TALKING

Automating the call centre

Many contact centres struggle to take the right approach to urgent conversations . Some lack the resources to rapidly ramp up and deal with increased call volumes .

With rapid scaling such a challenge for contact centres , what approach should they take instead ? A good start is to automate as many conversations as possible .

In the example above , the bank could have printed a QR code on the leaflet alongside the contact centre number . After scanning it , the prospective customer would have been connected instantly to a virtual agent .

The trouble was the bank ’ s contact centre simply could not keep up with the volume of calls that came in as a result of the campaign . Although the bank anticipated it would need additional contact centre agents , scaling up and back down as quickly as it needed to simply was not practical .

Putting aside the difficulty of finding enough contact centre agents , getting them trained up to the level where they could field any queries associated with the incoming calls was impossible .

The bank likely missed out on a lot of prospective customers as a result . After all , how many times would you contact a business with the intention of making a purchase before giving up and moving on ?

Those same scalability issues can arise in all sorts of situations and affect both outbound and inbound conversations . That means that contact centres must think differently when it comes to urgent conversations .

Or let us say someone calls a bank ’ s helpline with a Black Friday-related query or presses the help button on the bank ’ s application . Instead of being put in a queue to speak to a human agent , they are immediately connected to a virtual agent . AI-powered digital experts can have immediate conversations with customers .

These agents have the expertise of a senior contact centre agent or even a banker and can independently help most customers with the majority of rule-bound queries . They can also work across multiple channels at once , and can handle thousands of customers at a time . They stick to rules yet can shape to each customer ’ s context . This ensures every conversation is consistent , compliant and hyper-personalised .

As a result , they can process most of the high call volumes , handing off to human agents only when they get stuck or there is real emotion involved . Where relevant , the virtual agent will hand off to a human agent to complete the engagement .

Virtual agents stick to rules , so every conversation is consistent , compliant and hyper-personalised . They handle the urgent , repetitive , rule-based work so human agents can focus on higher value work - like figuring out where to drop the next lot of leaflets .

With lower call volumes to deal with , human contact centre agents can focus on the calls where a human connection is essential . They can better handle these calls with empathy and care because they are not chasing an average handling time clock . This not only makes customers a lot happier , but it also makes human agents happier too .

There is no doubt that , as much as banks appreciate the extra transaction volumes , Black Friday can be a stressful time . But with the right tools in place , it does not have to be .

CLEVVA builds , deploys and manages Virtual Agents for companies . These conversational process automation specialists drive down the cost of customer , supplier and staff engagements . p

32 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com