AI in APAC Contact Centres: 5 Transformative Ways to Improve CX

Barbara Stuart at Enghouse explores five ways artificial intelligence is transforming contact centres in APAC and Oceania and how businesses can thrive in this dynamic landscape.

The bar for customer experience has never been higher in APAC. According to the Salesforce State of Service Report, improving customer experience is a top priority in countries like Australia and India, and remains a key focus across other APAC markets.

Customers today want their issues resolved quickly, in their language, and without repeating themselves. These rising expectations are reshaping the future of customer service in the region.

But here’s the challenge: agent churn is rising, widening the skills gap. Resources are stretched thin, and outdated systems are struggling to keep up with the growing demand for a higher-quality experience.

Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the narrative in customer support. By automating time-consuming tasks, empowering agents with real-time guidance, and breaking language barriers, AI is enhancing efficiency and enabling businesses to deliver seamless, personalized experiences.

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Contact Centres

While as many as 44% of APAC organizations have already embraced artificial intelligence, many are still hesitant, unsure how to fully unlock its potential, or cautious about compliance. If you’re exploring AI adoption, these five transformative ways highlight its value and impact on modern contact centres:

• Streamlining customer interactions with AI-powered chatbots
• Boosting agent efficiency using AI-driven conversation summarisation
• Empowering agents with real-time knowledge and context-aware guidance
• Breaking language barriers with automatic translations
• Ensuring quality and compliance through AI-powered monitoring

Let’s dive in to explore how.

1. Streamlining Customer Interactions with AI-Powered Chatbots

In APAC, where mobile-first consumers dominate, and linguistic diversity is vast, AI-powered chatbots are transforming customer service.

These chatbots handle repetitive tasks, such as answering common queries or assisting with booking requests, and provide 24/7 support.

This reduces call volumes and allows agents to focus on resolving complex issues. For businesses, this means greater efficiency and, for customers – faster resolutions.

With 78% of APAC consumers expecting chatbots to match the expertise of a skilled human agent, businesses must ensure their AI solutions deliver seamless, intelligent, and human-like interactions.

AI-powered chatbots can scale seamlessly across languages and platforms, making them indispensable in a region as diverse as APAC.

Whether assisting a customer in Taiwan via a mobile app or resolving a query in New Zealand through WhatsApp, chatbots deliver fast, reliable, and multilingual support.

2. Boosting Contact Centre Agent Efficiency Using AI-Driven Conversation Summarization

In high-volume environments like India and the Philippines, where contact centres handle thousands of queries daily, after-call work can quickly become overwhelming.

Manually documenting conversations and summarizing interactions is time-consuming and drains agent productivity. It can also be subject to agent bias.

AI-driven summarization tools address this challenge by automatically generating clear, concise summaries after every interaction. These 100% objective summaries capture key details, action points, and context, saving agents valuable time.

The benefits are clear: faster follow-ups, reduced manual workload, and seamless continuity for agents when customers reach out again.

By streamlining post-interaction tasks, AI frees agents to focus on delivering exceptional service and helps contact centres maintain efficiency, even in the busiest markets.

3. Empowering Agents with Real-Time Knowledge and Context-Aware Guidance

In industries like banking and telecommunications, where customer queries are complex, and product portfolios constantly evolve, resolving issues can be time-intensive.

Agents must sift through extensive knowledge bases and undergo prolonged training to grasp intricate details – significantly hindering contact centre efficiency.

By “listening” to conversations in real-time, AI-powered knowledge tools deliver context-aware suggestions directly to agents’ screens, drawing from a centralised, up-to-date knowledge base. This empowers agents to guide customers with accurate, tailored responses instantly.

The benefits are clear: reduced average handling time, improved resolution rates, and shorter training periods. With artificial intelligence, agents no longer need weeks to memorise intricate product details or other business information – they can deliver exceptional customer support quickly and confidently.#

4. Breaking Language Barriers with Automatic Chat Translations

In regions like South and Southeast Asia, linguistic diversity is immense. It’s nearly impossible for contact centers to employ agents proficient in every language that may be needed. Hiring multilingual agents for all major language combinations is neither cost-effective nor practical.

However, AI-powered automatic translation tools are revolutionizing this landscape. These tools allow customers to communicate in their preferred language, translating input into text that agents can easily read and respond to in the language of their preference.

The system then seamlessly translates the response back for the customer, ensuring clear communication. This real-time exchange ensures that language differences never hinder problem resolution.

5. Ensuring Quality and Compliance Through AI-Powered Monitoring

Quality monitoring is essential for achieving contact center excellence, ensuring adherence to diverse regulatory requirements across APAC or in the business, and maintaining consistent service standards.

Traditionally, supervisors performing agent evaluations manually review 1-3% of interactions. With artificial intelligence, this process is transformed in contact centres – allowing 100% of interactions across all channels to be monitored and evaluated automatically and objectively.

For real-time quality management, AI-powered speech analytics monitor live calls for tone, stress, speaking speed, and adherence to scripts.

This is crucial in industries with strict compliance laws, as real-time checks can identify deviations and provide on-screen reminders, ensuring agents follow scripts with suggestions to improve call quality.

As we’ve seen, AI is transforming APAC’s contact centres – from streamlining interactions to ensuring compliance. But amid the excitement about automation, there’s one persistent question: will AI replace human agents?

The rise of generative AI (GenAI), with its conversational abilities, has only added to these concerns. But is there really cause for worry?

Humans + Artificial Intelligence = The Dream Team for Transforming Customer Support

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Enghouse Interactive – View the Original Article

For more information about Enghouse Interactive - visit the Enghouse Interactive Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Enghouse Interactive
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson