For businesses of all shapes, sizes, and stripes, the proverbial AI genie is out of the bottle. If you haven’t started exploring how generative AI can make your work easier, faster, and more efficient, now’s the time.
For contact centers, there are many potential applications for generative AI tools. They can draft scripts for agents, power chatbots to handle customer inquiries, and surface analytics on several things, like call sentiment. This is especially helpful for training your staff and identifying issues within your business.
In other words, generative AI tools can greatly support your marketing strategies, you just need to know which ones you can trust.
This list is a great place to start in your search for the best generative AI tool for your contact center.
Here are some top-tier tools for delivering next-level customer experiences at scale. And if you’re unclear on exactly what this type of AI is, check out our post on what generative AI is and how it works.
While many generative AI tools suggest tasks or messaging for agents to carry out with customers, Hatch Assistant actually performs those tasks for your agents.
With this tool, you build custom AI agents that text with your contacts to qualify leads, book appointments, follow up on quotes, and more. Configure your bot with a name, personality, and a set of prompts and it will conduct authentic conversations that move contacts through your funnel.
While it can feel scary to let a bot interact with customers, you set rules and controls so your bot behaves exactly as you intend. Best of all, all prompts and rules are created using plain language—no coding skills needed.
With AI bots handling initial conversations and admin work, your team can be freed up to focus on bottom-funnel conversations and strategic initiatives. See a real example of Hatch AI in action here.
RingCentral offers businesses a range of AI-enabled communication solutions, but its RingCX solution is built specifically for contact centers.
RingCX makes work easier for your agents and supervisors. Automated voice responses manage the simple conversations so your human team can tackle more complex calls. When your team does need to step in, RingCX still alleviates workload by generating automatic call summaries and transcripts.
The system also generates valuable insights for managers. From those call transcripts to sentiment analysis, to live dashboards and reports, supervisors receive information that can guide team coaching—which can and improve both customer experiences and employee retention.
Google Contact Center AI (Google CCAI) allows you to build virtual agents that handle many of your customers’ basic questions. By integrating with Google Dialogflow, you can design voice bot and chatbot flows capable of handling and engaging in standard customer communication.
If the call or chat does need to be handled by a human member of your team, Agent Assist supports the team member(s) by surfacing relevant information from your knowledge base and offering recommended responses.
Google CCAI integrates with major communications technology providers like Cisco, Avaya, and Vonage, allowing you to retain and boost your current system’s capabilities. Just like with Hatch CRM integrations, this AI’s capacity to integrate with your CRM makes the work that much easier.
Unsurprisingly, Google also offers incredible analytics. CCAI Insights uses AI to assess customer conversations, identify common topics or issues, pick up on customer sentiment, and help you foresee critical moments in conversations, like when a customer is about to complain.
Like Google’s CCAI, IBM watsonx Assistant offers virtual, AI-powered support to your human team. Its features are similar to those provided by Google, with the ability to craft dialog flows for voice bots and chatbots that free up your team.
IBM watsonx Assistant comes with pre-built flows that you can customize to your business, or you can create your own no-code communication flow. You can also opt to automate transfers to your live team for questions deemed too complex for your bot to answer.
IBM watsonx Assistant also integrates with many popular CRM and contact service as a center platforms. This makes transitions between AI and live agents smoother and helps you better keep track of all customer engagements.
Dialpad AI has developed an integrated AI contact center tool. From your team’s shared Dialpad AI workspace, individuals can take calls, attend meetings, track customer conversations, and more.
Dialpad AI automatically transcribes each customer call, and as it hears customer questions, it scans your resources for information to share with agents so they can relay it to customers as needed.
Agents and managers can also communicate and collaborate within the platform, leaving notes on specific customer interactions to enable appropriate follow-up or help the agent handle that question better next time.
Additionally, managers can see vital data like trends in call sentiment, call volume, and typical customer questions.
Microsoft Azure AI Services’ solutions run the gamut, from industry-leading speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities, to AI-enabled search, to generative AI models and bots customized to your business.
A unique benefit to Microsoft Azure AI Services is that you can purchase each feature individually, allowing greater flexibility in designing a solution for your specific needs and staying within budget.
One call center client shares its experience using several of Microsoft’s generative AI tools to introduce new efficiencies for its clients. The client uses speech-to-text to generate transcripts of calls and then relies on a combination of Azure AI and its own internal AI tools to surface insights from call transcripts that help deliver better results with less effort—a great tool for optimizing your call center.
Would any list of generative AI tools be complete if it didn’t include ChatGPT? When it launched in November 2022, ChatGPT catapulted the world into the AI-powered future.
Unlike the other services on this list, ChatGPT is a general solution—not custom-built to suit contact centers. As such, it doesn’t offer the same integrations and workflows you see with the industry-specific offerings.
However, if you’re looking for a free solution to help you craft scripts for your contact center team or populate your chatbot, ChatGPT is an excellent option. You can share information from your knowledge base documents, FAQs, or website copy and ask ChatGPT to draft customer service responses.
Add a few specifics, and this script could be ready to use at your contact center. Image source
Just remember: ChatGPT has access to the information you input for prompts, so don’t share confidential materials. For more help with using this tool, we cover different ways to use ChatGPT for contractors here.
Salesforce is already an omnipresent CRM solution across industries. If your organization is already using Salesforce, you’ll want to explore its generative AI tools, primarily Salesforce Einstein AI solutions, to further support your initiatives.
There is some overlap between Einstein AI’s features and those offered by other enterprise-level providers on this list. AI-generated responses to queries, call summaries, and chatbot features are all available in this Salesforce solution.
Salesforce’s new addition to Einstein, called Retrieval Augmented Generation, is unique. The solution allows your team to use semantic search within Salesforce to scan your data for relevant information. Instead of relying on keyword search, which can only surface exact matches, semantic search allows your team to type in a conversational query and find answers.
For more tips on using AI in this aspect of your call center, head to our post on practical ways to use AI for sales.
If your contact center already uses Zendesk, you’ll want to check out its new feature, Zendesk Answer Bot. Launched in January 2024, Answer Bot can help you resolve customer service tickets before they even make it to your human agents.
Answer Bot can assess incoming queries from customers and send relevant knowledge desk articles in response to resolve simple questions immediately.
In a case study from Zendesk customer Dollar Shave Club, Answer Bot deflected 10% of the brand’s total ticket volume from human agents. This could apply to your business, freeing up agent time to work on other initiatives and increase your ROI.
Intercom, another leading help desk and customer service solution, is also working hard to integrate generative AI tools into its technology.
Its AI bot, named Fin, is highly effective at supporting your human team. Current Intercom customers say Fin is resolving as much as 50% of all incoming customer questions.
When Fin can’t find an answer in your existing materials, it automatically routes your customer to the human help desk. Once the inquiry reaches your team, generative AI steps in again to help draft answers to those more complex queries. This both frees up time for customer support teams and improves customer engagement speed by reducing draft and response times.
Rasa wants to help large organizations deliver personalized customer service at scale with custom AI bots.
The platform gives you the power to build your own flows based on your specific business logic and needs. Rasa’s AI is especially adept at managing conversational quirks like digressions, topic changes, and rare, one-off questions.
The solution allows your technical team to collaborate with your marketing, sales, and customer service leaders. If you have coders on-site, they can customize within Rasa, but it also offers low-code options for others within your organization.
Rasa’s no-code option makes it easy to build your conversation flows without a developer. Image source
Don’t let the generative AI movement roll ahead without you. Now is the perfect time to invest in and prepare for the AI revolution and find an AI-powered solution to help you scale up while delivering the friendly, attentive service your customers want.
These solutions can help contact centers maximize their efficiency, identify opportunities for improvement, and support agents and customers alike.
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