Omnichannel Archives - BotCore

Top 5 Ways Intelligent Virtual Assistants Augment Customer Contact Centers in Europe

Roopesh Poojala — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 06:39:25 +0000

Top 5 Ways Intelligent Virtual Assistants Augment Customer Contact Centers in Europe

In today’s fast-paced, digital-first world, customer needs and expectations continue to rise, raising the demand for customer contact centers all over the globe.

In Europe, particularly, the change in customer demographics and the growing popularity of e-commerce has led to increasing pressure on contact centers for customer support. Here, companies, small, medium, and large, believe in focusing on their core operations; hence, Europe is one of the biggest markets that is outsourcing contact center operations.

The call center outsourcing market share in Europe is expected to increase by USD 3.73 billion from 2021 to 2026, and the market’s growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 3.53%. The retail, IT, and telecom sectors will be the most significant drivers of contact center outsourcing in Europe from 2022-2024.

High agent volume and the need for diversity, scalability, and multilingual capabilities are the most significant reasons why most European enterprises are turning to automation and AI to scale their contact center operations.

That’s where intelligent virtual assistants, including chat and voice bots, come into the picture. Virtual assistants, also known as virtual agents, use intelligent conversational interfaces powered by AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies to understand and respond to customer inquiries in a human-like manner.

Let’s know the five ways virtual assistants are well-placed to support European contact centers.

Five Ways Customer Support Chatbots Augment Contact Centers in Europe

1. Deliver exceptional customer support across geographies and time zones.

European companies prefer to focus on their core revenue-generating activities and prefer to outsource their contact center operations. However, they mostly outsource to nearby regions and time zones to account for language and cultural similarities.

This strategy suffers from a major drawback. Rapidly changing customer demographics have necessitated quick, 24X7 customer support. Thus, organizations may want to set up contact centers in distant countries to cover customer support beyond their usual business hours, demanding additional resources in terms of staffing and equipment.

AI-powered customer support chatbots transcend locational boundaries, especially in a continent like Europe that has multiple time zones, and provide instant answers to all customer queries at all times.

2. Make omnichannel chatbots the new gold standard in customer support in Europe.

Customers in different parts of Europe prefer different ways and channels of contacting contact center support. For example, the Netherlands has the highest number of non-telephone channel users, with email and web chat being the most popular.

On the flip side, people in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden prefer social media and web chat over email. The bottom line is that people prefer to communicate with brands on the channel of their choice and may even want to switch channels in the middle of an ongoing support case.

That’s where omnichannel chatbots play a crucial role. Virtual assistants can offer omnichannel experiences so customers can experience consistent and personalized brand engagement on their preferred channels. Moreover, customers can seamlessly transition from one channel to another without losing the context of the original conversation.

3. Address inquiries and grievances in customers’ native tongue in the land of many languages.

In a continent like Europe, where people speak multiple languages, it is challenging to personalize customer support for the entire customer base. After all, customers prefer being engaged in their native language. Moreover, it makes them feel comfortable, valued and heard.

Hiring contact center agents who speak multiple languages or training existing ones to speak in different tongues is costly in terms of time and money. That’s where virtual assistants play a crucial role.

AI virtual assistants support contact centers by detecting the user’s language and switching the conversation flow to the native tongue. What’s more, the customer support chatbot can remember the customer’s language preferences and then reach out to them in the same language in case of a proactive outbound engagement.

4. Providing scalable self-service options and data-enriched proactive engagement.

In recent times, Europe has seen steady growth in using self-service solutions like websites, social networking channels (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, whatsapp etc.), and IVR. These are easily accessible and take a considerable load off contact centers. To work productively and provide seamless, more meaningful customer engagement, organizations in Europe are embedding customer support bots on these channels.

70% of contact center agents say there are fewer calls when chatbots are available. Customer support bots and virtual assistants can shorten waiting times and collect relevant customer data before the call is passed on to the human agent. In cases where the requests are simple and repetitive, virtual assistants can solve them faster than the contact center agent.

Voice bot platforms have paved the way for conversational IVR in contact centers. Voice bots embedded within traditional IVR systems leverage natural language processing and speech recognition technologies to respond to users’ verbal commands using voice or text, enabling faster, more accessible, and more interactive user support.

Moreover, predictive data analytics maps out the entire customer journey to personalize interactions, reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR), and increase overall customer satisfaction (CSAT).

5. Cost is always a significant factor!

Using virtual assistants — chat and voice bots, leads to major cost reductions for all enterprises.

For starters, outsourced customer service agents cost as much as €22,200 per agent annually in countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Even for employees hired in Central and Eastern Europe, where contact center jobs are amongst the better-paid ones, the cost of hiring a contact center agent can come out to be around €6,436 per year.

In short, hiring more contact center agents will always prove heavier on the organization’s pockets. On the other hand, intelligent virtual assistants can solve thousands of problems at a few pennies per transaction, making them highly viable, almost a mandate for countries in Europe where labor costs are very high.

How can Acuvate help?

Acuvate helps clients build and deploy virtual assistants – customer support & engagement chatbots and voice bots with its enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have the opportunity of leveraging the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) frameworks, including the Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Cognitive Services, and LUIS.

Besides supporting languages like German, French, English, Latin, and many more (multilingual functionality), our bots work on popular enterprise channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.) and social channels (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, whatsapp etc.), thus helping organizations engage a geographically-dispersed workforce and customer base.

To know more about our bots and virtual assistants, please schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

The post Top 5 Ways Intelligent Virtual Assistants Augment Customer Contact Centers in Europe appeared first on BotCore.

All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:21:00 +0000

All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business

Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire business landscape, customer and employee experiences (CX and EX) have transformed drastically.

With the advent of various technologies, customers now expect personalized, immersive, and end-to-end brand engagement. Even employees are now considered customers of a digital world— expecting seamless collaboration and tailored engagement, even as interactions become more virtual, mobile, and distributed.

Over the past year, conversational AI has emerged as the new spectrum in both CX and EX. Businesses globally have adopted conversational AI to provide customers and employees exceptional experiences throughout their journeys with the organization.

As per Gartner, the conversational AI market is expected to reach an astounding AUD 22.6 billion by 2024.

This blog takes you through everything you need to know about conversational AI and what’s in it for your business.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), dynamic text to speech, intent and entity recognition, and machine learning (ML) that empower computers to understand, process, and respond to human utterances and text inputs naturally.

Conversational AI is used in chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants and helps conduct simple, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees. It allows enterprises to design cost-efficient digital experiences, streamline internal operations, and deliver superior customer engagement.

Bots can operate 24X7 and provide instant solutions to millions of customer and employee requests simultaneously.

Users may experience the technology on various platforms, including social media (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), enterprise messaging apps (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom), voice assistants (Alexa, Google Home), websites, and interactive voice response systems (IVR).

Emerging Capabilities of a Conversational AI platform

Let’s take a look at some of the emerging capabilities of conversational AI businesses should look out for —

Low-code chatbot development – Low-code chatbot building platforms like Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents allow people with little or no coding knowledge (citizen developers) to build professional-grade bots within a few days. Such platforms host a visual interface, pre-configured templates, and drag-and-drop features, and reduce development costs by up to 90%.
Multilingual chatbots – Only 7.5% of the world’s population are native English speakers. Global organizations employ people from around the world and have a wide customer base that spreads over geographies. Multilingual chatbots help scale the business’s localization efforts and amplify reach amongst customers from different regions. By making them feel heard and supported, organizations that engage with their staff in their native language have higher chances of building loyalty and retaining employees.
Omnichannel experiences – As discussed above, users can experience conversational AI through bots embedded on different channels. Here, a significant capability of the technology is its ability to empower users to start a conversation on one channel and continue it in another— without losing context.
Proactive engagement – As the business landscape becomes more digitized, the users of conversational AI not only expect omnichannel engagement but also want organizations to understand their intentions and preferences and respond accordingly. Bots must anticipate customer and employee needs in advance, intervene at moments when they may need help, and push personalized, context-aware information at the right time.
Sentiment analysis – Another key capability of conversational AI is sentiment analysis— a bot’s ability to comprehend the type and intensity of a user’s sentiment, steer conversations, and escalate to agents for human support.
Context management – With conversational AI, interactions feel truly human-like. A chatbot can remember critical information from past dialogue and retain context from one response to the next, ensuring interactions don’t feel scripted.

Conversational AI for customer and employee experience

Conversational AI has a wide range of use cases for both employees and customers.

In the case of employees, function-specific bots for HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, and enterprise intranets are making life easier for remote workers by fulfilling the following use cases—

Answer employee queries instantly— anytime and anywhere
For example, “How do I reset my password?”, “What is my leave balance for this year?”

Simplify and automate mundane, repetitive tasks
For example, raise IT tickets, book meeting rooms, schedule a video call

Fetch relevant information quickly
For example, retrieve project files, HR policy documents, and business KPIs

Push personalized alerts and notifications
For example, network outage, HR policy changes, upcoming events

Learn More: 4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

Moreover, chatbots transform customer experiences and ensure meaningful engagement at every stage of the sales funnel as follows—

Reach – Push alerts about new products, send personalized tips, collect data about customer preferences.
Acquisition – Suggest products to purchase, help customers navigate the brand’s online store, assist with checkout, guide on product use.
Retention – Analyze customer needs, inform customers about latest offers and sales, upsell/cross-sell products.
Loyalty/Advocacy – tailor loyalty programs, send personalized rewards and discount coupons, collect customer feedback.

Learn More: Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience

What can conversational AI do for your business?

By harnessing the power of conversational AI in everyday business, organizations can reap the following benefits

Benefits for customers	Benefits for employees/organization
Increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities Build a loyal customer base through personalized and meaningful engagement Reduce customer effort Improve net promoter scores	Improve employee productivity Reduce voluntary turnover rates Uncover data-driven insights to make intelligent business decisions Reduce cost per contact

To learn more about conversational AI and how businesses can transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI, please feel free to go through our e-book “Transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI.”

In this guide, we’ll talk in depth about what is conversational and how it has helped transform customer experience in a post-pandemic world.

Conversational AI: A sneak-peek into real-life use cases

Una - Unilever’s chatbot for HR

Unilever leverages its HR chatbot Una to answer employee queries on various HR topics, including performance appraisal, allowance, and perform certain routine tasks like checking meeting room availability, claiming for healthcare, etc. Una is capable of conversing with employees in 106 countries, using 32 languages.

Leena Nair, CHRO at Unilever, in an interview, said, “Una hub is like a google search leverage scale in transaction answering. UNA handles about 7 million transactions in a year.

By using this technology, we have taken time away from the HR person, in some cases, as high as 1 hour a day, that usually they would spend in resolving queries and given them the time to do things that drive business performance which is doing interventions for teams, getting people focused on the big things to do.

In our recent Univoice survey, 93% of our people felt that they were really well supported during COVID with the equipment and technology that allowed them to be productive.”

POND’s SAL

POND’s SAL is an exciting real-life example of how conversational AI has transformed the digital customer experience.

SAL leverages technologies such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality to provide an immersive online shopping experience. Customers can say “hi” to SAL on Ponds’ flagship Shopee store.

Users must first upload a selfie, and while the personalized skin analysis takes place, SAL sends beauty tips to keep them engaged.

Post determining the customer’s skin type, SAL offers personalized product recommendations from POND’s across four significant areas – pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

95% of users who completed the SAL experience on Shopee have stated a positive experience with the bot.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy customer and employee-facing chatbots that deliver fast, meaningful, and personalized interactions with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we use the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to build our bots.

BotCore hosts the following list of advanced capabilities —

An intuitive, low-code, visual interface, allowing the quick implementation of AI chatbots
Flexible integrations with existing legacy systems and AI services
Our chatbots simulate both simple and highly complex conversations.
Our bots are deployable on most of the popular enterprise messaging and social media channels and support several languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

Moreover, we help clients build and implement AI chatbots using Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution called Power Virtual Agents (PVA).

To know more about BotCore and PVA, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

The post All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business appeared first on BotCore.