AI-Powered Contact Centers: Freeing Your Agents to Focus On the Customer

In 2025, we anticipate that AI will be key to shaping the customer experience. With each AI-powered brand interaction, customers will have higher expectations: Instant responses, tailored experiences, consistent interactions, better troubleshooting, and more. They’re expecting an AI-powered customer experience that’s so seamless, it’s almost invisible.

AI is already making a major impact in contact centers, the backbone of customer support and service. Enterprise contact centers have adopted AI-driven solutions to enhance customer service and to streamline operations. These AI tools and AI agents augment human contact-center agents to dramatically improve both customer experience and contact-center employee experience. For example, AI-driven personalization and 24/7 availability boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. And AI tools provide human agents with customer insights and help them respond faster.

Additionally, AI drives operational and cost-efficiencies for customer service teams. According to McKinsey, generative AI (GenAI) in customer service functions could increase productivity by 30% to 45%, and it could further reduce the volume of human-serviced contacts by up to 50%.

Contact Center Transformation

To transform customer service and engagement in the modern enterprise, contact centers need an agile, scalable platform that can fully leverage AI to unify the customer experience. That’s where the unified contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) comes in. It’s a cloud-based platform that integrates communication channels (such as email, chat, phone, and social media) with contact center functionalities (like routing, agent tools, and analytics) into a single, scalable solution for managing customer interactions.

It’s critical to unify your customer data across all communication channels. That way, you can make the most of AI to unlock the potential of your data. This unified view enables AI and GenAI tools to fully understand the customer journey, driving better insights and more personalized interactions.

Let’s take a look at how customers today are experiencing the impact of AI in the enterprise.

AI in Action

A global logistics company partnered with Tech Mahindra and Google Cloud to improve its call center options. This company services customers around the world with a broad range of logistics solutions. Customer support agents spend valuable time understanding customer conversations, identifying and entering data using multiple screens, and searching a large knowledge base for the right article to address customer challenges. This manual approach puts pressure on support agents and can negatively affect the customer experience.

The company wanted to use an AI-powered solution to alleviate the bottleneck. Operationally, it sought to reduce ramp time for agents and to monitor conversation quality using automation software. Tech Mahindra worked with the company to design an Agent Assist solution that integrated with existing telephony and CRM systems. The company and Google Cloud established SIP recording and telephony integration, while Tech Mahindra embedded intelligent assistant technology in the company’s specialized CRM agent desktop. Meanwhile, Google’s contact center AI solutions, which are agnostic to telephony and CRM products, allowed more flexible integration into the company’s heterogeneous technology environment.

With the solution deployed, the company realized significant gains:

• Reduction in average call handle time.
• Increase in first-call resolution.
• Reduction in agent effort to retrieve knowledge.
• Highly accurate call summarization.

Optimizing Operations With GenAI

A prominent U.S.-based communication service provider (CSP) is another one of our clients who used AI to overcome business constraints. This CSP’s customer service team struggled to optimize contact center operations while managing costs.They needed to address limited agent bandwidth, high costs associated with agent-handled calls, and difficulties in data and transcript cleansing. These issues made it difficult for the CSP to deliver efficient and cost-effective customer service.

The CSP turned to Tech Mahindra for help in driving a transformation. Based on insights provided by GenAI models, the team fine-tuned a plan to reduce the overall call volume that was manually handled by agents. We developed a robust solution that leverages GenAI to analyze call and chat transcripts, extracting actionable insights to inform strategic decisions. By identifying key trends and refining response strategies, this solution increases the efficiency of customer service. For instance, issues that don’t need agent intervention are resolved through automation.

Real AI Impact Today

Contact centers are an excellent use case for how AI can both supplement a human workforce (making them more efficient and effective) and improve customer experience and satisfaction. By deploying unified CCaaS solutions, contact centers can empower agents with the CRM and business intelligence data they need to speed issue resolution and enable 24/7 customer response through AI agents. Ultimately, these AI-powered solutions will drive customer retention and loyalty by elevating the quality of interactions.

Getting Started

Google Cloud and Tech Mahindra, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, are working together to redefine customer service and engagement. Our automated and unified Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) solutions equip contact centers with omni-channel customer communications and deliver business apps in one place, at the agent’s fingertips.

Navixus, a business unit within Tech Mahindra’s Business Process Services division, offers a holistic CCaaS suite, designed to enhance an enterprise’s customer experience solution. The suite enables intelligent process automation and provides advanced knowledge management to empower agents and optimize operations.

By leveraging advanced natural language processing (NLP) and Google Cloud AI, the Navixus unified CCaaS suite helps businesses deliver seamless, real-time conversational experiences in multiple languages. The suite offers an intuitive interface, where users can select their preferred language, and it uses AI to resolve customer queries while also facilitating a smooth escalation to live agents, if needed.

To learn more, visit https://www.techmahindra.com/alliance/google-cloud-partnership/.