Agents Can Focus On Customers Rather Than Notes

Customer experience is of paramount importance to businesses in the current era of digitisation and rapid competition. Needless to say, great customer support and service paves way for a great customer experience, and a contact center plays a critical role in ensuring the same. Therefore, in a bid to serve their consumers effectively, businesses all across the globe have been integrating a myriad of new-age technologies in their contact centers, which enables them to offer customer support in a more streamlined and efficient manner. According to a report, 53% of executives feel that customer experience is the primary reason for companies to implement AI.

Challenge

Now, consider a scenario where a customer phones a contact center to seek support from a service agent. While interacting with the consumer, the agent simultaneously jots down notes and inputs from the client, keys in information and searches through a flurry of information to arrive at a solution. This entire process stretches the wait time for the customer, annoying them and at times, prompting them to look for alternate, next-best solutions. Also, the productivity and experience of a service agent greatly suffer, since he/ she spends a large amount of time performing manual, repetitive and non-performing jobs.

Artificial Intelligence – The Solution

By embedding AI into the voice channel, all customer calls get automatically transcribed/ summarized in real-time, saving the agents from the hassle of manually taking call notes. As the call summary or transcribe automatically gets generated, agents are now free to focus more on the client conversation, and strive to make it more engaging, personalized and impactful. The capabilities of the support staff automatically get fuelled, as they now utilize this saved time towards the betterment of customer service and exploring new business opportunities on the call.

Delving Deep

So, as the customer puts forward a query or complaint, AI furnishes the suggested answers instantly on the system, and the agents instantly know what needs to be answered. It also suggests the next best actions on the screen at the same time, which can be shared with the customer on call. Well, the agent now need not hunt through multiple systems to gather information for the query placed, as he/ she is instantly served with the wealth of knowledge at her fingertips. As AI gets integrated into the voice channel, real-time feedback is also offered to the agents during the call, ie, if they need to make changes to their tone, speed, approach, etc. Thus, on-the-job training is also ensured through the use of superior technology.

Moreover, the post-call actions can also be streamlined, as agents now need not flinch through the manual notes to make sense of the conversation. They can simply delve into the automated call summary post the call to close the query and draw learnings from the same to further enhance their interactions going forward.

In all, the agents’ average handle time for interactions gets reduced dramatically, while the risks of human errors also get eliminated. This improved agent productivity, in turn, drives phenomenal outcomes for the business in the form of reduced costs, happy customers and increased prospects of a brighter business.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, customers are more likely to use speech interfaces to initiate 70% of self-service customer interactions, rising from 40% in 2019.

Thus, greater adoption of AI-powered automation in the customer support domain can make a transformational, unparalleled difference in the realm of customer service. With the soaring volumes of calls and enquiries in the contact center each day, along with evolving consumer preferences and expectations, the use of AI is inevitable in order to ensure a fantastic customer journey.

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