your Genesys platform, visit us in the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.