It’s no secret that the contact centre industry faces significant challenges. Between the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and ever rising staff turnover and burnout, the contact centre status-quo is looking increasingly unsustainable. In fact, 72% of call centre workers say they are currently facing burnout. This has an inevitable impact on the quality of service received by customers, and 84% of contact centre staff feel pressured by management to deliver quantity over quality.
As a result, contact centres risk being dragged into a spiral of decline with disastrous impacts on customer loyalty and retention. The chances of customers taking their business elsewhere increase when they feel they are being treated more like statistics than human beings. Around 58% of customers are prepared to sever their relationship with a business due to poor customer service.
To accommodate rising demand, contact centres have tried desperately to deflect customer inquiries away from human agents. The use of customer self-service tools has grown substantially in contact centres, from FAQs and knowledge bases to chatbots and visual IVRs. However these investments have produced mixed results. While 34.3% of contact centres use chatbots, only 28% of customers report that these bots are able to resolve their issues. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of customer interactions in contact centres still take place over voice and telephone channels. In total, voice channels still account for 68.5% of all contact centre interactions, with text-based channels such as email and live chat trailing behind at 17.3% and 6.9% respectively.
Rather than burying their customer service number deep within their website and diverting customers into ineffective self-service channels, contact centres need to focus on the fundamentals. Customers are clear about what they want: they want to dial in at a time that suits them, speak to a knowledgeable advisor and get their issue resolved on the first call. This is precisely what the next generation of conversational AI technology aims to deliver.
What is a first call resolution?
Have you ever called customer service with a specific question and been passed around like a baton between departments only to eventually be told that you’ll need to call again next week? What’s worse is that every transfer and redial requires you to wait on hold again and listen repeatedly to the same canned loop of music.
This situation is frustrating for customers, who expect their needs to be prioritised, and it puts extra pressure on contact centre staff who may need to de-escalate a tense situation. Simply put, a ‘first call resolution’ describes a situation where a customer’s call is handled and resolved within a single phone call without the need for any transfers. By resolving more calls in this manner, you can leave customers satisfied and relieve the pressure on your employees.
How can next generation conversational AI help?
The next generation of conversational AI technology uses cutting-edge advances in speech recognition and natural language processing to intelligently engage with customers over the telephone. Unlike chatbots and legacy IVR systems, next gen conversational AI allows customers to express their needs in natural language, using their own words, and to receive a human-like response in return. In short, this technology allows customers to converse with an automated system as they would with a human.
With an unrivalled ability to analyse meaning and intent, action.ai’s next generation conversational AI services are designed to efficiently and accurately get to the core of a customer’s request. This allows them to answer a far greater range of complex queries than past generations of conversational tech. With these systems, every customer call can be seen to be answered by the most knowledgeable and best agent you have.
With these abilities, this new breed of virtual agent is capable of handling a vast percentage of your customer service calls. From a single interface, customers can accomplish an astonishingly wide range of tasks. For instance, in a banking context, customers can use these virtual assistants to check balances, make transfers, update personal details, replace lost cards, report fraud and apply for new products. And in the rare event that these conversational AI powered agents cannot process a request, they can intelligently route calls to the correct customer service department every time.
Putting the customer in the driving seat
The problem with legacy self-service technologies, such as IVR and chatbots, is that they restrict the range of expression permitted to the customer. Relying too heavily on rigid rules and keywords, these technologies only allow for simple use cases. As a result, customers often find themselves misunderstood or deeming the service irrelevant to their needs.
In contrast, with a vastly superior ability to derive meaning from human language, the next generation of conversational AI tech gives customers the power to drive the conversation forward in their words and in their own time. When interactions are led by the customer, rather than by the machine, conversations do not need to follow a script, and questions or queries can be addressed in any order.
To deliver on this vision, these next generation virtual agents are equipped with the ability to understand customers even when they pause, hesitate, or interrupt. Embracing the imperfectness of language is at the heart of this approach, and this next generation technology is even trained to accommodate for background noise. advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition. This allows customer self-service solutions to more closely mirror interactions with a human agent. In short, next generation conversational AI aims to function as a digital employee, with all of the abilities of its human counterparts.
This all builds to offer a distinct competitive advantage to contact centres that embrace automation. Next generation conversational AI agents can answer calls and deliver an expert service 24/7. The contact centre is at a crossroads: the industry must choose between the continued erosion of customer confidence or embrace bold new technological solutions.
