- Written by Andrew Woodger - Contact Centre Account Director
- Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn
AI tools are reshaping customer experience in the contact centre. Here’s an overview of 5 AI-powered contact centre features that CX Directors can leverage to reduce costs within their contact centre without compromising on CX.
As customer expectations rise and operational costs continue to increase, CX leaders are under pressure to deliver personalised and efficient experiences without stretching budgets. The solution lies in AI tools purpose-built for the contact centre.
While people and processes remain at the heart of great CX, the right technology can enhance decision-making, streamline workflows, and free up agents to focus on more complex, meaningful customer interactions.
Here are the 5 AI-powered tools every CX Director should be exploring this year
AI Insights
Before you can improve efficiency, you need visibility. AI insights and real-time transcription make this easier than ever.
Advanced AI-driven visibility into contact centre performance and operations enables you to proactively identify inefficiencies to inform strategic, data-led decisions.
These dashboards automatically detect conversation topics and sort them into clusters.
For each topic, you can view:
- Number of interactions
- Average handle time
- Average hold and queue time
- Impact score
Instead of relying on guesswork, reliable data shows what’s driving call volume and where agents spend most of their time. For example, if a topic like ‘new device activation’ is taking up a significant amount of agent time, you can take targeted action whether that’s through improved training, automation, or enhanced self-service options.
AI-Powered Workforce Management
Staffing is often the largest cost in a contact centre. That’s why AI-powered Workforce Management (WFM) tools are critical.
With machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, you can automate:
- Forecasting and scheduling
- Performance reporting
- Agent engagement metrics
Instead of sifting through spreadsheets, your team gets fast, accurate staffing predictions and performance insights all in real-time.
AI tools take the guesswork out of scheduling, improving service levels without overstaffing and helping you make every hour of agent time count.
AI-powered self-service IVR
Traditional IVRs simply route calls. AI-powered IVRs understand intent, deliver answers, and solve problems without the need for human intervention.
Capabilities include:
- Natural language understanding for better query routing
- Integration with knowledge bases and self-service portals
- Skills-based routing for complex queries
This creates what we call “digital offload” diverting simple queries away from agents and into effective self-service journeys. With 91% of customers willing to use a self-service knowledge base if one exists, the opportunity here is enormous.
Interactive Virtual Agents (IVAs)
When customers visit your website, they want to buy something, get information, or ask for help. But traditional chatbots often fall short. That’s where Interactive Virtual Agents (IVAs) come in.
IVAs can:
- Understand customer context and previous interactions
- Provide accurate, natural-language responses
- Escalate to humans only when necessary
IVAs act as 24/7 support reps, delivering meaningful, accurate responses while cutting wait times and deflecting low-value queries. It behaves like having another high-performing agent for every shift without the payroll cost.
Agent Assist
Every second counts in a live call. Agent Assist tools use real-time language processing to detect keywords, intent, or emotion, and then prompt agents with relevant information.
For example, if a customer asks about delivery times, a prompt delivers the answer instantly, or if a technical issue is raised, the agent gets a suggestion to offer a premium upgrade.
Agent Assist boosts first contact resolution, reduces handle time, and ensures agents never miss an upsell opportunity. It’s like giving every agent their own personal coach – guiding agents with the right prompts at exactly the right moment.
AI Powered Quality Monitoring
Manual quality monitoring is resource-intensive and reactive. AI completely redefines that approach. With tools like sentiment analysis and keyword detection, you can:
- Automatically assess 100% of calls
- Flag emotional or non-compliant interactions in real-time
- Notify supervisors when calls escalate, like raised voices or the use of inappropriate language
This removes the need for retrospective analysis and enables supervisors to coach agents proactively. It also frees QA teams from hours of manual listening and provides a full picture of your contact centre’s performance.
How to begin your AI implementation journey
These five AI tools aren’t just nice to have they’re becoming essential for CX leaders who want to stay ahead. Used strategically, AI doesn’t replace people, it empowers contact centre teams to deliver more value to their customers and delivers extensive business efficiency improvements.
Opus have a team of specialists contact centre consultants, who have delivered the above solutions for several of our clients. Please get in touch as we would love to share how we have achieved this and understand your businesses needs in more detail to suggest how we could potentially enhance your contact centre operations using AI.
View our guide that explores how you can reduce overheads with AI
Achieving the balance between delivering high-quality customer experience and maintaining financial stability within your contact centre requires careful navigation. This handy guide explains how you can achieve exactly this.
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