Dec 01, 2022

Cutting Corporate Spending? Don’t Touch Your Contact Center

Worried about the economic slowdown? Most executives are, and they’re going into cost-cutting mode. One area you should not decrease investment in, however, is your contact center. Personal consumption is growing year-over-year, and contact rates are growing right along with it. What happens if your customers try to engage with your business and there’s sloppy service or worse, no one there?

Now’s the time to be investing in technology solutions that can make an immediate impact in your contact center and improve ROI as adoption increases over time. Here’s what you should be looking at:

SPEECH ANALYTICS

Most customers still prefer calling to reach a service rep. Put AI to work by having it analyze customer-agent conversations (recorded after the fact or in real-time) to identify actionable insights. You can better understand the agent experience (where training might be lacking, for example), regulatory compliance (which agents are following or failing to comply), customer complaints (the underlying reasons why customers are unhappy), and more based on what they say and how.

Companies that successfully use speech analytics report cost savings of between 20-30%, CSAT improvements of 10% or more, and stronger sales as well. Overall, the global speech analytics market is slated for 22% year-over-year growth between 2020 and 2026.

CONVERSATIONAL SELF-SERVICE

Take your chat bot or IVR to the next level by allowing it to understand natural speech and engage with customers in two-way conversation. Conversational AI uses machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) to understand not just the words your customers say but the intent and emotion behind them. Conversational AI also instantly addresses questions which, if done well, will transform customer relationships.

As the self-learning system gets smarter with each use, you may even feel confident in transitioning away from manual configuration with “if/then” decision trees. Another huge benefit of conversational self-service is the ability to scale your contact center without having to hire more agents. Remember, though, to always make it easy for your customers to reach a live person. No one wants to get stuck in an infinite dialog loop with a machine.  

CONTACT ROUTING

About 20% of customers who call a contact center are transferred to another agent, sometimes more than once. Research shows that every time they are, their satisfaction drops 12% and your company’s First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate drops 14%. You can apply AI to your routing system so that all incoming queries – via phone, email, messaging, chat, or any other channel – are automatically directed to the right agent or resource based on actionable data insights.

This can be information you have stored based on a customer’s interaction or transaction history or information a customer submits in real-time to help you better understand why they’re reaching out. Again, make sure you don’t trap customers in a conversational loop. Always provide a way out if preferred.

PROCESS AUTOMATION

The life of a contact center agent is as demanding as it gets. You need to be “on” as soon as you start your shift, you hardly ever get a break (there is always a phone call or email to be answered), and you’re constantly fielding negative and/or challenging situations.

If there’s nothing new to learn, you’re essentially doing the same, emotionally taxing work for hours on end. This is a waste of perfectly good time your agents could be using to handle more important matters (up to three hours per shift, research shows), and this monotony is also proven to increase boredom, burnout, and stress. It’s no wonder attrition is so high in contact centers. This entails huge hiring and training costs, not to mention lost efficiency when agents are still in the “get up to speed” period.

Almost 80% of agents polled by Salesforce in 2020 agreed that automating routine tasks would help them complete more complex tasks like tech support and recharge their batteries, so to speak, to handle negative or challenging events. You can also run AI to automatically pull up information for agents like past ticket answers or knowledge base articles they can use to address a question or to send to a customer.

Almost 80% of CX leaders say they plan to increase their investment in contact center AI and automation, specifically to improve customers satisfaction, agent efficiency, and costs. Servion can help you start using contact center AI to immediately improve CX, EX, and operational efficiency. We have helped businesses of every kind reach their goals with these solutions, and budget is always a top consideration.

Check out our success stories and schedule a call with our experts!