AI Phone Agents: Revolutionizing Call Center Technology and Profitability

I. Introduction

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The call center business model has always been linear in scale. More call volume means more staff and the headaches that come with managing large teams. Within Increased competition and connectivity allowing many offshore facilities deliver adequate service many operators are forced to increase their volumes.

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Like any business dependent on people to grow, profitability is often directly correlated to the ability to recruit, train and retain call operators; something that is notoriously difficult to do. 

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AI phone agents are the key to unlocking exponential growth and returns for call center owners and operators. The technology has finally arrived making it feasible to scale call volumes without needing to recruit, hire and train armies of low-level employees.

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II. Understanding AI Phone Agents in Call Centers

• Definition and basic capabilities
• Key features (e.g., natural language processing, 24/7 availability)
• Comparison to traditional automated systems

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AI Phone agents are not traditional automated prompt menus. We’ve all suffered through long options-packed menus read to us by a generic electronic voice.

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AI agents sound like people. They ask questions on their own and actually understand the responses of the person speaking to them. A chat with a well built AI agent should be indistinguishable (or better!) than one with a standard service representative. 

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III. Current Challenges in Call Center Operations

Tighter Margins

The landscape for call center operators is full of challenges. As network connectivity has improved worldwide, the ability to source operators has become a global market.  And with an increased talent pool comes increased competition. Many “call centers” are operating virtually without the need for centralized equipment and connectivity. 

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Turnover and Training

The biggest costs to call centers is maintaining quality across all of their operators.  Call centers worldwide have notoriously high turnover rates with their employees and constantly struggle to find and retain good talent. As most call centers focus on entry-level employees, turnover due to upward mobility is also a significant factor.  When employees walk out the door for other opportunities, they take their subject matter knowledge, and valuable on the job training expenses with them.

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Inconsistent Customer Experiences

Beyond meeting the demand of customer call volumes centers are faced with the task of unifying customer experience across all of their representatives.  This is where meticulous training and recording/quality assurance of calls comes into play. Maintaining an acceptable standard of customer experience proves to be an ever-present challenge.  Few call centers can boast exceptional satisfaction rates.

Limited Multi-Lingual Support

Native english speakers come at a premium in the support call realm. Beyond that, bi-lingual speakers fetch even higher prices for call operator positions. 

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Many call centers located outside of North America and Europe struggle with maintaining a high level of english (and other languages) comprehension across all representatives. 

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IV. How AI Phone Agents Address Call Center Challenges

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AI phone agent teams can address the majority of challenges call centers are facing today. 

A. Cost reduction

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Agents enable you to scale the volume of calls your center handles without adding headcount. A common use case is maintaining more senior and experienced human operators while replacing entry level and tier 1 support staff with AI agents. 

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B. Improved consistency and quality

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Following the scripts provided to employees can often be a challenges are caller requests vary, or simply from lack of proper training. AI agents share identical scripts, conversation flows, and knowledge bases of product/company information. This allows managers to make changes to a script or flow in a single place and instantly make that information known to all AI agents answering calls. 

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With a centralized repository for directing your AI agents, call consistency can be guaranteed across all callers. 

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C. Scalability and flexibility

Capacity management is another area AI phone agents far exceed their human counterparts in call center activities. Peak caller times are often unexpected and can degrade a customer’s experience beyond repair if forced to wait for a human agent.

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AI agents are infinitely available, and can be built to handle spikes in call volumes with ease. Eliminating wait times and getting standardized call support to all of your customers. 

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D. Enhanced customer experience

Beyond their capacity to handle peak times, AI agents are available 24x7.  Always standing by for calls that can be held in multiple languages. In an industry where bilingual employees are often essential, AI phone agents can seamlessly communicate in most languages.

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E. Data collection and analytics

Bland has a powerful platform built around deriving insights from your agent’s calls. Our models can analyze the sentiment of your calls and help provide indicators that can be used for quality assurance modeling. 

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Quality can be incredibly challenging to maintain across a large volume of calls happening around the clock. Bland insights allow you build customized insight reporting that automatically apply to each call as it’s happening. This means that insights steam directly to operators, giving them access to the pulse of their calls and how they are going.

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V. Implementing AI Phone Agents in Call Centers

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While all AI phone agent rollouts are unique to the company implementing them, almost all follow the same general framework to ensure success. The following are the steps that Bland engineers take whenever walking customers through a call center implementation.

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Assessment of Current Operations

Calls can’t be improved if there are no insights into how they are going now. What are the scripts being used? How much variation typically occurs? What are the biggest challenges for your operators to understand and perform on any given call? The deeper these questions are answered in the early stage, the easier implementation and feedback collection will be further into the rollout.

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Choosing the Right AI Solution

AI is now a buzzword, we get it. So amidst the sea ‘AI tools’ how do you know what will actually work for your calls? Not all AI phone agents are created equal, and it’s not easy to differentiate what will work best. Again, this is where seasoned Engineers like Bland’s come into the picture. After assessing your calls and workflows, we can provide recommendations as to which strategy will best fit your call needs. 

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Integration with Existing Systems

An elegant integration must now be designed. The goal of this phase is to figure out how to hook new AI agents into your existing call workflows without a complete switchover. We want to divert a small trickle to AI operators before building a dam and redirecting all of the call volume.

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As every call center uses different technologies, this step is often very unique and customized to your business.

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Training and Fine Tuning the AI

Much like how you’d monitor a new call operator and provide feedback on their first few weeks of calls, the AI operators need a similar set of attention. Don’t despair, once this process occurs the models will remember their feedback forever.

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Depending on your use case, this stage is completed in collaboration with engineers who have spent years tweaking and optimizing call flows for customers. 

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Gradual Rollout and Evaluation

Once trained and fine-tuned models are performing well in their test phases, it’s time to get them onto real-world calls and monitor closely. Remember those monitoring and insights tools mentioned earlier? This is where your plan for evaluation comes into play. Monitor call transcripts, and all of your analysis factors in real time while your AI agents take those first few calls. 

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In this stage, some undiscovered improvements often lead to minor adjustments to the agents. As your metrics and call satisfaction continue to improve, you will continue to direct more call volume to your newly trained agents.

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VII. Challenges and Considerations

With any new technology costs of implementation need to be considered when evaluating if AI agents are right for your call center’s business model. In enterprise software, costs can come in far more packages than simple licensing fees. Here are our top challenges and costs to consider when evaluating an AI agent based solution for your call center.

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Initial Investment and ROI

Much like hiring new employees, building fully automated AI systems and training them well takes some time and careful planning. It’s important to budget time for learning alongside your implementing engineers at Bland (or elsewhere), and to be prepared for feedback loops during training. 

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While the costs of the technology or of making AI phone agent calls are not high, your time spent on the initial implementation may be significant.

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Employee Concerns

AI has made headlines over the past few years as the killer of jobs, and for many entry level data-based positions this may actually be true. Call center organizations rely heavily on well trained staff, and there may be increased tensions if management is seen as trying to “replace” everyone with machines.

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Data Privacy and Security

Is sensitive data passed to your call operators? Does your specific industry require a unique treatment of user data? All data privacy and security questions matter greatly when architecting an AI solution. Bland works with companies from healthcare to fintech and can tailor security needs for everyone.

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Maintaining a Human Element

At Bland we rarely recommend a fully automated call center solution. In most of our use cases, we use AI agents to handle a bulk of calls, while strategically passing some callers to highly trained human operators. Striking the right balance between automation and human interaction can often be a challenge and is worth thinking through before beginning any AI agent based project. 

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VIII. Future Trends in AI Call Center Technology

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You’ve now read about what is possible with AI phone agents in call centers, and gained an understanding of how to see through your own integration projects. But what does the future hold for call center AI?  At Bland we are excited (and already working on) several areas that will change call center operations forever. 

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Advanced Sentiment Analysis

This is something that is constantly improving at Bland, to answer the question “How are our calls going?”. As the sophistication of our large language models increases, so does our ability to understand the complexities of caller emotions during a call. Are they delighted with the support they’re receiving, flustered, angry? It can all be deduced by their speech.

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Predictive Customer Service

One of hte most frustrating experiences with call customer service is having to explain the entirety of your situation to an agent (or multiple agents). Then you “wait while they pull up your account”, and still have to re-explain your question. With AI agents and advaced CRMs, all of this contextual information can be made available to the agent instantly. They would have immediate knowledge of all previous issues, current products etc. 

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Continuous Learning and Improvement

The best employees (both human and machine) learn from their mistakes and get better at their jobs over time. It’s why industry experience is often such a great indicator of abilities. As AI agents (and the systems teams like Bland build around them) grow in sophistication, there will come a time in the no-so-far future where the agents can be designed to “self learn” from their calls. While the Bland team has already figured this out, such a hands-off approach is not quite available to all users out of the box.

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IX. Conclusion

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Are AI phone agents the answer to you call center’s quality and profitability concerns? As you read today, the answer is very likely yes. But no technical solution is without potential drawbacks and costs. Before considering a major implementation of AI agents into your business, we strongly urge you take advantage of a consultative call with an experienced Engineer.

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At Bland, we have a team standing by to answer your questions and review your specific business use cases. Don’t hesitate to reach out and book a call, even if you’re not 100% certain of how a solution would work for your call center. 

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