Want the short answer? My pick for the best AI Call Center Software is Five9. Read on to compare more of the top providers in this space.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) call center software is becoming more popular as businesses strive to redefine their customer experiences.
As customers, we’ve all been there. On the phone, clicking through endless staircases of prompts, annoyed with long interactive voice response (IVR) flows, wishing to just speak to real human agents. All while hoping we don’t get redirected through another series of steps after finally reaching an agent.
Wait times, being on hold, long sequences, long workflows, and subpar customer service help, breed customer dissatisfaction, impact call center teams, and negatively impact businesses’ bottom lines.
Poor customer service experiences are why 80% of customers end up switching to other brands (Source: Qualtrics).
So, what’s the solution?
That’s where AI call center software comes in. It helps boost both the customer and human agent experiences.
With AI, call centers can reduce wait times, streamline processes, personalize customer interactions, track and gather data, which can lead to increased sales and reduced customer churn.
This is super important as 83% of customers expect immediate engagement when contacting a company (source: Salesforce)
Additionally, AI-powered software can help with agent coaching, onboarding, realtime-training, automating repetitive and monotonous work, which reduces agent churn so you have happy and qualified agents to serve your customers.
The average call center turnover is between 30-45%, so any improvement on retaining staff definitely helps a businesses bottom line (source: qatc.org).
So without further ado, let’s dive into the solutions to help increase customer satisfaction and redefine call centers in 2023.
What is the best AI Call Center Software?
Here are my top recommendations for the best AI call Center Software in 2023:
1. Five9
Best overall Cloud Contact Center with AI
Five9 is a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software. It offers a complete suite of products that allows businesses to manage and monitor customer interactions.
Five9 is one of the few contact center software providers that offer both cloud and premise-based deployment options. So if you aren’t ready to move to the cloud, their products and solutions can still support you and help boost your customer experiences.
Their AI solutions aim to reduce costs and increase productivity that ultimately improves both customer and agent satisfaction. Their practical AI can pass monotonous and repetitive work to an intelligent virtual agent (IVA) so live agents can work on the more complex and rewarding tasks.
IVA can handle lower-tier customer service requests and even help upsell products or services after the customer’s initial request has been resolved. Check out their AI and Automation webinar to see a use case in action.
Five9 also has a robust partner network that allows businesses to easily integrate with their CRM solutions (like Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft, etc.). They have great thought leadership pieces as well and are an industry leader in the CX space.
Key Features:
- AI Agent Assist to help guide agents and streamline workflows
- Intelligent cloud-based contact center
- Omnichannel routing
- Unified communications to drive first contact resolutions
- CRM integrations and SDKs
- Workflow automation
- Reporting and analytics
- API integrations
- Workforce optimization
Pricing:
Call centers typically have unique customer needs, so you need to fill out a quote to get details on their pricing bundles. Their pricing scales depending on your organization’s needs.
- Core Bundle: Includes voice functionalities
- Premium Bundle: Includes the core bundle + digital engagement features like chat and email
- Optimum Bundle: Includes the premium bundle + workflow optimization features
- Ultimate Bundle: Includes the optimum bundle + workflow automation
Reviews:
- G2 Winter 2022 Leader
- G2 3.9 Stars
2. Balto
Best call center AI real-time guidance
Balto’s AI enabled system provides real-time feedback to call center agents so they can say the right things live on calls and provide the best customer experience or sales experience. Real-time guidance closes that gap between insights and implementations since agents can course-correct during calls.
They have 3 different products including real-time guidance, real-time QA, and real-time coaching. They cover a wide variety of use cases like customer experience, sales, compliance, and quality insurance. They provide these solutions across a range of industries like, insurance, home improvement, direct to consumer, and more.
Key Features:
- Real-time coaching
- Manager intervention for at-risk calls
- Dynamic prompts for discovery questions and rebuttals
- Reporting to scale top-performing behavior
- Compliance monitoring using Smart Checklists to guide agents word-by-word and to notify agents when they’ve said something non-compliant.
- Automatic call scoring
Pricing:
If you’re interested in learning more about Balto’s pricing, be sure to request a demo as they currently don’t have their price list on their website or other sources like Capterra and G2 Review.
Reviews:
- G2 High Performer Spring 2021
- G2 Leader Winter 2022
- Gartner Cool Vendor 2021
- G2 4.7 stars
3. Talkdesk
Best AI call center automation
Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center platform with a ton of AI features. With the help of AI, businesses can predict and pre-empt customer needs, deliver personalized service across channels, review workforce analytics, and drive better knowledge management.
They have a no-code AI model training feature that allows non-technical customer service staff to provide inputs to improve the AI models that can then power better automation in contact centers.
Key Features:
- Conversational AI with Talkdesk Virtual Agent
- AI Trainer
- AI-powered self-service
- Agent Assist
- Knowledge management
- AI workforce management
- Interaction analytics
- Quality management
Pricing:
The Talkdesk CX cloud essentials package is $75/month per user and includes access to the AI platform. Prices move up with the CX cloud elite package at $125/month per user. For industry level CX solutions, you can request a quote.
- CX Cloud Essentials $75/month per user
- CX Cloud Elevate $95/month per user
- CX Cloud Elite $125/month per user
- Industry level – Request a quote
Reviews:
- G2 4.4 Stars
- G2 Best Usability Mid-Market Winter 2022
- G2 Top 100 Best Highest Satisfaction 2021
4. InteliWISE
Best AI Voicebot for call centers
InteliWISE’s Voicebot offers programmable voice automation solutions for customer service. The Voicebot uses natural dialogue to help assist with a customer’s questions and problems and can be programmed to pass more complex situations to live agents. With Voicebot, agents have more time to focus on complex problems which help cut costs on each interaction.
InteliWISE also offers an enterprise-grade Chatbot for service and sales. It uses a natural language processing (NLP) engine that can help understand customer inquiries and proactively assist and engage with customers.
Key Features:
- Voicebot conversational AI for automated voice conversations
- Turn-key solution that can be implemented in a day
- Programmable dialogue
- Call Center and CRM integration tools
- Train and manage NLP and NLU for personalization
- Live agent escalation
- Ready to use templates
- AI Chatbot
- Ai Chatbot for e-commerce
Pricing:
- $0 Free 14-day trial
- AI voicebot pricing starts at $119/month
- AI chatbot pricing starts at $99/month
- Contact Center pricing starts at $49/month per agent
Reviews:
- Capterra 4.2 stars
5. Bright Pattern
Best AI automated routing
Bright Pattern is a cloud-based contact center software that offers AI capabilities to help customer service reps provide faster, more personalized customer service. Bright Pattern’s AI capabilities include the ability to automate routine inquiries through self-service flows so agents can focus on critical tasks. It also has the ability to recognize customer sentiment from a customer inquiry and recommend the best response.
Key Features:
- Automated routing
- Automated notifications and alerts
- Speech to text recognition
- Conversational IVR and self-service
- Omnichannel quality management
- Full context bots
- Cloud-based
- CRM integrations
Pricing:
With Bright Pattern, you can choose from a variety of packages that are tailored to your business needs. They offer the voice select, pro package, and premium package that include different capabilities and features. You can request a quote to learn more about their pricing models.
Reviews:
- G2 High Performer Winter 2022
- G2 4.3 Stars
- Capterra Emerging Favorite 2021 (Predictive Dialer Software)
- Capterra 4.7 Stars
6. Genesys
Best AI omnichannel contact center suite
Genesys provides contact center and customer experience solutions. It has been in business for more than 25 years and has over 10,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Some of their features include omni channel routing, workforce engagement management, voice services, automatic call distribution (acd), and AI tools to help with personalized customer experiences.
Their AI solutions can be integrated quickly and can help with cross channel communication so agents can see the full customer journey and support history to quickly assist and reduce the average ticket time.
Key Features:
- Omnichannel customer support
- Predictive engagement
- AI chatbots
- AI voicebots
- Workforce engagement
- Predictive routing
- Agent Assist
- Speech and text analytics
Pricing:
Genesys has a few different pricing tiers that can support small business to enterprise-level contact centers. Contact their sales team to get a demo and discuss rates.
7. Coveo
Best omnichannel search software for call centers
Coveo is an AI-driven search and AI-powered customer engagement platform that redefines how companies interact with their customers. Coveo’s AI capabilities enable companies to surface the most relevant content and insights from across their entire organization in milliseconds. This provides customers with a more personalized experience and allows companies to make better decisions faster.
Their service and support solutions include call center support solutions that can help boost first-call resolutions. For instance, their machine learning and AI technology enables predictive search so customer service agents can find the answers they need quickly.
Their AI can also help with personalized content recommendations based on a user’s purchase history and speed up self-service resolutions.
Key Features:
- Integrated intelligent search
- Customer journey insights with cross-channel data stitching
- Personalized content recommendations
- Customer activity insights
- Content health tracking
- Omnichannel analytics
- Customer self-service
- Chatbot AI
Pricing:
- Free trial
- Base plan starts at $600/month
- Pro plan starts at $1,320/month
- Enterprise volume-based pricing
Reviews:
- G2 Leader Winter 2022
- G2 Reviews 4.1
Other notable AI call center solution providers include:
Wrapping things up:
Whether you are looking to move your call center operations to the cloud or transition from IVR to an IVA solution, we’ve covered some great AI call center tools that can help boost your customer experience in 2023.
AI Call Center FAQs:
What is call center AI?
AI call center software is software that uses artificial intelligence to automate tasks that a call center agent usually performs. It can handle common customer service tasks such as handling customer inquiries, providing customer support, route calls, and troubleshooting customer problems.
How is AI used in call centers?
AI is used in call centers to provide call analytics, predict customer sentiment, provide self service options, route calls, and virtual assistant customers via chat bots or through interactive voice agents.
Can AI replace call center agents?
AI cannot replace call center agents. AI can significantly increase performance in call centers by automating repetitive tasks, assisting customers with lower tier support, and help prioritize customer requests based on intelligent insights, but human agents will always be needed to help solve more complex customer inquiries and problems.
