Be it seeking seamless ways to communicate with businesses to quicker approaches to problem-solving— New-age customers want and demand something more. Traditional contact center interactive voice response ( IVR) systems make it simpler than ever to provide telephone-based self-service to consumers. Still, they also end up becoming the escalation mechanism of preference for relaying complicated problems, conflicts, and customer frustration. Moreover, conventional touch-tone and dialog-based IVR systems with complicated and long-winded menu trees usually struggle to satisfy the needs of knowledgeable consumers-often ending up disappointing them more than offering any assistance.
It leads to more calls being diverted to the human agent and higher costs of contact centers— despite being mobilized for the exact opposite reason.
To complicate the matters further, social media gives tremendous power to individual opinions and perceptions to influence others' buying decisions – so that a single negative experience can affect thousands, or even millions, of current and future customers. In short, your customer service and experience can either make or mar you.
Conversational IVR: The future of the contact center
Conversational AI-based IVR replaces Complex menu mazes and other time-wasting limitations with NLP, machine learning, and other types of intelligence. It helps the framework to grasp the nature and meaning of spoken queries, enabling more responsive and free-form customer interactions. Users can communicate with your device through conversational IVR, using their voice and words that come effortlessly to them, without being bound to a rigid script.
Contrary to the menu-driven engagements, consumers get simple, tailored, and frustration-free self-service that rarely needs a human agent, enabling you to achieve automation, minimize turnover, optimize labor efficiency, and save money.
Considering COVID-19's long-running possibility, contact centers are up for another tough challenge caused by demand spikes and decline in agents' availability. Here's how the implementation of Conversational AI can help to turn the tables around.
AI deployment
Your very first line of defense can be voice-based conversational AI — or a virtual assistant that provides real, human-like interactions over the phone. Bots offer an effective way of solving repetitive requests—typically, the calls that arise during peak times.
Advancing human agents
Taking away mundane tasks from human agents would give them more resources, time, and flexibility to concentrate on more nuanced customer service issues and be more inventive while doing so.
Using virtual assistants to take on your transactional calls would open up a window for brand-consumer experiences of greater value. ATMs have done the same for the banking sector. They are now responsible for performing the most tedious activities such as checking deposits and cash distribution, enabling human agents to provide higher-quality services such as financial planning and management strategies.
Enhancing assistance with greater insight
With voice-based conversational AI deployment, Contact centers can collect more data and insight through each consumer engagement. Human agents can concentrate on the caller and not taking notes; virtual assistants can do both. They can record everything regularly, adding up to quickly searchable and analyzable call transcripts. It gives businesses full insight into why do people call, how they need support, and what types of solutions work best.
To know more about the conversational AI and its deployment mechanisms at Contact centers, visit Surbo.
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