Contact Center Bots Archives - BotCore

9 Contact Center Trends For 2021

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 10:50:00 +0000

9 Contact Center Trends for 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the entire business landscape. As customer behavior shifted from physical interactions to contactless digital transactions, businesses found themselves unable to cater to the emerging support and customer service needs.

Contact centers, particularly those in the health care, travel, government, and financial services industries, were overly burdened with inquiries from thousands of anxious callers seeking information and comfort. While remote employees struggled to balance work and home life, the contact centers witnessed significant absenteeism as workers tended to family commitments or lacked the necessary knowledge and infrastructure to operate from home.

Albeit measures to improve contact center performance, including setting up infrastructure, reskilling, and training agents to work in a distributed environment, many key performance indicators were negatively impacted –

Average handling time (AHT) increased from 3-6 minutes to more than 10;
First call resolution rates fell as agents weren’t able to address all queries with the new workflow requirements;
Transfer rates increased; so did average queue time (AQT);
As AQT increased, call abandonment rates rose to 10% from a targeted 2-5%.

Consequently, contact centers focussed on deploying technologies, like automation, artificial intelligence, and cloud technology, that helped them gain efficiency and cost-saving while redefining customer and employee experiences.

Here we present the top 9 contact center trends for 2021 to build agile, scalable, and resilient contact center operations.

1. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

In 2021, Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) will become a preferred operating model for contact centers around the globe. In the new normal, CCaaS will enable remote working for agents by offering a future-proof, cost-effective, and secure cloud environment for contact center deployment.

Additionally, AI will augment CCaaS platforms, empowering staff with real-time actionable insights and improved decision-making. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis accelerated the need for alternate support channels; and AI chatbots will help provide quick and interactive engagement on various customer touch points, freeing up human agents to focus on other critical tasks.

Therefore, in the post-COVID era, organizations, small or large, will replace traditional on-premise infrastructure (brick-and-mortar structures) with scalable cloud contact centers for providing seamless omnichannel customer support.

2. Remote work

Talkdesk, in its survey, concluded, 93% of leaders believed their contact centers would be hybrid or fully remote post-COVID.

The rapid technological transformations that contact centers underwent to serve customers better during the pandemic won’t disappear in a jiffy. Many companies have found operational benefits in continuing to function remotely.

The same goes for millions of people who have reaped the advantages and adjusted to remote working life, and given a choice; it is unlikely they would want to return to the workplace.

Therefore, investments in making a shift to remote work will translate into enhanced data security, increased customer analytics, and improved workforce management for contact centers. At the same time, customers will enjoy the benefits of a happy and productive contact center staff.

3. Omnichannel communication

Amidst the uncertainty and panic surrounding the pandemic and lack of face-to-face interactions, customers called up contact centers to receive support on various issues. While phones alone could not handle the influx of customer demand, organizations needed more avenues to deal with the unprecedented pressure.

Alongside voice and email, organizations invested in other channels, including instant messaging apps, SMS, and social media, integrated with AI chatbots. By establishing omnichannel chatbot support, organizations were able to provide real-time customer service, economically, and at scale.

However, providing consistent customer support across all avenues requires cohesive backend integration and channel blending, and 2021 will be a year where brands will undergo such integrations to reach where their customers want them to be.

At Acuvate, we help clients build AI-enabled omnichannel chatbots with our low-code bot building platform, BotCore, to provide customers uniform support and easy access to information across a multitude of customer channels. With advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities, our bots can learn from past conversations and retain original context, so customers can switch channels without the need to start the interaction from scratch.

4. Building contact center resiliency

Having witnessed and experienced the massive upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 will also be the year when contact centers will increase expenditure on building a resilient, agile, and future-proof operating model, which would mean –

Adopting scalable and flexible technology transformations and integrations;
Improving remote workforce management;
Developing agent skills so they can deliver personalized, omnichannel support;
Leveraging AI and analytics to create valuable, long-term relationships with customers.

5. RPA bots

The integration of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with AI chatbots to solve significant operational issues and automate contact center processes end-to-end will be a major trend in 2021.

An RPA powered chatbot can integrate with multiple, siloed back-end enterprise systems to retrieve information and manage more complex customer requests and queries at scale.

With RPA, chatbots will not only handle conversations and find information but also perform transactions on users’ behalf.

At Acuvate, we’re helping clients achieve this by integrating Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate.

Learn More: Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

6. AI and analytics

As more and more customers make a permanent shift to digital channels, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a significant role in contact centers by complementing human effort. Organizations will leverage AI and analytics to optimize operations and predict customer needs in the following manner –

Providing useful data insights to help serve customers better;
Equipping support agents with backend customer information so that they can provide more efficient service during customer interactions;
Improving accessibility to self-service channels for routine queries while allowing customers to connect with human agents when needed;
Capitalizing data analytics tools to anticipate future customer needs so the right agents can reach out to them in advance;

As AI and analytics take up routine process optimization, the contact center manager’s responsibilities will focus more on enhancing HR and people management.

7. Conversational IVR

Having established dominance amidst the pandemic as the channel-of-choice in solving customer issues, IVR continues to have a stronghold in contact center operations. Improved customer service in 2021 would mean investing in better IVR functionality to tackle challenges related to traditional IVR, like navigating various menus and facing longer wait times before reaching the right agent.

With the increased adoption of IVR, customers expect a speedy resolution of their queries, which will involve a shift towards conversational IVR services.

Conversational IVR leverages text-to-speech technology in bots to provide engaging, accurate, and personalized human-like voice support. For example, the next time you want to book a flight, just call up support and say, “I want to book a flight to New York.” So, instead of going through the multiple IVR options, the bot will ask you for other details, including date of journey, time of the flight, etc., and book the available flight of your choice, or directly route you to the concerned booking agent.

Thus, conversational IVR will redefine customer experiences in 2021 by making quick and interactive engagement available to users.

At Acuvate, we help brands develop a voice of their own and deliver exceptional customer support by converting text to lifelike speech with Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services.

Learn More: Conversational IVR: The what, why and how

8. Data Security

As contact center operations go digital, leaders will invest more money in ensuring information security and compliance with data privacy rules.

To retain customer faith in digital channels in 2021, organizations must place utmost emphasis on ensuring customer data isn’t compromised through various measures, like mandating remote login from a secure VPN. Automating IT security through AI is another method to reduce data-protection risks and prepare contact centers for a post-COVID era.

9. Empathy

As uncertainty loomed during the pandemic, contact center agents worked 24X7 to help customers with critical inquiries and provide emotional support.

Contact center agents are responding with genuine empathy and care since they feel as worried and concerned as their customers do about this pandemic and its impact on everyone’s lives. That ‘I really know how you feel’ awareness will stick with them hereafter.
Bill Quiseng, CX Speaker & Consultant

At the same time, customers were also considerate about the longer than before waiting times. And as contact centers redefine practices, such mutual empathy is expected to continue in 2021 as well.

Getting ready for the future!

Contact centers are at the heart of every customer-serving enterprise. In an increasingly virtual world, developing highly personalized, valuable relationships with customers requires organizations to augment human interactions with technology.

The trends highlighted above will pave the way for next-gen contact centers. And, as you explore them, do have a look at our digital solutions, including our enterprise chatbot builder platform (BotCore), our Microsoft-powered RPA-bot integration, and advanced AI and analytics technologies that can reshape your contact centers in 2021 and beyond.

For more information, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our technology experts.

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation.

The post 9 Contact Center Trends For 2021 appeared first on BotCore.

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:31:00 +0000

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

2020 is the year of customer service transformation. The unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a wave of uncertainty and panic among consumers.

Customers’ natural tendency to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels in times of crisis led to unprecedented call volumes and put tremendous pressure on traditional IVR systems, support agents, and their ability to respond and address all queries. This led to longer than usual wait-times, with calls dropping automatically after a few minutes, thus increasing customers’ frustration levels. Moreover, most customers were unwilling to go through extensive IVR menus and frequent agent transfers or repeatedly ask the same query to get the right support.

Additionally, voice-based channels are not only difficult to scale but are costly too, as traditional voice interaction, on average, costs $15 per exchange. Yet, voice as a medium to provide customer support isn’t going anywhere but is undergoing a massive change with the emergence of AI-powered voice bots.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.

So, let’s explore what voice bots are and why they are the future of contact center customer service.

What are voice bots?

A voice bot is a computer program that understands spoken natural language and uses synthesised voice to converse with people. AI-powered speech recognition technology enables voice bots to recognize users’ spoken queries and respond to inquiries using text or voice.

In other words, voice bots are computers that can speak with people.

These bots are a scalable way to provide engaging, personalized, and interactive human-like support and ensure speedy resolution for your customers. Moreover, they ease the burden of human agents, allowing them to focus on more productive, higher-value work and pressing customer issues.

For example, you want to book a flight. Now, instead of going through the myriad of traditional IVR options, simply call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a flight to New York.” The bot will ask you for other details, including the date of the journey, preferred departure time, and book for you the flight of your choice, or directly route you to the right agent, saving you the long and tiresome drill of a legacy IVR system.

Hence, voice bots shall pave the way for interactive and wholesome conversational IVR in the contact centers.

Essential capabilities of a voice bot

Here, we list down the core capabilities that a voice bot should have to deliver better conversational experiences.

1. Understand the ‘intent’

Voice bots leverage natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the semantics of the human language, including grammar, synonyms, canonical word forms, and slang.

Customers aren’t always literal in what they utter. NLP helps extract the intent behind user utterance and helps voice bots understand the meaning behind the words. For example, when a customer says phrases like “sure” or “why not,” the bot must be able to understand that they are most probably saying “yes.”

Hence, intent analysis is one of the most significant capabilities of a voice bot.

2. Allow a barge-in

The ability to pause, listen, and speak accordingly, whenever a customer interrupts an ongoing interaction saying, “Sorry, but that’s not what I’m looking for” or “no, I am not interested in this product,” is one of the best features of a smart AI-enabled voice bot.

3. Streaming recognition

Speedy and efficient resolution is essential for every business. Therefore, a bot must be able to interpret and act at the same pace at which the customer speaks. Slow responses and lags may hamper the reputation of a business.

4. Personalization

When a customer calls a business, they are looking for a fast response. For instance, after reaching a contact center, if customers need to identify themselves through details like account number, id, address, etc., it can really add to their frustration levels.

Therefore, optimal integration with the support desk database is vital for the bot to greet the caller by name, know caller history, identify the likely reason for the call based on past interactions and customer persona, and tailor suggestions based on the customer knowledge.

5. Handover to a live agent

At any point during the conversation, if the bot is unable to answer the user issue or if the customer asks for an agent handover, the bot must be capable of transferring the call to the right human agent or subject matter expert.

6. Keep Learning

An AI-powered voice bot must never stop learning. It should leverage its machine learning capabilities to improve accuracy and continuously learn from past interactions.

Advantages of voice bots

With voice bots, you can reap the following benefits –

1. Provide fast resolution to customers

Research by Harvard Business Review has concluded Customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

Therefore, a customer complaint handled quickly can turn into a potential opportunity for earning more profit. Traditional IVRs force customers to go through multiple options and menus, wait for the next available agent, or try again during regular business hours. However, voice bots offer instant resolution with 24X7 support, even scheduling agent call-backs if needed.

2. Scale up your voice operations and reduce costs

A single voice bot can engage with thousands of customers at the same time and provide personalized support to each user. Moreover, by offloading mundane, repetitive tasks from human agents, contact centers can manage many more support issues than otherwise possible and dramatically reduce costs.

3. Reduce transaction times

When it comes to speed, voice is any day faster and more customer-friendly than typing. Moreover, specific tasks, such as purchases, bookings, and cancellations, can be performed more quickly by bots than humans, hence reducing the overall transaction times.

4. Humanize support staff

Repetitive tasks, the mundane nature of everyday operations, and the pressure to close as many tickets as possible often sap the humanity out of support center agents. With bots taking over most of the repetitive tasks and easing the workload of contact center staff, your support staff can take out the time to deliver human connection whenever needed.

5. Create sales opportunities

Voice bots continuously learn from past interactions and are equipped with natural language understanding (NLU) and synthesis; they can deduce what the customer really means and deliver more contextual, meaningful, and human-like conversations and provide personalized product recommendations. Such interactive voice engagements create opportunities for new sales.

Voice bots - The future of contact center customer service

Voice bots are indeed the future of contact center customer engagement. They lead to an enormous reduction in cost by taking over the resolution of common and repetitive queries at scale.

Moreover, they make personalized recommendations based on the customers’ preferences and previous purchases and enhance revenue through cross-selling and upselling.

The speed, accuracy, and 24X7 availability of voice bots improve first call resolution rates and positively impact customer experience.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop a voice of their own with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore, supporting them in delivering exceptional customer support by converting text to lifelike speech using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services.

The post Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots And Human Agents Together Will Transform Contact Centers

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 08:55:00 +0000

How Chatbots And Human Agents Together Will Transform Contact Centers

As chatbots are gaining traction, their various benefits for customer service are being extolled by business leaders across the globe. However, we are still not at a point wherein human intervention in customer service processes can be completely eliminated. In such a scenario, how can chatbots be used to seamlessly work with human agents to streamline and transform customer contact centers?

The Role Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Good customer service is such an important aspect for the success of business today that companies often go to great lengths to establish the most efficient and effective customer contact centers. While contact centers were traditionally driven by human agents trained to effectively handle customer queries and grievances, automation and AI technologies are also making their way to the table. For most companies with a focus on automating and streamlining a part of the customer service process, chatbots are already on the radar.

Chatbots are essentially conversational AI softwares that use Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the ‘intent’ behind a question and respond back with the most appropriate answer. According to Gartner Inc, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistants (VCA) or chatbot technology across all engagement channels by the year 2020. This number has gone up drastically from less than 2 percent in 2017.

Before discussing how a co-existential model of humans and chatbots can be leveraged in a contact center, it’s important to understand the different capabilities and benefits of a chatbot.

The Benefits Of Using Chatbots In Contact Centers

Chatbots today can simulate human-like conversation and resolve simple and many complex customer issues. Especially chatbots can easily take over handling simple tasks such as sending an instant response to a customer eg: ‘Okay, we will look into it.’, or answering Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ), from human agents. This greatly improves agent productivity as usually most customer service questions are low-level and repetitive.

Responding immediately is a very important determinant for customer satisfaction. In this regard, chatbots help companies garner satisfaction and trust from their customers.

Another benefit of using chatbots is that they can be used to handle customer care at odd hours of the night. Unlike for humans, time is not a parameter applicable to chatbots.

If you were to look at the benefits of using chatbots in contact centers, the most important factor is the reduction in cost. In fact, CNBC reports that chatbots are expected to cut down business costs by as much as $8 billion by the year 2022. Some of the economical benefits of adopting chatbots for customer service are:

Reduced Labour Costs – Organizations that have integrated chatbots as a first line of service in their customer service team have seen a considerable reduction in labour costs. While a human chat agent can effectively chat with about three customers at once, efficient chatbots can handle an unlimited number of interactions simultaneously. This means that a chatbot could be employed to handle as many customer concerns as possible, transferring the service process to a human agent only in case of very complex queries.
24/7 Presence – Customers today are extremely demanding due to which it is a good idea for companies to have round-the-clock customer care. Because let’s face it, customers pay for more than just the product. They pay for good service too. But in order to employ human agents for 24/7 service, the cost required is huge. So what can a company do to provide good customer service WHILE cutting down on costs? Use a chatbot. Using chatbots to handle after-hour queries with an option to escalate to a human agent only when required, is practical. This way, customers trying to establish contact do not feel deprived either. The company too is happy as no additional resources need to be hired.
And the greatest thing about chatbots is that unlike humans they don’t charge by the hour. Whether you have implemented a chatbot for 9 hours in a day or 24, it costs the same.
Lower Training Costs – Customer care agents need constant training in order to keep them updated with ever-evolving products and processes. Additionally, every new hire also needs to be thoroughly trained. But the cost of training these resources can quickly add up and get out of hand. Chatbots on the other hand are capable of constant learning. Even in case of newer data, an update can be made to the centralized chatbot builder platform and revision cascades to the overall chatbot operation. They also pick up on customer behaviour patterns to deduce what the best response to specific questions might be.

According to Gene Alvarez, Managing Vice President at Gartner, more than half of the global organizations have already invested in automated solutions such as chatbots for customer care, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service. Gartner research also reports that organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing an automated solution such as a chatbot. According to the Aspect Consumer Experience Index, 70 percent of millennials report positive experiences with chatbots, and many prefer chatbots for the convenience and immediate gratification. Along with increased customer satisfaction, a 33 percent saving per voice engagement has also been noted.

When Is Agent Intervention Needed?

While chatbots can seamlessly handle simple queries and to an extent complex queries as well, there many arise situations where the issue can be resolved only by agents.

This is where human intervention becomes essential.

Imagine a scenario where a customer is in distress and needs immediate help with something. While a human agent can understand their emotion and urgency, a chatbot cannot.

Another scenario could be during a new product/service launch. Let’s say your company has launched a new product/service. There’ll be a spike in help requests from customers who’re still trying to figure it out. If your existing chatbot is not trained to answer these new types of questions, agent intervention will be required.

There could also be situations where a customer is trying to solve a rare problem personalized to him/her and reaches out for help. In such cases chatbots may not always provide the best answer.

Human Agents And Chatbots - A Coexistence Model

Essentially, organizations must look at fostering a coexistence model with chatbots working in line with human agents and augmenting productivity. Chatbots can be used as the first line of agents to the existing customer service process and to fulfill basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user data, answering repetitive questions, sending relevant information and taking down the details related to customer concerns.

In case of an escalation or upon a customer’s request, the chatbot can also handover the conversation to a live agent. This concept is called “agent handoff”. Ideally any customer service chatbot should also provide an option to switch to live chat. It should also be intelligent enough to understand the context of the conversation and suggest customers to chat with a human agent.

In a nutshell, here are a few situations a chatbot should transfer the conversation to an agent:

Customer directly requests to chat with a agent
Critical and time-sensitive issues
Complex conversations: The bot should be intelligent enough to understand it can’t provide the right answer
User’s sentiment: If the customer sounds frustrated or angry

Learn more: Human Hand-Off In Service Desk Bots

This process not just ensures a quick response time from the customer care team to the concerned customer, but also makes the work of human agents much simpler. While quick response and efficiency is a chatbot’s USP, human agents can bank on their emotional quotient to win customer trust.

Human Agents Training Virtual Customer Assistants

Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture
Gartner

An AI system needs a human-in-the-loop feedback system to constantly learn and become intelligent. And throughout its lifecycle, an AI system interacts with different types of people who influence its intelligence. In the case of consumer-facing chatbot, even the smallest customer’s feedback like “click here if you are satisfied with the solution” can help improve the machine learning algorithm of chatbots. In addition to consumer training, contact center agents can also classify outliers and exceptions and help modify the chatbot training data and behaviour accordingly.

Educate Your Agents About Chatbots

A concern about chatbot implementation among your agents is the perceived threat they pose to their employment. Although we are still a far way off from completely doing away with human staff in contact centers, the existing workforce feels threatened. This is a demotivating factor for the employees, and something that the organizations need to factor in when trying to bring in chatbots.

While most contact center staff may look at chatbots as their competition, it is not the case.

Educate your agents about how chatbots can solve low-value customer issues and make their work more productive and streamlined. Demonstrate the capabilities of the chatbot so they can better understand its functioning.

The Future

Sooner or later, the implementation of customer service chatbots will become imperative. Chatbot adoption can help organizations provide round the clock service to its customers, partly reducing the workload on its human customer care agents while cutting down on staffing costs. Essentially, chatbots can help organizations provide better customer care with fewer resources.

Although we cannot completely eliminate the human touch from customer service, chatbots can be used to cut down on human intervention as much as possible. This can be achieved by using chatbots to manage a larger volume of customer needs while reserving only the most complicated issues for human agents.

Knowing the potential that chatbots today possess, the question begs to be asked; Can chatbots completely replace human customer service? At this point, no. But of course, chatbots do have a bright future, with more and more organizations implementing them in multi-operational capabilities. Although they might not oust the human workforce in contact centers, chatbots sure do reduce operational costs and improve process efficiencies, making them a valuable addition.

Even at the most rudimentary level, contact centers that embrace the coexistence of chatbots and human agents, will surely deliver superior customer service.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore).

Additional Reading:

The post How Chatbots And Human Agents Together Will Transform Contact Centers appeared first on BotCore.

7 Ways To Improve FCR At Your Contact Center

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 10 May 2019 12:28:00 +0000

7 Ways To Improve FCR At Your Contact Center

First Call Resolution (FCR) is an indispensable metric for contact centres to measure and improve.

Research conducted by Ascent Group suggests that 60% of companies measuring FCR for a year or longer reported improvements of up to 30% in their performance. Measuring FCR is beneficial as it evaluates the efficiency of the agents, reflects the quality of customer services and provides insights on the improvement areas.

FCR is a valuable business metric as it not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps in minimizing operating costs.

For instance, let’s say a contact centre receives 25,000 calls every month and the FCR rate is 60%. This shows that 40% of calls require follow-up support. If the FCR rate improves by just 10%, there will be 2500 fewer calls every month or 60,000 fewer calls every year. This reduction in calls enables a contact center to allocate resources better, and saves a lot of time and money!

Here are 7 actionable ways you can quickly improve your FCR rate and enhance customer experience.

7 Ways To Improve FCR

1. Deploy Chatbots and Conversational IVR

Chatbots have become an essential addition at contact centres to streamline several parts of customer service. “25% of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017”, report by Gartner suggests.

Enabled by conversation AI, NLP and ML, chatbots today are capable of understanding the ‘intent’ behind customer queries and conducting human-like conversations. This ability enables them to handle tasks such as providing information, answering FAQ, sending instant responses, collecting user information, among many more. Chatbots provide self-service options to customers and can be used 24/7 for customer care.

Chatbots also act as the first line of support and only route extremely complex conversations to agents. All these capabilities of chatbots help them to engage customers until the issue is resolved – thereby reducing the need for a follow-up conversation and improving the FCR.

Another emerging bot technology to consider is conversational IVR. Powered by AI and Natural Language Processing, conversational IVRs provide a unique voice-based and hands-free solution where customers can interact using natural language as opposed to choosing the options from a long static menu offered by traditional IVRs.

Reduced customer service costs, improved CSAT, increased agent productivity, streamlined workflows, a decrease in the number of customer emails and calls are some more key business benefits of deploying bots in contact centers.

Read More:

2. Incentivize Agents to Reduce Call-Backs

Rewarding agents on resolving issues on the first call is a great way to motivate agents to perform better and an investment that companies should make as the returns that they reap on reducing the number of call-backs is much bigger.

Evaluating agents based on the average handling time can prove to be an ineffective strategy as they can close calls without successfully resolving an issue to save time. Incentivising agents on resolving customer requests on the first call would be a good long term strategy as it relieves them from the pressure of saving time and shifts the focus to effectively resolve issues. This reduces call-back from customers and in turn saves time.

3. Employ Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics can be an eminent tool at call centres to have a well-rounded understanding of customer service journey. It is one of the primary steps to resolve FCRs and build an effective interaction with customers to avoid voice calls.

Traditionally, companies have relied on customer surveys to glean insights on escalations to agents, which proved to have serious limitations. Companies are deploying customer journey analytics to accurately understand the events throughout the customer service journeys that lead to failure escalations and failure in service.

Customer journey analytics provides insights to predict the likelihood of escalation and is a great tool to proactively design self-service to customers. With customer journey analytics, structured and unstructured data from various channels like website, mobile app, chatbot can be integrated. This is useful in eliminating the silos across the channels and have a comprehensive cross-channel understanding of customer behavior, issues and drop-offs, which offers a proactive preparedness for contact center agents for potential escalations from various channels.

4. Speech Analytics

In order to measure FCR, contact centres traditionally were dependent on reports by agents, QA team analysis and customer surveys. However, these practices are becoming increasingly ineffective. Agent reports can be inaccurate and biased, QA teams usually are not so confident in the data they’re provided and customers don’t actively participate in surveys.

Organizations are therefore implementing speech analytics – a great tool to understand customer pain-points by recognising patterns and keywords in conversations that indicate customer distress or dissatisfaction.

It can be used to measure the number of customers who call more than once to resolve their problem. It also helps in identifying trends, attrition hints, process issues and any inhibitors to FCR.

Speech analytics provides actionable information about customer calls and supports root cause discovery. This allows call centers to reduce repeat calls and the need for callbacks.

5. Provide the Right Training to Agents to Improve First Call Resolution

Equipping contact center agents with exhaustive knowledge and training meticulously on their function is fundamental to improve FCRs. Agent training hours is found to be one of the biggest drivers for first call resolution that yields improved rates of FCR and higher customer satisfaction.

6. Make Customer Data Available to Agents in Real Time

Following up on the previous point, while training agents it is also essential to equip their knowledge with all the essential information they may need to effectively help a customer.

Dashboards that provide a 360-degree view of customers can be a useful tool for agents to have a better understanding of the customers that approach them. These dashboards equip agents with all the necessary information about customers like purchase history, preferences, conversation history that are essential during a live conversation to provide a seamless interaction and resolve issues on the first contact.

This reduces the handling time as agents spend less time in gathering necessary information to understand the issue.

7. Focus on next issue avoidance

Next Issue Avoidance (NIA) is a useful metric to enable agents to predict prospective customer issues. NIA is derived by analyzing data from large sets of tickets raised by customers to anticipate the issue that customers can come up with, which can be leveraged to eliminate a large number of calls.

NIA is a critical strategy adopted by several contact centres to reduce customer effort, improve contact centre effectiveness and establish loyalty from customers. Research suggests that 46% of customer support cases are avoidable by predicting the next potential problem.

Wrapping Up

As customer service costs continue to increase, measuring and improving FCR is an imperative part of any effective Customer Experience (CX) strategy. By using the right processes, approaches, technologies and resources companies can now predict and resolve issues with the least Customer Effort Score (CES), reduce contact center volume and improve CSAT.

If you’d like to learn more about improving FCR at contact centers, please feel free to get in touch with one of our contact center and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

The post 7 Ways To Improve FCR At Your Contact Center appeared first on BotCore.

7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:09:43 +0000

7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Providing a great customer experience while reducing call volume and costs is the ultimate goal of any contact center. Over the years, contact centers have invested in various types of customer-facing technologies – right from IVR, CTI, CRM, ACD to AI. But in spite of deploying these technologies, most organizations are not able to improve operational efficiencies, enhance CX or maximize their ROI.

Most organizations today believe that technology alone is the solution to reduce costs and by focusing solely on implementing the technology they allow CX and their core operations to take a hit.

But there are ways in which the number of calls that a contact center receives can be reduced while ensuring good customer experience and better business growth. In the following section, we discuss the top 5 tips to reduce call volumes in your contact center.

7 tips to reduce contact center volume

map the customer journey

The first step in cutting down inbound call volume is to determine why customers are calling the contact center in the first place. This includes recognizing the most common issues that customers are facing with respect to a product, process or service. Often, it is a bunch of similar reasons that tend to lead to the majority of inbound calls.

Once the most common reasons behind inbound calls are established, we can use customer journey analytics to map the customer service journey. Analytical data gives us an insight into the effectiveness of the service provided by the agents in the contact center as well as recognize the pain points faced by the customer.

Using customer journey analytics helps assess the information that is readily available to customers, determine the ease with which customers can reach out to the contact center when required and establish the top reasons why customers call-in. Armed with this information, companies can take the primary steps required to reduce inbound call volume.

measure customer effort score (CES)

Customer Effort Score refers to the ease of customer interaction and getting a resolution for a request. High-effort experiences include switching between channels, repeat interaction, transfers, etc. Tracking CES helps you reduce call volume and costs whilst improving customer experience. According to Gartner, low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls. Gartner also recommends asking this single question to measure CES.

focus on multiple channels and provide self-service options

Use different channels for communication and promote these channels evenly. Assign KPIs for each channel. Allow customers to choose their options. Enable smart self-service options across web, mobile, and telephone. Some self-service best practices include:

Highly visible and updated FAQs
Customized CRM portals
Strong and NLP enabled knowledge base solution
Self-help links integrated into web pages that lead to the respective help document(s).
Online community discussion portals

A more modern and efficient self-service option through which customers can look for answers is via Chatbots and conversational IVR systems. Chatbots today can be deployed from handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets as well as from the desktop. They are increasingly being integrated in social media applications such as Facebook, as well. We will learn about chatbots in detail in the next section.

using AI chatbots

Chatbot adoption in contact centers has grown exponentially in the past couple of years, across industries. According to Gartner, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020; this statistic used to be less than two percent in 2017.

Chatbots today are powered by conversational AI, NLP, and machine learning, and offer the same conversational experience as communicating with a human agent. In contact centers, they are deployed as the first line of support in order to handle tier-1 interactions. The 24/7 availability and an easy-to-use conversational interface of chatbots make them an efficient self-service option for customers. Chatbots reduce the number of calls that human executives have to handle, without compromising on the customer experience.

Learn more: 10 Powerful Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Service

chatbot agent handoff

Although chatbots are great at handling customer interactions by simulating human-like conversations, a common misconception that customer service leaders may have is that a chatbot alone is sufficient to handle customer service. But the truth is that there may be scenarios where the customer interaction needs to be handed off to a human agent.

In such a scenario, the chatbot must be able to identify the need for human intervention and seamlessly transition the interaction to the appropriate agent. In this way, the inbound call volume can be cut down by fulfilling basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user information, and recording customer concerns with the help of a chatbot. Only those tasks that absolutely need human intervention can be routed to the human agents.

Learn more: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

conversational IVR

Chatbot technology in call centers is also intended to replace traditional IVR systems that tend to be a major pain point for customers looking for quick and effective issue resolution. Unlike traditional IVR systems, conversational IVR uses NLP and Machine Learning to understand the content of customers’ speech and enables dynamic and hassle-free experiences. Customers no longer have to navigate through the complex navigation menu of a traditional IVR.

ensure first call resolution ( fcr)

A major factor that contributes to increased inbound call volume in contact centers is that most issues are not resolved in the first call, requiring multiple calls to ensure resolution. This leads to calls adding-up while also being detrimental to customer satisfaction.

Essentially, customer satisfaction is directly related to the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate of the contact center. One of the ways to ensure FCR is to frequently measure CSAT with the aim to improve it.

optimize in order to reduce repeat calls

When contact centers receive calls regarding issues with certain ineffective customer-oriented processes, they must have a resource in the backend team to modify or improve these processes and related self-help pages accordingly. By improving pages and processes based on support calls, contact centers can reduce the occurrence of repeat calls for the same issues in the future.

Reducing call volume is key to reduce business costs in any contact center. And this involves streamlining and automation of processes and intelligent orchestration of work.

If you want to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

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