Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is becoming a vital tool in call centres in the Philippines. However, far from the cliché of being misunderstood by a robotic voice, customer experience is improving radically thanks to AI, which is reducing call handling times, increasing first call resolutions, and helping agents provide consistently high-quality service to customers.
Many customers prefer human contact when dealing with a company’s support team, and AI is usually deployed in such a way that callers are unaware it’s being used. BPOs in the Philippines tend to use AI in two ways. First, it looks at high-level data and uses it to help shape service delivery, making the call centre more productive. Second, it acts as a personal assistant to the agent, instantly looking up details about the customer, predict likely problems, and even use voice recognition to identify and propose potential solutions before the customer even finishes their question.
The benefits of this are easy to spot. In an industry where consistency is important (even down to scripted answers), and there is a focus on high performance, with calls being handled promptly and efficiently, the use of AI produces an obvious division of labour. Call centres in the Philippines use AI to focus on tasks that computers are good at—taking input, whether a key word relating to a product or indicating an emotional state and retrieving relevant information—while the human agent focuses on communicating appropriately with another human, showing understanding and, most importantly, providing a solution.
This also provides benefits to the agent in terms of increased job satisfaction. Instead of having to become an expert on products or services, or, perhaps worse, an expert on navigating the documentation about products and services, the agent can focus on the customer.
“The support of the AI means the customer support representatives will see improvements in the numbers of calls they resolve, deal less frequently with emotional customers, and benefit from the sense that they are performing at a high level, winning the appreciation of customers,” says Ralf Ellspermann, CEO of PITON-Global, an award-winning call centre in the Philippines.
AI provides additional benefits for call centres serving international customers. While the Philippines has an incredibly high rate of English proficiency, there are always idioms and local knowledge that any call centre, wherever it’s located, will not know. Whether a customer is referring to a location or using a term particular to their variant of English, the AI can pick this up so the call agent is never stumped.
AI is already proving its value, and BPO vendors in the Philippines that have implemented AI solutions continue to invest in improvements and upgrades. With everyone benefiting—from the business buying BPO services, the call centre staff, and ultimately, the customers themselves—AI has become a firm fixture in leading call centres in the Philippines and will only become more important for those who want to offer premium-quality customer service.
