Artificial Intelligence is finding its way into almost every area of business, and telecoms is no exception.

But while there is plenty of talk about AI replacing people, we think some of its biggest benefits are much more practical. Used well, AI can help people communicate better, remove repetitive admin, give businesses more useful information and ultimately improve the experience for both customers and employees.

For us, that is where AI in telecoms gets really interesting.

From phone system to business intelligence

For years, a business phone system was essentially there to make, receive and transfer calls.

Modern communications platforms can do considerably more. Calls, meetings, messages and customer interactions generate a huge amount of information every day. AI can help turn that information into something genuinely useful.

A conversation no longer has to disappear as soon assomebody puts the phone down.

AI can provide automatic call transcription, create a summary of the conversation, identify key actions and, where systems are integrated, add useful information directly into a CRM or other business application.

Instead of somebody spending ten minutes typing up notes after a call, much of that work can happen automatically.

Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of conversations every week and the potential time saving becomes significant.

Less administration, more time for customers

One of the most immediate benefits of AI is its ability to take away repetitive work.

After a customer call, for example, AI could help:

• Transcribe the conversation
• Summarise the important points
• Identify agreed actions
• Generate follow-up notes
• Categorise the reason for the call
• Update or provide information for your CRM
• Highlight conversations requiring further attention

The objective isn't necessarily to replace the person handling the call. It's to allow them to concentrate on the conversation rather than worrying about taking detailed notes or completing administration afterwards.

That can mean more productive employees, better records and a more consistent customer experience.

Making every conversation easier to understand

AI can also help businesses understand what is happening across their communications as a whole.

Traditionally, managers might look at statistics such as calls answered, calls missed and average call duration.

Useful? Certainly.

But they don't necessarily tell you why customers are calling or what happened during those conversations.

AI-assisted analytics can potentially help identify recurring subjects, common customer questions, emerging issues and patterns within conversations.

Imagine being able to see that a particular product question has suddenly increased, that customers are repeatedly contacting you about the same issue or that certain enquiries are taking significantly longer to resolve.

That is information a business can act on.

Better customer service without losing the human touch

AI can also help customers get answers more quickly.

Intelligent routing can help direct enquiries to the right person or team. AI assistants can help employees find information while they're speaking to a customer. Automated services can deal with straightforward enquiries while more complicated conversations are passed to a human.

The important word, though, is help.

We don't believe good customer service means making it increasingly difficult to speak to an actual person.

There are some enquiries that automation can handle brilliantly. There are others where a knowledgeable person, a conversation anda little common sense will always be the better option.

The best communications strategy combines the two.

AI can benefit more than the contact centre

It's also easy to think of AI communications as something only relevant to large contact centres.

It isn't.

A sales team could use AI-generated call summaries to improve CRM information.

An account manager could quickly review previous conversations before contacting a customer.

A service team could identify common support issues.

Managers could review trends across customer conversations without listening to hours of call recordings.

Internal meetings could be transcribed, summarised and turned into actions.

Even a relatively small business can generate hundreds of conversations every week. Making that information easier to capture, search and understand can have a significant operational benefit.

Start with the business problem, not the technology

Perhaps the most important point is that businesses shouldn't implement AI simply because AI is the latest technology everyone is talking about.

Start with the problem.

Where are your teams losing time?

Where are customers experiencing delays?

What information are you capturing but not using?

Which repetitive tasks could be automated?

Where could employees make better decisions if they had better information?

Once you understand those questions, you can determine where AI genuinely adds value.

Powered by AI. Still powered by people.

Telecommunications has changed enormously over the last few years, and AI will accelerate that change.

Phone calls will increasingly become searchable data. Routine administration will become automated. Communications platforms will become more closely connected to CRM and other business systems. And businesses will have far more intelligence about how, when and why their customers contact them.

That's exciting.

But the technology should make good communication easier,not remove the human element that makes communication valuable in the firstplace.

At Apollo Cloud, that's the balance we're particularly interested in: using increasingly intelligent communications technology to help businesses work more efficiently, while keeping people firmly at the centre of the conversation.

Because the smartest communications technology should help people communicate better.

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Check out our 3CX Expert Series to see some of these applications in action

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