Can an AI call centre save your business time and money?

Salesforce predicts that by 2027, 50% of customer service cases will be resolved by AI. So it’s safe to say that AI’s role in customer service is here to stay. Technology is moving at a rapid pace, and it can be easy for many small business owners to feel like they can’t keep up.

At Startups, we’ve been helping small business owners for over two decades, which is why we’ve put together this simple guide to demystifying AI call centres. We’ll break down how they work, how they can help your business, how to implement one and how to avoid any potential pitfalls.

This might seem like a daunting technological leap for small businesses, but seeing as the PTSN switch off in January 2027 means that all businesses will have to switch to VoIP-based providers anyway, this could be the ideal time for you to start investing in AI for your call centre.

What is an AI call centre?

While the name might conjure up images of expensive hubs of advanced technology, simply put, an AI call centre just refers to any customer service department that is using AI-based software to help handle calls and resolve issues automatically.

This means that calls could potentially be being handled solely through a virtual agent, but an AI call centre could be defined as a workforce of real customer service agents using AI-powered tools to make their day-to-day more efficient.

AI call centres can mean that calls are being answered round the clock, but without having to pay for staff 24/7. Ideally though, you shouldn’t be replacing your human staff with AI, but using it to enhance your workflow. So it can be a win-win for both you and your staff.

Just keep in mind that AI can’t demonstrate judgement or critical thinking the same way a human can, and it can be prone to biases. Implementation can be costly, and ultimately the lack of human touch could put off your customers or clients.

How AI is transforming the modern call centre

Considering that customer satisfaction statistics show that phone (91%) and live chat (85%) are the preferred methods for customers to reach businesses, it’s crucial that your call centre is the best it can be.

According to LiveAgent, some of the most common reasons for customer dissatisfaction are long wait times, poor issue resolution, and the lack of a personalised service. Considering that even smaller call centres can get hundreds of calls a day, it can seem difficult to resolve these issues.

But with AI, the answers to these problems might be more attainable than you think. These are some of the key tools AI provides for call centres:

Intelligent IVR (Interactive Voice Response)

Even if the name IVR doesn’t stand out to you, we’ve all come across it. It’s the (mostly frustrating) robotic voice you need to navigate when calling a contact centre that lists the various options in a monotone drone.

This has been a bugbear for most customers for years, but thanks to AI, IVR is dramatically improving. No longer the equivalent of a tape recorder, IVR systems can provide real-time responses to callers.

AI-powered IVR uses natural language understanding (NLU), to interpret and comprehend human language, providing a better experience for callers.

Chatbots and virtual assistants

71% of leaders plan on increasing investment in AI chatbots, specifically for customer service. The reason these are so enticing to employers is that they can provide customers with a self-service option and free up agents.

These AI-powered chatbots and assistants can handle basic questions and help resolve simple frequently-asked issues. This means that agents can focus on resolving more sophisticated customer enquiries, and avoid being bogged down in trivial troubleshooting.

Call summaries

You can use AI in your call centre to create automatic transcripts of any call, with the key points summarised so you can quickly recap the most important information. This can save your staff time and also provide you with actionable insights.

Proactive assistance

Call centre AI is becoming so advanced that some tools can help you stay ahead of the game by predicting customer issues before they call. It does this by analysing trends in frequently occurring support requests, and then preemptively creating suggestions for a solution to the issue.

Intelligent call routing, and triage

Call centres can use AI to more efficiently direct incoming calls to the best destination, whether it’s an agent or a department. Through algorithms, customer calls will be delivered more efficiently to the right place, increasing customer satisfaction.

Sentiment analysis

Using NLU technology, AI can help determine the emotional tone of the caller, and gather that data for analysis. This kind of real-time sentiment analysis can give you a much deeper insight into your customer experience overall, but it can also help agents adapt during a live call with a customer. You can use the data gathered from sentiment analysis to improve your overall workflow.

The pros and cons of using AI in call centres

If you’re considering implementing AI in your small business call centre, these are the pros and cons you should think about before pulling the virtual trigger:

What are the pros?

There’s undeniably a lot of benefit to a small business owner, including:

Improved customer satisfaction

AI can help provide a more personalised, and efficient, experience for your callers. By using AI in your call centre workflow, you can have a more sophisticated quality assurance process, and a better call quality means happier customers.

Assistance day or night 

Using a virtual agent means that all calls will be answered, at any time. Using AI can help you direct your incoming calls much faster and more efficiently, so not only does every call get answered 24/7, you can be assured it will go exactly where it needs to.

Help your human agents be more productive

Ideally, AI should be helping to enhance your human staff, not replace them. But by providing predictive solutions and real-time analysis, your human agents can be freed up to provide more complex and well-considered advice.

Cost reduction

In the long run, AI call centres could potentially save on running costs thanks to a reduced reliance on staffing needs.

Scalability

AI can help your startup expand much faster than was previously attainable for business owners, especially by using virtual agents to resolve customer queries when your normal staff isn’t available.

Enhanced analysis and insights

AI-powered analysis can give you a deep and sophisticated look at your data, such as being able to track your average call handling time. You can leverage these insights into an improved workflow.

What are the cons?

It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not all positive. There are some issues which might make AI less suitable for your operation, such as:

Initial costs

It’s important for business owners to keep in mind that the initial setup costs for AI call centres can be steep. An AI-suite of tools can be far more expensive for a small business than a standard business phone system.

Ethical issues 

AI is far from infallible, and it’s been shown that AI-learning can be prone to biases around gender and race. When relying on AI chatbots, you need to be extremely careful around responses and information that could be construed as discriminatory.

Lack of a personal touch 

Relying too heavily on machine learning and automated processes can be alienating to callers. More sophisticated automation is still automation nonetheless. This is why you need to balance a human workforce with AI, as a customer’s preference will always be to deal with a flesh and blood person over a virtual agent.

Increased security concerns

While AI can help strengthen your business cybersecurity, using technology that relies on collecting and analysing your customer’s information can be fraught with potential danger. You will need to be incredibly strict and diligent with privacy concerns around data, and ensure you are achieving GDPR compliance.

How to integrate AI into your customer service

If you want to implement an AI call centre into your own operation. you should consider these four simple steps to ensure success:

1. Set goals and metrics before you begin 

To make sure you get a positive result from your AI call centre, you should use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals to determine what exactly you want to achieve by adopting AI. Once your AI call centre is up and running, make sure to continuously monitor the results to see which changes or improvements need to be made.

2. Be realistic, make it manageable

Don’t start too ambitiously, you should make sure you start out with a limited scope before expanding. Slow and steady wins the AI race, so you should begin by implementing a handful of tools into your workflow, and attempt a trial run before expanding it into your full workflow.

3. Ensure you can connect your AI tools into your existing workflow 

You will to need to make sure the AI tools you intend on using will smoothly fit into your existing workflow, rather than being hampered by it. Make sure your AI suite will be able to work alongside your business’s CRM system, for example.

It’s worth nothing that the best call centre phone systems will have specific contact centre plans, that will come loaded with AI tools. If you’re already using a business phone system provider like RingCentral or Vonage, then you should investigate the contact centre plans.

4. Train your staff, don’t replace them 

According to Hubspot, 54% of leaders believe the best option for resolving complex customer support requests is a human assisted with AI. This means training your current agents to use your AI-based system, which can take time to implement. So, ensure you have taken the time to design an effective training programme for your staff. Your AI tools should help, not hinder them.

So start off small, make sure it fits into your current business structure, train your staff fully, and then measure the success of your AI-powered call centre.

Summary: is an AI call centre right for your business?

Once thought to be only the domain of advanced businesses, AI call centres can now be realistically achieved by small business owners as well. When implemented correctly, AI call centres can increase your efficiency, streamline your workflow, and boost your customer satisfaction.

Just remember, the human touch is key. AI should be seen as a method of enhancing your current staff, not a replacement. By adopting tools like automated customer support, it means that you and your staff can stay competitive and keep customers happy.