Artificial intelligence is starting to touch on many different areas of our lives. When it comes to telephone calls, particularly those made using VoIP, there are a number of areas where AI is expected to make a big difference in the future.
Call centre technology
Call centres are essential to many businesses. Despite the rise in use of email, social media and other communication methods, there are still many occasions when a phone call is needed in order to resolve an issue quickly and efficiently.
Automation of some aspects of call centre operation has been predicted for some time,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/15/robots-will-replace-customer-service-agents–thank-god-for-that/ but only recently have developments in AI made it a more practical proposition. AI can be used for sophisticated tasks like determining the mood of a caller from their voice and thus directing them quickly to the right agent to deal with their enquiry.
A further development is the use of interactive voice response. IVR can gather relevant information about the customer in order to streamline the handling of the call, freeing up human agents to deal with the enquiry rather than having to ask a series of questions first. Although VoIP wholesale systems from suppliers like https://www.idtexpress.com/blog/2018/04/27/wholesale-voip-termination-choosing-a-provider significantly reduce call costs, making better use of staff time can also cut the cost of the operation.
Business functions
Moving a further stage on from IVR is the use of chatbots. Like IVR these can be used to automate interactions via the use of AI-powered chatbots. As these become more sophisticated they can be used for business tasks too, things like arranging meetings, inviting attendees, managing schedules and more.
AI can also be used to facilitate VoIP conferencing. As businesses become less centralised and allow employees more flexibility in their working patterns, it can be difficult to bring people together for meetings. Using AI can help to drive meetings by providing intelligent prompts to move the discussion on, or pulling up documents and data to back discussion points. As the technology advances it may also be able to deliver simultaneous translation on international calls.
Although AI is still in its relatively early stages, it promises to be able to advance business telecoms in many ways. Added to the flexibility and scalability of VoIP, it is something that any business relying on phone systems can’t afford to ignore.
