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As the main point of contact between your organization and its customers, the contact center offers a significant opportunity for competitive differentiation. Today’s customers demand an outstanding experience in exchange for their loyalty, and speech and text analytics play a key role in enabling your organization to deliver on those demands.

Technology is rapidly changing how companies of all types and sizes conduct business. This is true in the realm of customer service and support. Using artificial intelligence (AI) in the right ways can provide businesses with a range of benefits. One of the technologies that have helped to reshape the customer service experience is the AI chatbot. Before we get into the benefits of using an AI chatbot, let’s first get a better understanding of what this technology is and how it works.

If you’ve interacted online with pretty much any sort of business in the past year, there’s a good chance it was handled by a chatbot. Lately, I’ve encountered more local small businesses using them to take orders and answer questions. The convenience offered by their chatbot helped to win my business. And they seem more prevalent than ever. Have you noticed the proliferation of chatbots on websites and social media platforms? The chatbot is one modern technology that’s more than a trend; it’s becoming an important part of customer service and leveraged by businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition in their sector.

When it comes to employee engagement, the research and survey data consistently find that engaged employees perform better, churn less, and are happier at work. That’s not surprising. The tricky part is knowing how to foster engagement such that employees are motivated, personally invested in their work, and committed to their own success and the success of the business.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to deliver agent guidance in real time, at the exact moment it’s needed, helps contact centers maximize agent performance, delight customers, and reduce costs. That’s the finding of a report by Aberdeen, which surveyed more than 300 contact center leaders across industries around the world.

A hybrid workforce model isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Agents are loving the flexibility and comfort it offers. But like anything, it comes with its own unique challenges as you try to keep employees engaged in their positions. If you’re unsure of where to start, the six pillars of a hybrid contact center workforce engagement strategy listed above would be a great place to start.

This is the third article in a four-part series designed to help small call centers choose the right software to enable them to thrive and compete. The first article focused on cloud call center software as a growth enabler, the second was all about building customer loyalty, and now we’ll discuss how to use modern technology to compete more effectively and take performance to the next level.