Rumors of the demise of voice in the contact center appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
In fairness, those rumors were supported by fairly solid logic: new digital channels would become more and more popular, making the phone a costly legacy channel.
But that isn’t what’s happened.
In fact, Zendesk says voice still accounts for around 40% of contact center contacts among its customers, with some even reporting a 24% increase in voice volume on average.
“Voice is more important than ever,” said Hannah Deveney, Senior Director of Product Management at Zendesk.
So why hasn’t digital managed to kill off voice?
In a nutshell, the two channels are working together, rather than against each other.
AI agents are beginning to take the simpler calls, leaving human agents to deal with the disputes, fraud claims, billing problems, and sensitive conversations that customers do not want to resolve through a string of messages, as Deveney explains:
“When a call is escalated to a human, it’s usually a more complex or sensitive issue. Humans want to speak to humans to have that empathy or care when it’s a really complicated issue and address it in real time.”
Voice Translation Is About More Than Language
This need for phone channels to be able to provide a more personal customer experience was part of the thinking behind Zendesk’s latest Real-Time Voice Translation feature.
Built directly into Zendesk contact center, the tool translates live calls in both directions.
The capability is designed to allow customers and agents to speak naturally in their preferred languages.
Agents can turn translation on or off during a call, while administrators can decide where it is available and whether to retain original audio, translated audio, or both.
On the surface, that sounds like a useful way to cut interpreter costs and reduce pressure on multilingual hiring. Yet the more interesting opportunity is around routing.
Traditionally, a multilingual customer may be directed to a language-specific queue, regardless of whether that agent is the best person to handle their issue.
A French-speaking customer with a complex fraud claim, for example, may be passed to a French speaker who has broad service knowledge rather than a specialist trained for fraud cases.
That creates a difficult trade-off between language and expertise.
“You have your specialists who might handle billing inquiries and then others who handle sales. But then language gets its own queue,” Deveney said.
“You’re kind of creating these isolated silos when you want to have your agents who are proficient and excellent at solving a specific need to be able to speak the language as well.”
With real-time translation, instead of routing primarily by language, contact centers can route based on the customer’s issue and the agent’s specialist knowledge, then use AI translation to keep the conversation moving.
For customers, the payoff should be fewer transfers, less repetition, and a better chance of reaching someone who can resolve the problem first time.