Artificial Intelligence Translational Services Use Cases in Cisco Contact Centers

Artificial Intelligence and Translational Services

The world is flattening; thus, with the business becoming increasingly global, the existing language barriers demand new solutions across vertical markets, especially when dealing with a company to a consumer.

Europe, with its 24 official different languages, is certainly posing some extra challenges to those companies delivering services across countries part of the union, and that’s nothing considering that there are more than 200 languages spoken on the continent.

The language barrier is undoubtedly and historically adding complexity to international business, and this is especially true when we consider Contact Centers and the high-quality customer experience they have to deliver in business-to-consumer services. While in business to business, there is a de facto international language, which is English. If there are consumers involved, that’s no longer an option —companies have to deal with the many languages spoken across countries.

Narrowing the Call Center Gap

With new generations of new consumers speaking their mother tongue language when calling a contact center, the translation problem will not disappear anytime soon. We should even expect the problem to become further challenging because of the increasing immigration of people. In 2017 2.4 million immigrants entered the EU from non-EU countries, and a total of 22.3 million people (4.4 %) of the 512.4 million people living in the EU on 1 January 2018 were non-EU citizens*

While these new immigrants will learn the local languages, they need to access services, especially public services, and this is quite a challenge, in particular for public administrations. In theory, a Contact Center could afford these challenges employing multilanguage agents or more agents. Still, it’s rather clear that this is far to be an optimal solution, and the associated costs are not negligible.

Apart from that, we are not talking about supporting two or three different languages, but rather a multitude of idioms; to depict the complexity of such a model, consider the challenges that this poses to a European contact center service in terms of WorkForce Management and Optimizations. When delivering a satisfied Customer Experience, it’s no longer just a matter of the number of agents we need each hour of the day, of the week, and the week of the month, but rather how many different languages they can speak — an authentic nightmare.

The Growing Need for Multilanguage Agents

It is also happening quite often that the multilanguage agents might be good at speaking two or three languages but not necessary at writing those. Therefore, the challenge is even higher for Digital Contact Centers.

Recent advances in speech technology and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) have the potential to transform today’s challenges into new opportunities. Artificial Intelligence, integrated into Cisco Cognitive Contact Centers, could deliver an excellent solution to business problems like those described above. For example, a digital Cisco Cognitive Contact Centers could leverage Google AI DialogFlow capabilities to provide a Chat Translation Assistance Service, literally able to remove the language complexity and costs from the “Contact Center Work Force Optimization equation.” Let’s see how in the following proof of concept example:

Watch the Video:

This is the logical architecture used in the video.

Another use case we may want to consider as a proof of concept is when traditional audio-only contact centers are located in a country abroad, where the cost of labor is cheaper. There are agents able to speak the required language even if they aren’t mother tongue. For example, this is the case for North African French-speaking contact centers, Est European Italian contact centers, and many more.

In cases like these, Cisco Cognitive Contact Centers powered by Artificial Intelligence could deliver an Audio Transcription and Translation Agent Assistance Service meant to assist the agent in dealing with foreign languages in a more natural, quicker, and more productive way. Let’s see how in the following proof of concept example:

Watch the video:

This is the logical architecture used in the video.

Transforming Customer Experience with Contact Center AI

The Contact Center business is going through a series of significant changes driven by the technology innovation, the raise of socials, and the new consumption models that are being evaluated by most of the companies.

From a technology angle, there is very little doubt that the advent of Artificial Intelligence is transforming traditional call centers into Cognitive Call Centers. This arrival is turning an IT cost into a business strategy tool to increase Customer Experience, achieving higher customer service levels and quality, increasing the productivity of agents, and even lifting their traditional role to the new one: customer ADVISORS and CONSULTANTS.
Cisco has a portfolio of on-premise, hybrid, and cloud contact center solutions. That covers the undergoing migration to Cloud and the demand for a versatile, open, consistent architecture across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud solutions able to grant a smooth transition to the broad base of existing customers and at the same time allowing a consistent innovation adding digital channels and artificial intelligence.