The power of an intent-driven contact center

Technology related to natural language understanding (NLU) and data science has opened the doors for brands to manage their contact centers more efficiently by better understanding their consumers’ needs through intent.

Until today, you were forced to hard code consumer needs by categorizing them using the choices they’ve made from a drop-down menu and then matching their input to agent skills or predefined journeys. Yet, within agent skills, we know that there is a vast array of different inquiries, each with its nuances. Even with the best reporting, analytics, and website trafficking across your website, IVR system, and apps, you are still left guessing what your consumers want.

Conversational commerce — where you enable your consumers to ask questions, purchase products, and get help through their favorite messaging app or voice assistant — gives a far better opportunity for consumers to communicate their needs. With conversational commerce, the journey starts from the consumer’s intent and runs across the entire consumer journey. This lets you understand consumer behavior...at scale...in a way that’s not possible otherwise. The text and utterances in these ongoing conversations are the most essential parts of understanding the consumer’s intent.

What is intent in a contact center?

Whenever a consumer initiates a conversation with your brand, whether it be with a bot or a human agent, the consumer comes with an intent, and their ultimate goal is to fulfill it. A consumer intent can be defined as a consumer's desire to change their state or  relationship with you.

The ability to accurately identify an intent and provide the relevant service for the intent is at the forefront of building an efficient contact center. Through the combination of machine learning and human intelligence, LivePerson offers intent recognition and analysis tools to help you identify and manage consumer needs. Using the consumer’s intent as the driving force, you can better track what is happening in the contact center and make fast progress in improving operations and automating consumer interactions.

Benefits of the intent-driven contact center

• Understand consumer conversations: By implementing real-time intent listening on all communication channels, you gain unparalleled insight into your consumer conversations. Use this info to optimize operations in your contact center.
• Take action on conversational events: Real-time identification of intents enables you to better orchestrate consumer conversations. And real-time inclusion of intent data into dashboards and reports lets you identify emerging trends and make quick data-driven decisions and operational adjustments where needed. 
• Scale and optimize automation efforts: Automation and routing that is built on an understanding of consumer intent is more efficient and enables smarter, more flexible experiences for consumers. Tuning reports based on intents enables you to better prioritize automation investments: Intent by intent, you can drive your automation strategy by exposing the costs, benefits, and risk of automation.
• Improve the quality and efficiency of your agents: Route a conversation to the agent that’s most effective given the intent. And pinpoint training opportunities for handling strategic intents.

Our LivePerson tools

LivePerson’s tools for intent management let you make the consumer’s intent the foundation of your contact center and automation solution. You can define, discover, and tune intents. You can also empower your agent managers and agents to improve the intent detection, thereby optimizing your contact center.

Intents that you discover can be used as “seeds” for new bots, or used to hone in on a specific consumer problem, like a network outage that you want to monitor.

Intents that you’ve defined are visible in real-time and are available across all analytics products, enabling you to understand the quality, goals and outcomes, and costs associated with individual intents.