How AI is Transforming Outbound Call Centers The Call Center industry is on fire. With both changes to long-term foundational technologies and sudden creation of new ones, the ever-competitive world of outbound call centers is changing at a pace that was hard to imagine even a year ago. Dmitri Lepikhov, CEO of the telephony company MightyCall, has an opinion about the future of the industry.
By Joe Richmond
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The Call Center industry is on fire. With both changes to long-term foundational technologies and sudden creation of new ones, the ever-competitive world of outbound call centers is changing at a pace that was hard to imagine even a year ago. Dmitri Lepikhov, CEO of the telephony company MightyCall, has an opinion about the future of the industry.
AI is the secret sauce to supercharging call centers
As the CEO of a major call center service provider, Lepikhov understands the frustrations that call center managers encounter on a daily basis. If you run a call center using older technologies, your team spends half the day dialing numbers, waiting through tones, and reaching voicemails.
But new technologies allow a vastly different picture to emerge. Imagine this instead: an AI-powered system that skips all the busywork, connecting your agents only to people who are ready to talk.
That's the power of predictive dialers.
And it doesn't stop there. What if an AI agent could handle all the boring, repetitive stuff: checking stock levels, confirming insurance details, or even reminding someone about a doctor's appointment? Your human agents would be free to focus on what they do best: building relationships, solving problems, and closing deals.
Two pieces of tech Lepikhov considers as examples of why companies are quickly jumping on the AI bandwagon:
1. Predictive Dialers
These tools eliminate wasted time. Agents don't manually dial numbers, wait through busy signals, or deal with voicemail greetings. Instead, they are instantly connected to customers who are ready to talk. As a result, you can make more calls per hour, increase customer engagement, and get higher sales conversions & more satisfied customers.
2. Voice AI agents for routine tasks
AI-powered voice agents can handle mundane, repetitive tasks that do not require human judgment or empathy. These tasks often include checking data, processing codes, or confirming information.
Think of a medical call center. Its job can be to verify insurance coverage by processing procedure codes and retrieving answers. It might need to confirm stock adequacy by reviewing item codes and delivery schedules. Or it might just need to remind customers of their appointments. None of these routine operations require human judgment or empathy. They are purely data- and information-based. And all of these will be done by AI in the coming years.
Human-to-human interaction
This is not to say humans will be eliminated from the equation, Lepikhov stresses - far from it. There are lots of business activities that require trust, judgement, compassion, and general common sense. In these cases, human-to-human interactions simply can't be replaced.
People like to buy from other people and build relationships. When dealing with these cases at scale, the predictive dialer helps the call center to reach the zenith of its capabilities.
The modern call center fuses the two aforementioned technologies together. Live human agents go straight to the customer, or prospect, maximizing their productivity. Whereas AI agents do routine work.
On resistance to implementation
"The resistance melts when productivity soars," Lepikhov explains. "At first, employees and even leadership fear the unknown. But when they see how it actually frees up their time for meaningful tasks while making the company 10 times more efficient, the resistance just vanishes."
On customer perspective
Lepikhov points out that customers are more ready than one might think to embrace AI because it enhances their experience. Nobody likes being put on hold or repeating their story to three different people. AI solves this by reducing wait times and remembering every detail of your last interaction.
A well implemented predictive dialer ensures calls are connected seamlessly, reducing the dreaded "Please hold" moments to less than 1% of all conversations.
A proper AI agent can effortlessly reschedule the call back to a customer at a more convenient time upon a customer's request, and a smart dialer will call at that precise time - connecting this customer to an artificial or a human agent, depending on the situation.
Customers are already embracing AI, even if they don't realize it, Lepikhov believes. "They just want quick, consistent, and reliable service, and AI delivers exactly that."
The Future is Already Here
In an era of testing the boundaries of efficiency, there is a clear path for Call Centers to become at least 10x more productive. Lepikhov believes that within a few years, the majority of call centers will be running on AI: "Routine tasks will be done with unmatched efficiency. The leaders will be those who figure out how to balance automation with the human touch."
