In today’s competitive world, it is becoming increasingly important for enterprises to provide a best-in-class customer experience (CX), not only for retaining the customers but also for differentiating themselves from the competition. Contact center plays a critical role in delivering unmatched customer service and experience and thereby ensuring customer loyalty.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought contact centers to the fore more than ever before. With imposed lockdowns and stay-at-home mandates across the world, contact centers are inundated with unprecedented call volumes. Contact centers are plagued with higher agent attrition due to stressful work environments, lack of proper training, and disparate systems. [box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]So, the big question is – being the first point of contact for the customers, how do you ensure that contact centers can deliver a positive customer experience (CX) and agent experience (AX)?[/box]
The ideal contact center should consistently deliver an excellent experience to customers, on their preferred communication channels, not just the IVR but over email, chat, SMS, or social media too. For decades, contact centers have relied on legacy IVR systems that are often criticized for their confusing menu options – these, in addition to multiple call transfers, often lead to the long wait and hold times for customers to reach the right agent, resulting in a negative customer experience.
Why Conversational AI?
Let’s first try to understand – what is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is technology that enables humans and computers to communicate clearly and effectively through speech or text. This enables machines to process, understand, and respond naturally to text or voice inputs. They use large volumes of data, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to recognize speech and text inputs, understand intent, and decipher their meanings in a way the user can understand. Done well, it helps people interact with complex systems in much faster and easier ways, and helps businesses deliver personalized engagements and support at scale.
Conversational AI-powered intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) are a key part of this evolution. IVAs are automated versions of live contact center agents and are capable of handling conversations with customers intelligently.
[box type=”success” align=”” class=”” width=””]For example, a bank may get hundreds of inquiries in a day from customers for lost cards or application for a loan or airline companies may get bombarded with customers’ calls for rescheduling or cancelling of the flight tickets. Conversational AI-powered virtual assistants can resolve all such customer queries quickly with no wait times.[/box]
Organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat, and/or email inquiries after implementing Virtual Customer Assistants, according to Gartner research.
Transform Customer and Agent Experiences with Conversational AI
As mentioned earlier, global contact centers are under increased pressure, especially after the Covid-19 crisis. With an unprecedented rise in inbound calls and agents not having the right tools during the conversation, Covid-19 has exposed the contact centers’ entire operating model.
[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]According to Pindrop, in certain instances, the overall call volume to contact centers jumped over as much as 600% from normal levels, while agent call capacity dropped by 20%. The outcome of this massive demand and shortage of contact center agents led to an increase in wait times drastically, which further impacted the overall customer experience via contact centers.[/box]
Let’s understand how Conversational AI can help in addressing these challenges:
Intelligently Manage and Automate High Customer Call Volumes
Using Conversational AI, it is easy to categorize the calls based on customers’ past interactions, intent, and context. Hence, a good number of such calls can be routed to intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) that further reduce the overall load on contact center agents and deliver great self-service. In addition to managing queries by IVA, it is crucial to escalate or route customer queries to the right agent the first time understanding the context and importance of the call. Intelligent or Smart routing is a technology that uses conversational AI and applied machine learning to automatically understand a caller’s intent and intelligently route customers to the best available agent with the required skill set.
Kore.ai’s SmartAssist, the world’s first AI-native Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) solution, that provides end-to-end call automation for inbound customer service calls through a combination of conversational IVR, virtual assistants, smart routing and AI-powered agent assist. SmartAssist automates up to 80% of calls and chats without ever reaching a live agent, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and a superior customer experience.
For instance, the world’s leading bank was facing a grim challenge of increased workload on contact center agents as the current IVR system was unable to provide brand-specific responses and was inefficient in handling the inbound queries, resulting in dissatisfaction in customers. The contact center was receiving 15 million calls monthly (175 million calls annually) for partner credit card queries and call volumes were increasing in the range of 10-15% YoY.
The customer support virtual assistant built on Kore.ai experience optimization platform not only managed to provide brand-specific, customized, and caller-specific personalized responses on different channels, including IVR, web, chat, and SMS, but also easily scaled to handle increasing call volumes, without any additional coding. This resulted in reducing the contact center’s IVR volume almost by 18% with a 90% containment rate.
Empower Your Contact Center Agents with AI-enabled Tools
The second major use of Conversational AI in the contact center is to support live agents with relevant tools, systems, and information that agents require to have a smooth and productive call with the customer.
Kore.ai’s SmartAssist empowers agents to provide extraordinary customer experiences with Agent Desktop (or Agent Workspace) and AgentAssist, the contact center agent’s personal virtual assistant. The AI-native virtual assistant harnesses the power of AI, ML, and NLP to find information from knowledge bases and other backend systems and recommend the next best actions that empower agents to deliver phenomenal customer service through every conversation. Also, when needed to engage a live agent on the call, SmartAssist passes on all the call history and caller details making it easier for agents to take the call forward, leading to an increase in CSAT, decrease in agent attrition, shorten average handling time (AHT), and enhance overall customer and agent experience.
Final Thoughts
The shortcomings of traditional contact centers have been obvious for some time now; however, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst, exacerbating these shortcomings so much that they’ve become increasingly detrimental, to industries and businesses. It’s time for contact centers to make the transition to staying ahead of the competition. As we are moving in the post-Covid era, conversational AI will be the next essential tool in giving your contact center an advantage.
Gartner has forecasted that 70% of customer interactions will be handled by conversational AI platforms by 2022.
[author title=”Rajavardhan Nalluri Executive Vice President – Engineering Kore.ai” image=”https://dev.et-insights.com/dev/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Rajavardhan-1.jpeg”] Rajavardhan Nalluri is the Executive Vice President Engineering at Kore.ai. He is the product owner and chief architect of Kore.ai’s experience optimization platform and SmartAssist products. He has rich experience in architecting and building enterprise products from the ground up while working at global organizations like Xerox, Virtusa, and Pega.[/author]
