How Call Center AI Solutions Are Revolutionizing Sales & Service in 2024

In 2024, Contact Center AI Software Will Mature—and Become Mandatory

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology for call centers isn’t necessarily new. 

But in 2023, a view of AI-powered call center software’s potential to complete transform the industry—if not life as we know it—came into focus.

In 2024, how can your organization ride the rising tide of innovation and take advantage of game-changing contact center AI applications?

Find out in this article from our 2024 call center trends series.

AI in the Call Center Takes Center Stage

Looking back, it’s almost hard to fathom that it’s been just more than a year since ChatGPT rolled out to the public. The chatbot’s release kicked off a frenzy, as the wider public got its first glimpse at AI technology’s revolutionary possibilities.

With the introduction of ChatGPT (and other tools that followed soon after), AI was no longer a vague term conjuring images of cyborgs. It was no longer a buzzword used primarily in enterprise C-Suites. Suddenly, AI was something that people could use.

AI moves from understanding to generating

What makes tools like ChatGPT so powerful is that they’ve raised the bar for what’s possible.

As Convoso CEO Nima Hakimi has written, “AI has moved from understanding what conversations are about, to knowing what to do with them. It’s this move from understanding natural language to generating it that’s at the heart of the recent leap forward in AI.”

The growth of Generative AI, or GenAI, has virtually overnight led to a paradigm shift in the way brands are doing business—and the scale at which this is possible. Generative AI is helping people write emails and code software, analyze data and better understand what their customers are thinking and feeling. And in 2024, this impact is coming to a call center near you. (Hopefully, your call center.)

Call Center AI Moves from “Maybe” to Mandatory

In all likelihood, your call center—or your competition’s—is already leverage AI-driven solutions. As our partners at Balto found in a recent survey, over the past year, AI usage grew from 59% of contact centers to an incredible 90%.

While those who have already adopted new solutions may not have unlocked the full potential of call center AI software just yet, these numbers point to one simple truth: today’s organizations need to adopt and leverage AI before they risk falling behind their competition.

In the next year, it’s predicted that generative AI will drive the first overall improvements in customer experience metrics in three years. Meanwhile, Forrester research also predicts that AI initiatives will spur a new age of creativity, by boosting productivity by 50% and unlocking more time for creative problem-solving and customer-focused innovation.

Heading into the new year, leaders have to ask themselves: Will our contact center AI strategy be part of this new age? Or will it be left behind?

Of course, they may also be asking, what are best call center AI solutions for 2024?

Below, we dig into the sorts of AI call center solutions that will drive rapid growth in the year ahead.

Examples of AI Call Center Technology in Action

Like the algorithms that power predictive dialing, AI call center technology and machine learning processes often work in the background to expand and enhance outbound capabilities.

Indeed, some call center software platforms offer AI for lead generation, pre-qualifying leads, quality and compliance monitoring, smart call routing, and more. However, as you’ll see here, more and more AI is taking center stage at today’s contact centers—and it’s capable of playing an even more prominent role in driving call center profits.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Though they’ve been around since well before AI, some up-to-date intelligent IVR systems now use AI-powered voice response and analytics to automate call routing. If you have an automated message that you need to communicate, an IVR system can send personalized messages over multiple channels to your leads. You can guide customers and leads through a series of options using a conversational IVR system to minimize the automated feel.

IVAs Extend Abilities Over Text, Too

As we cover in our trends series, voice is far from the only critical channel for call centers in 2024. Today’s brands are more and more reliant on efficient SMS communications for making sales and delivering customer service.

Intelligent virtual agent technology can also help call centers strategically manage and scale customer conversations over text. Rather than load more requirements on agents who are already stretched thin, a conversational AI-powered IVA can take on two-way text conversations to set sales appointments, schedule callbacks and much more.

How Voso.ai is Revolutionizing Omnichannel Communications

Using Voso.ai, outbound contact centers and lead generation teams can leverage cutting-edge conversational AI to accelerate their sales pipeline and drive revenue growth.

Capable of holding fluent conversations over both SMS and voice, this solution can serve as a linchpin of your outreach and customer engagement strategies. Voso.ai can:

• Engage with leads quickly
• Schedule callbacks and sales appointments
• Pre-qualify leads and transfer them to closing agents
• Set automated reminders
• Re-engage aged leads and dropped callers
• Handle Q&A and self-service

With the ability to understand the intent of customer responses and respond naturally, Voso.ai is a breakthrough AI technology for contact centers—one that your customers will experience as though conversing with a live agent, whether over voice or text.

Voso.ai delivers personalized experiences in the channel of your customer’s choice. And as it automates routine interactions at scale, your agents will suddenly be free to focus on what matters most: generating leads and closing sales to move your business forward.

AI-Powered Call Center QA

Call centers are complex operations. But when it comes to what’s behind most mistakes, the primary cause is rather straightforward: it’s simple (and preventable) human error. That’s according to a Balto survey of over 1,000 agents.

Describing these results, Balto CEO Marc Bernstein said, “We don’t usually take [revenue analysis] down to the agent level and say, when your customers are having these conversations with your agents, where [are the opportunities to] increase conversations and revenue there?”

Tools like Balto’s Real-Time Guidance and Observe.ai provide a resounding answer to that question. These AI call center solutions can monitor performance and provide quality assurance for a volume of calls that are simply impossible for human QA teams to replicate. In the process, they can uncover trends to help call centers make improvements and win back lost revenue.

Simple phrase, incredible power: “Show me all of my calls where…”

AI-powered QA and call monitoring tools derive a lot of their power from this ability to analyze calls. However, speaking with Convoso Chief Product Officer Bobby Hakimi, Balto’s Marc Bernstein pointed out one other incredible time-saving aspect of this cutting-edge technology: the fact that managers can talk to it.

That’s right: not only can AI-powered QA tools listen to your calls, they can also listen to your questions while you’re analyzing those calls, too.

Thanks to conversational AI, tools like these enable natural-language based interaction, meaning that a manager can ask, in plain English, for the AI to identify specific trends or behaviors in their team’s calls.

What’s more, they can even ask the AI to provide a draft of agent feedback that they can edit and pass along to drive improvements. As Bernstein puts it, all it takes is typing a single, powerful command:

“What used to take five steps now takes one. It used to take a whole bunch of filters and a really good knowledge of speech analytics, programming, and keywords. Now you just type in a box, ‘Show me the calls where this happened.’”

Reporting and Predictive Analytics

AI-powered QA software delivers rich data and insights on your conversations, but there’s much more to report on in the average day of call center activity.

In 2024, equip your managers and leadership team with a reporting platform capable of sending custom, automated reports at the pace you need to understand performance and take effective action. 

You can also step the automation up yet another notch with AI-driven predictive analytics. Found within many of today’s top CRMs, predictive capabilities can crunch your customer data to identify trends and outreach strategies, score and prioritize leads, and much more.

Plus, as Convoso’s Bobby Hakimi points out, you can also use natural language interaction to easily dig deeper into your call center analytics and come up with improved strategies:

“You can even ask [an AI] for suggestions like ‘What is the best time to call based on my success rate, sales, conversion, or customer sentiment? All of that is information the AI can consume and give an answer back to you…You can get very intelligent information that helps you make better decisions and optimize your contact center.”

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Though they’ve been around since well before AI, some up-to-date intelligent IVR systems now use AI-powered voice response and analytics to automate call routing. 

If you have an automated message that you need to communicate, an IVR system can send personalized messages over multiple channels to your leads. You can guide customers and leads through a series of options using a conversational IVR system to minimize the automated feel.

Answering Machine Detection (AMD)

Every outbound call center manager is probably familiar with the issues answering machines and voicemail can cause. Teams of sales and lead gen agents need to stay in rhythm to consistently have successful conversations—and frequent voicemails are a surefire way to disrupt that. A highly accurate answering machine detection solution can help combat this problem.

The most accurate solutions are trained using machine learning. For instance, Convoso trained its own AMD solution on billions (you read that right: billions, with a b) in order to improve the tool’s ability to more accurately judge whether there is a human or voicemail message on the other end. The results that an AMD solution can produce for agent productivity can be jaw-dropping. 

Just ask Jessie Daniels of One Health Direct, an enterprise-scale outbound call center. Before switching to Convoso, voicemails weren’t just getting in the way of success, they were driving higher turnover. “[Agents] were leaving,” Daniels told us. “They were saying, ‘I’m not going to be able to make a living on answering machines all day.’” 

After making the switch to Convoso, Daniels’ team saw 70% fewer voicemails—and agent commissions and morale skyrocketed—showcasing the true power of AI and machine learning in the call center.

Generative AI

While they may have made many headlines with its usage in term papers and search engines, generative AI tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can actually come in handy at virtually any contact center.

The name of the game in AI is increased efficiency. Using a powerful generative AI can help outbound sales and lead gen teams generate all manner of text in significantly less time. 

For example, want to get started on a new call script? Simply ask ChatGPT or another tool what you should include. The fluency and competency of its answers may continue to surprise you.

Reporting and Predictive Analytics

QA software delivers rich data on your conversations, but there’s much more to report on in the average day on a sales floor. Equip your managers and leadership team with a reporting platform capable of sending custom, automated reports at the pace you need to understand performance and take effective action. 

You can also step the automation up yet another notch with AI-driven predictive analytics. Found within many of today’s top CRMs, predictive capabilities can crunch your customer data to identify trends and outreach strategies, score and prioritize leads, and much more.

Benefits of Using AI Call Center Technology

As technologies like those above advance and telemarketing demands change, call center AI software opens numerous possibilities to keep your business thriving.Ultimately, adopting contact center AI and machine learning in your operation gives you another tool to compete in your industry, to increase efficiency, and to stay current with best practices and compliance.

1. Discover and Qualify Leads

Call center AI solutions can greatly simplify the lead generation and qualification process. 

By analyzing your CRM data to find qualified leads from existing customers, AI can help you find new sales opportunities and score your leads to help streamline prioritization.

Meanwhile, with a conversational AI-powered solution like Voso.ai, you can get the support you need by making outbound calls and texts. Leading friendly, fluent interactions on its own and across channels, your virtual agent will pre-qualify and nurture leads, set appointments, and ensure that your live agents are free to speak with the most qualified leads.

2. Increase Contact Rates and Conversion Rates

Low contact rates are one of the biggest challenges today for call center outbound lead generation and sales teams. By pre-qualifying leads and setting up sales appointments with call center AI, you can increase the number of conversations for your live agents. Intelligent virtual agents work to increase contact rates.

Live agents who only speak with qualified leads expecting calls avoid time wasted on voicemails, hang-ups, and dropped calls. And when they get on the phone, they’ll be much more likely to convert. Contact center teams can maximize their time and efforts, getting big results that benefit everyone.

3. Operate with Compliance Confidence

We talked about the prospect of implementing quality assurance in your contact center above with AI. While tools like dynamic scripting software can improve agent conversations, auditing call interactions using AI supports stronger adherence to scripts, regulations, and company standards for more comprehensive compliance control.

“AI in terms of quality control is really going to play a huge role in better conversations, more compliant conversations, and ultimately, increased results in agent performance. For example, there’s an integration we have that will coach and listen to your agents in real-time and let them know if they’re off-script or not, or if they’re using the right rebuttals or not… Are they talking too fast?”  

– Nima Hakimi, Convoso CEO, and Co-Founder 

4. Get Performance Insights and Build Strategic Campaigns

Intelligent analytics reports will give you insights into the successes and problems within each of your campaigns. With this information, you can make better strategic decisions based on the how and why of lead and list performance. Better yet, in some systems, AI is capable of uncovering those insights on its own. With predictive analytics and data mining tools like those described above, sales teams can leverage call center AI tools to do the time-consuming number-crunching and bring improved strategies to their sales pipeline much faster.

5. Reduce Call Center Costs

According to a global AI survey, 44% of executives in companies that use AI have realized cost reductions. In call centers, AI reduces the amount of time and money you spend on labor costs. With less training and fewer agents required to meet targets, your scaling costs can drop significantly. Adopting AI for your outbound call center can both increase conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs. 

The result? Greater scale that was previously impossible, says Convoso’s CEO and Co-founder, Nima Hakimi:

“Scale without automation doesn’t exist. Sometimes it’s a bit challenging. Technology isn’t always easy. But once it’s implemented and you get the hang of it, you can take things to the next level.”  

AI Call Center Software: The Future of Lead Generation and Sales

The trend to incorporate the advanced capabilities of AI technology into lead generation outbound call center operations will continue in 2024, as marketing and sales teams look for more ways to stay competitive. With AI for your contact center, you can improve costs, productivity, and sales to grow in 2024 and beyond.

Looking for a dialer that will give you the competitive edge all year? Check out our solutions with a FREE DEMO. You’ll be amazed at the difference.