In today’s competitive landscape, customer experience (CX) is a battleground. Leaders and decision-makers understand that a well-run contact center is no longer just a cost center; it’s a strategic revenue driver. Investing in the right technologies is crucial, and artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a game-changer for maximizing ROI.

In this article, we outline the two facets of ROI you should consider: How virtual assistants can add value in the contact center and specific metrics to track so you can fully understand where you’re gaining the most value from conversational AI. We’ll also explore some steps for deploying virtual assistants in your contact center so that you’re set up for success.

The ROI Equation: Cost Reduction + Revenue Generation

Traditionally, ROI in contact centers focused on cost reduction. Conversational AI disrupts this paradigm by offering a two-pronged approach:

  1. Cost reduction: Virtual agents (chatbots and voicebots) and agent assistants powered by AI can automate routine inquiries, deflecting phone calls and reducing agent workload. When implemented properly, conversational AI can decrease average handle time and agent turnover, leading to significant cost savings.
  2. Revenue generation: Beyond deflecting calls, conversational AI can act as a virtual sales engine, qualifying leads and even up-selling and cross-selling during interactions. Furthermore, by providing faster resolutions and improved self-service options, conversational AI enhances customer satisfaction, leading to higher loyalty and repeat business.
Conversational ai, roi, artificial intelligence, cx

Virtual agents powered by conversational AI technology can help significantly improve your contact center ROI. Here are a few advantages you should expect.

Always-on customer service: Virtual agents provide 24/7 customer engagement, ensuring your business is never closed — and customers can get support when it works best for them, even without human intervention. They can answer basic inquiries, deflecting customer calls and freeing up human agents for complex issues. This translates to faster resolutions and happier customers.

Omnichannel accessibility: Virtual agents go where your customers are. They operate on multiple platforms like messaging apps, social media, SMS and online portals to create a seamless omnichannel experience. This accessibility builds brand trust and fosters stronger customer relationships.

Consistent brand voice: Virtual agents can be programmed to communicate in your brand’s specific tone and voice. This consistency fosters familiarity and trust with customers, enhancing the overall experience. Additionally, virtual agents can be used for personalized product recommendations, increasing customer satisfaction and driving sales.

Global reach without borders: Virtual agents can handle customer interactions in multiple languages, eliminating language barriers and expanding your market reach. This removes the need for multilingual human agents, making global customer engagement more efficient and cost-effective.

Enhanced efficiency through automation: Virtual agents can automate repetitive tasks like answering FAQs using a knowledge base, conducting customer satisfaction surveys, and providing insights for sales process improvement. This frees up human agents to focus on higher-value interactions with customers and strategic tasks, boosting overall team productivity.

By implementing voice assistants, leaders can unlock significant ROI through improved customer service, increased sales opportunities and optimized operational costs.

Quantifying the Benefits of Conversational AI: Beyond the Numbers

Measuring the ROI of artificial intelligence goes beyond simply tracking cost savings. While reducing agent workload and deflecting calls are valuable benefits, true success lies in understanding how the technology impacts customer behavior and overall business health.

Here’s how to look beyond the numbers — at specific KPIs you can track to quantify the benefits and the impact on customer behavior and overall business health.

  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores: Conversational AI can significantly improve CSAT by providing faster resolutions, reducing wait times, offering 24/7 availability and personalizing interactions. Track CSAT changes post-implementation to quantify customer satisfaction gains.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Happy customers become brand advocates. Monitor NPS and user input to see how conversational AI-driven improvements in customer experience translate to increased brand loyalty and advocacy.
  • Sales conversion rates: AI-powered chatbots can nurture leads, qualify prospects and even close sales. Track conversion rates to measure the impact conversational AI has on revenue generation – and the benefit that has for your sales team.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES): Effortless interactions are key to customer satisfaction. Use CES to measure how easy the technology makes it for customers to complete tasks and find answers.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Happy customers stick around longer and spend more. While directly attributing CLTV increases to conversational AI might be challenging, showcasing the link between improved customer experience and potential CLTV growth can be powerful.

By combining these metrics with traditional cost-saving data, leaders gain a holistic view of how conversational AI affects the bottom line. This comprehensive picture allows for continuous improvement and optimization of CAI deployments, ensuring maximum ROI for your contact center.

Making Conversational AI Work for You

Building a virtual agent with the Genesys Cloud® platform is surprisingly easy. A drag-and-drop interface replaces complex coding, allowing for rapid deployment. Still, a successful conversational AI implementation requires careful planning.

Here are three key considerations to ensure it goes smoothly:

  1. Identify the right use cases: Start by automating repetitive tasks that free up agents for complex inquiries. Simple use cases that will allow you to understand your customers’ needs, especially through the messaging channel interaction with a virtual agent, FAQ and routing use cases are great starting points.
  2. Focus on the customer journey:  Integrate conversational AI seamlessly into the customer journey, ensuring a smooth handoff to human agents when needed. Conversational AI can provide additional information to agents about the interaction between the virtual agent and the customer, such as context, intent, full transcript, sentiment analysis and more.
  3. Invest in training: Train both agents and customers on how to effectively use the technology. Designing better dialogues for virtual agents is essential to provide a better customer experience. This will ensure customers use virtual agents in the best way. Agents must be trained to understand all the insights that AI can provide and how to work with them.

What to Look for in a Leading Contact Center AI Solution

Cloud-based contact center solutions offers robust platform that empowers organizations to maximize the ROI of conversational AI. Here’s how:

  • Seamless integration:  Seamless integration with various conversational AI solutions is important, especially if you need to connect to one service to get better results or provide additional service for your customers.
  • Advanced analytics: Look for a platform that provides comprehensive analytics that help track and measure the impact of CAI on key metrics like CSAT, NPS and sales conversion rates. This data allows for continuous improvement and optimization of your AI deployments.
  • Scalability and security:  Highly scalable and secure platforms ensure that your conversational AI solution can grow with your business while keeping customer data safe.
  • Open API framework: Open API framework allows you to easily customize and integrate with other business systems, creating a truly connected and personalized customer journey.

The Future of ROI in Contact Centers: A Symphony of Human and Machine

Conversational AI isn’t a silver bullet for the contact center. It’s a powerful tool for boosting contact center performance. By focusing on both cost reduction and revenue generation, leaders can unlock significant ROI and build a future-proof contact center that delivers exceptional customer experiences.

The future of ROI in contact centers lies not in replacing human agents, but in creating a harmonious collaboration between humans and AI.

By embracing this human-AI partnership, contact centers can unlock a future of exceptional customer experiences and maximized ROI. They’ll also create a competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital landscape. The future of contact centers isn’t about replacing the human touch, it’s about amplifying it.

Ready to get started with AI? Read this ebook “How to build your business case for AI” to learn how to gain buy-in from stakeholders.

And find out why IDC Marketscape named Genesys a Leader in delivering conversational AI solutions in front-office customer service environments.