6 reasons to leverage conversational AI in your contact centre

Your contact centre is a busy place. You might have call queues out the virtual door on any given day, and not every customer query will be worth this long wait time. Some people just need an answer to a straightforward question. Sometimes they might need this question answered after business hours.

In scenarios like these, conversational AI can help customers resolve their issues.

What is conversational AI in contact centres?

The term ‘Conversational AI’ has arisen in much of our work on implementing speech recognition IVRs, speech analytics and chatbots for our customers. It seems it has become an umbrella term for these types of interactions.

It generally encompasses all conversational interactions that start with technology and escalate to a person if needed. AI is quite similar to interacting with a human agent. Of course, in voice interactions, you would notice the difference, but these differences are more subtle over instant messaging.

Conversational AI analyses and understands natural human speech to resolve customer queries. If the issue is beyond the knowledge and programming of the AI, then the system can transfer the caller to a human agent better equipped to solve complex problems. The program can learn and improve over time, remember past interactions, and handle multiple requests simultaneously.

Why leverage conversational AI?

There are many reasons why conversational AI is becoming more popular in contact centres. Here are just a few:

1. 24×7 availability

Your human agents work shifts during regular business hours and need to take breaks. On top of that, keeping your contact centre open 24×7 costs time, money and resources.

Conversational AI in contact centres enables you to be available and support your customers 24×7. By automating customer support via chatbots, you can provide instant assistance to customers even during weekends and late at night.

2. Optimise contact centre costs

Conversational AI drives cost savings by automating tasks usually completed by a human agent, so your agents can focus on more complex tasks. Or, you can reduce the number of overall agents needed to handle your contact centre.

Training your agents takes time and requires them to spend sessions learning the skills to address new issues. Whilst conversational AI also takes time to implement, it learns and improves over time by analysing past customer interactions, so you don’t always need to provide additional updates.

3. Easy communication between customers and businesses

Conversational AI in contact centres simplifies customer communication by using language specific to your industry. This does not mean your AI will send jargon; the bots learn your industry’s language by analysing real-life uses and recorded conversations.

It can also handle multiple requests at one time. Humans are limited to the number of customers they can handle well. To give their best service to a customer, many agents can only focus on one at a time, which often leads to long wait times. Conversational AI can address many customers at once and send through links or resources that your customers need at the same time.

4. Personalised customer experiences

Conversational AI has the potential to deliver personalised customer experiences by learning customer details, recalling previous interactions and remembering preferences. Many people claim they still prefer speaking with a human agent, as they can provide personalisation, but conversational AI takes this to the next level.

By using conversational AI, contact centres can provide a more customised experience for customers, leading to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.

5. Gain behavioural insights about your customers

Conversational AI collects vast amounts of data that you can leverage in your contact centre. When taking a call, your human agents need to focus on listening to the customer and resolving their problem. They do not have time for recording or noting specific data outside the customer’s details.

Conversational AI can record conversations, create transcripts, deliver insights about customer sentiment, etc. They are a tool that contact centre leaders can leverage to understand their customers better. Such information becomes helpful in reporting and driving improvement in your customer service. Additionally, conversational AI can help organisations identify customer service issues early and resolve them before they cause long-term damage.

6. Adding a human touch to your contact centre

Conversational AI in contact centres is very similar to interacting with a contact centre agent. Both involve using natural language to communicate with someone else, and you can use both to resolve customer issues. Conversational AI enhances the human touch in your contact centre. When your agents have a smaller call queue, they can deliver meaningful customer service.

What to consider before implementing conversational AI

In a previous blog, I discussed the benefits that human agents bring to a contact centre and what you must consider before deploying technology such as AI. The great benefits that conversational AI brings to a contact centre are only as good as the solution you deploy as well as the time and resources you have available for the initial implementation. Done well, you’ll be able to ensure that CX does not suffer as a result.

In summary, here is what you need to consider before rolling out conversational AI:

  • Some customers will not want to speak or chat with a bot. If you allow them to choose between instant messaging and calling, you will have happier customers.
  • Carefully consider the role of conversational AI before deploying it and how it will work alongside your human agents. If you do not consider these points, the customer experience may become sterile and dysfunctional.
  • Listen to your customers’ preferences and address those where possible. Your customers may not want to deal with a bot for specific scenarios or they may prefer it in others.

Premier Contact Point’s cloud contact centre solution

Our cloud contact centre solution delivers conversational AI solutions that support your customers and your agents. We provide contact centre training, affordable & innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

Overcoming CX challenges in your business

CX challenges

Think back to your last experience making an online purchase. I trust that in these times, it was not very long ago. I imagine that you experienced a few of these:

  • You heard about the brand or retailer somewhere
  • You received an order confirmation email immediately
  • You had a question about your order and revisited the website or spoke with a customer service agent

Now here’s a question: which of these experiences defines the customer experience? It’s a trick question: the answer is all of the above.

What CX challenges does the typical Australian company face?

The expectations of Australian customers are changing fast, and your customer service arm must be a fast-moving engine to keep up. As our world becomes more connected, your customers expect more touchpoints and real-time interactions with your company. In this landscape, competition for customer retention is fierce.

Fast resolution time is no longer a competitive advantage. Customers expect empathy from your customer service agents, and they want to interact with companies that enact their values, not just shout about them.

For many Australian businesses, this keeping up to maintain a competitive edge can be a significant challenge in this space. If you have a slow response to addressing customer expectations, they can become dissatisfied with your service and their experience and move on to another company.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technology within all of our lives. Customers have increased the frequency with which they leverage messaging apps and social media to interact with your company. Today’s customers may become frustrated if there is only one method of communication with your company. Even if you are not a digital native, you surely enjoy having options when contacting a company. You may become frustrated if they lack a web enquiry form or even an FAQ page, and you have to call to address your simple question.

Moreover, CX challenges for contact centres also exist within the development and implementation of CX initiatives. You need a holistic view of your CX challenges if your initiatives are to succeed.

insights proactive customer service

Source: Gartner.

Where CX initiatives go wrong

Some companies go wrong with their CX initiatives by conflating customer service with customer experience. In reality, customer service is one slice of the customer experience pie. CX covers the gamut of interactions with your customers, from first hearing about you online to the first time they call your customer service team.

Many companies go for surveys to gauge CX in their business. While surveys are one good method of highlighting where you might improve CX, they are not the only and certainly not the best way to pinpoint areas of improvement. Again, it often goes back to customers’ expectations of service in real-time; surveys capture customer data from the past and do not allow you to improve the customer experience as people interact with your company.

There is also a need for companies to address their internal challenges before trying to fix external problems. For example, if customer service representatives are under-trained or overworked, it can affect CX. So, they need to be resolved internally first before focusing on external aspects of CX initiatives.

“A study by Forrester measured the CX maturity of the survey respondents. Only 31% of them qualified as experience-driven businesses.”

Improve your play with a CX maturity model

CX maturity is a model for measuring the capabilities needed to deliver excellent CX and whether your contact centre meets these; it essentially measures how customer-centric you are. A CX maturity model is a sliding scale, and your organisation will place somewhere on this scale based on the measurements you are succeeding in.

It tracks metrics such as the sophistication of your technology, the skills of your agents and how well you implement customer feedback. Furthermore, it can be a great way to benchmark yourself against your competitors and decide where you need to improve your play.

With 73% of customers citing good CX as a factor in their purchasing decisions, it is crucial that you increase your CX maturity. Marking where you sit on the scale can provide you with the information to target potential areas for improving customer satisfaction and implement them across your organisation.

We have developed our own CX Maturity Assessment to help you get started in this process.
PCP CX Maturity Level Banner

Strategies to overcome CX challenges

Once you have your CX maturity rating, you can leverage some of the strategies below to increase it.

1. Understand your customer base

Your customers will have differences in culture, generational attitudes, economic factors and geographic location, all of which you should consider if your team is to deliver CX with empathy. Your customers will have some of these metrics in common so you can create segmented lists for different types of customers.

2. Capture real-time customer feedback

Many CX challenges, such as unhappy customers and high turnover, can arise from a lack of real-time feedback.

Effective contact centres offer great service and respond to customers’ requests quickly and efficiently – but the contact centre is only as good as the agents responding. So, contact centres need to accurately capture real-time feedback to ensure they give the customer their best.

Capturing real-time customer feedback also helps you enhance training programs, so new hires have a better chance of learning and improving from day one.

3. Regularly gather employee feedback too

Employees are your most valuable asset when it comes to contact centre operations. It is seldom enough to gather their opinions via a yearly review, so you should consider regularly gathering their feedback to gather their ideas on where CX could improve. Your agents are, after all, the ones interacting with customers every day.

4. Create a clear customer experience vision

A successful CX initiative builds on a clear, future-facing vision that guides your business and your team in the right direction. Remember, your customers love companies that stick to their values and deliver on them.

You might ask:

  • Is your vision clear?
  • Does everyone in your contact centre understand how they contribute towards delivering that customer experience vision?
  • What would happen if all of your contact centres understood their role in delivering the overall customer experience strategy.

Remember: Your vision should be something your agents can realistically stick to, and it should be specific.

5. Measure the ROI of your improved customer experience

One of the most important reasons for measuring ROI is to gauge the impact of your CX initiatives. By measuring ROI, you can designate whether particular CX strategies are working and where you might need to place more focus.

There are different ways you can measure your contact centre. For example, you might measure contact centre effectiveness by assessing how well agents communicate with customers and how satisfied customers are at the call’s end. You can also measure contact centre efficiency by assessing how long it took to answer a call during peak periods.

Overcome CX challenges with Premier Contact Point

We can help you measure your CX maturity, find strategies for improving it, and implement the solutions you need to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Our solutions encompass real-time customer reporting, seamless connections between touchpoints, quality assurance, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can complete our CX Maturity Assessment to receive a report with actionable insights for improving CX.

Call queue management methods to reduce average wait time

Call queue management

What happens when you have an issue as a consumer? You like to check the company’s website and FAQs page for a quick resolution. Perhaps their FAQs page is just a laundry list of technical codes, and you cannot find the solution to your issue. Their website has no chat function, or they are offline, or worse still they appear online but nobody responds to your request for help. You then have to call up and work through an interactive voice response menu, before staying on hold for 10 or 20 or 30 minutes (sometimes over an hour) while listening to elevator music. I am sure you do not enjoy this experience.

The truth is, neither do your customers. 

Call centre waiting times seem to be getting longer and longer – averaging between eight minutes to over an hour – and Australian consumers are becoming increasingly frustrated. 

Seven ways to improve call queue management

There are several things beyond the obvious ‘hire more staff’ solution for reducing call wait times. When call centres want to minimise wait times, they can start by improving call queue management, which manages queues to reduce average wait time across the call centre.

 

1. Create workflows for predictable requests

Self-service workflows are one method of call queue management that can personalise customer interactions at scale and deliver improved customer experience (CX), whilst reducing the number of avoidable calls. When developing self-service workflows, you should begin by analysing frequent queries from customers and create workflows that guide them effortlessly through to the resolution of their call.  

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) workflows are configured to play pre-recorded questions and messages which guides callers to provide responses via their telephone keypad or simply by speaking. IVR’s can also integrate with back office applications like CRMs to easily provide callers with the information they are looking for.

Visual IVR leverages the unique capabilities of smartphones without the caller being required to download an app from an app store. Visual IVR leverages the standard functionality of smartphones by combining voice, SMS and browser applications to create personalised self-service workflows, which avoids the need to connect the caller to an agent.

 

2. Last agent routing

Also known as agent affinity, last agent routing automatically routes callers to the agent that last handled their call. Agents receive a screenpop showing them the customer’s name and other vital information like their entire contact history with the organisation, previous actions taken and call outcomes. Agent affinity delights customers by significantly reducing their effort to be connected with the person best placed to handle their query. It also improves the performance of call centres by reducing average handling times, which in turn reduces average queue wait times.

 

3. Reduce call centre waiting times by offering chat

Call centres are typically busy environments, so call queue management is essential to keep wait times minimal. Modern consumers respond well to web chat and have come to expect it. A chat session can take half the time of a call, an agent can manage it from anywhere, and multiple chats can occur simultaneously.

Some call centre managers now opt for chatbot technology as a way to improve digital queue management. Chatbots, when leveraged for web chat, can provide instant responses and round-the-clock service. Even when real-life agents are offline, customers will seldom feel like they are waiting for extended periods.

 

4.  Implement overflow queueing to reduce call centre wait times

Your company may have more than one call centre across a region. Overflow queuing redirects customers contacting the busy call centre to an available agent from another call centre. Thus, there would not be any significant increase in average wait time for callers if one call centre does not have enough agents on hand.

Further to redirecting callers, proactive communication and setting expectations are crucial to reducing frustration and anger.  Explain that you have a high level of activity at present and give customers the option to wait or request a callback. The callback option allows callers to enter their contact information, retain their place in the queue and receive a call from an agent when they reach the first position.

 

5. Create a business continuity plan

Call centres need a business continuity plan in case of disaster or disruption – including power fluctuations, facility issues, or security-related incidents. Create a business continuity plan that you can implement within minutes during emergencies. You should develop your plan with input from call centre team leaders and communications executives. Provide all customer-facing staff with detailed training on implementing the plan, with clear directions on who does what and when.

Your call centre technology solution should facilitate access from any location and from any device with internet connection and a web browser and should include guidelines for call queue management. You might record an event-related message to play for callers upon connection, update your website and social media, or provide customers with alternative options, like requesting a callback.

 

6. Write FAQs in plain English

A FAQs page is an excellent way to minimise the amount of traffic to your call centre. To truly minimise traffic, you need all public documentation – like FAQs, technical manuals, forms, conditions, instructions – in clear, unambiguous English (and other languages).

It is wise to assume that the person reading your FAQ page does not have a technical background. Write your page in plain English to help customers understand the terminology and prevent confusion about the product. If the customer understands what they are talking about in plain terms, it makes it easier for them to relay the problem to an agent should they need to get on a call.

 

7. Match peaks and troughs to reduce call centre wait times

Rostering teams to meet peaks and troughs in call centre traffic can involve many hours of analysis and juggling rosters. Call centres also need to manage hours of operation so that call queues do not become overloaded at peak hours or empty during off-peak hours. You can review historical data to pinpoint trends in peak times; call traffic might increase during holiday periods or the end of the financial year, it all depends on your industry.

A workforce optimisation solution can enhance call queue management by balancing contact volumes, staff availability, rosters, performance KPIs and budgets whilst consistently delivering optimal CX. Overall, it saves a lot of time and money.

How Premier Contact Point can enhance call queue management

Our solution can enhance call queue management to reduce wait times across your call centre. We deliver affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, overflow queues, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can get in touch with us if you would like to book a demo of these features and see how we can help you reduce wait times across your call centre.