In times of economic trouble, business leaders often sharpen their pencils and look for areas of waste to strike from their bills.
Such an exercise is worthwhile as cloud contact centers often pay annual fees for idle resources.
Yet, the much more significant savings typically come from an investment in innovation.
Here are four excellent examples that every contact center should consider.
Get Smarter Around Call Deflection
Many consider call deflection the art of sending phone calls to bots, live chat, or another digital channel to reduce the amount of phone calls agents handle.
After all, many operations have found that voice is the most expensive channel for handling customer queries.
Yet, in creating call deflection strategies, many businesses risk lowering customer satisfaction, increasing customer complaints, and – ultimately – jeopardizing customer retention.
As Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce, summarizes:
“You don't want to invite Aunt Nellie to your wedding, but you also don't want her and her folks trash-talking you behind your back, and you definitely still want the wedding present.”
So, how can the contact center strike this balance? First, consider the trade-offs.
Instead of sending every customer following a particular IVR input to a bot, think about when customers would benefit from automation.
An example of this is offering customers the option to interact with a bot when wait times exceed a specific threshold.
Then, consider where it is best to implement those bots. Making a list of the most common, transactional ticket types and working from the top down ensures the business applies conversational AI in the most fruitful places.
Finally, list the routine processes agents follow when handling contacts and how often they appear in tickets. Handling times fall, and cost savings soar by picking one to three to automate.
Just be careful in choosing the best-placed architecture and methodology to apply. After all, implementing the appropriate integrations and ensuring configuration control requires a lot of thought so success continues after the first project, and the business can optimize afterward.
Automate the First 45 Seconds of Every Call
Contact centers that deal with 150,000 inbound calls a month can save $500,000 annually by automating the first 45 seconds of every call.
Doing so involves adding natural dialogue to the IVR, capturing customer information – including their contact reason – upfront, and filtering that through to the agent.
With this context, the rep can get a head start on the call, lead the customer through it at pace, and cut handling times significantly.
Such a strategy may also include automating identification and verification (ID&V) processes before the call – which again saves agents significant time.
Buckley delves deeper into this cost-cutting strategy in the video below.
Why automate the first 45s of your calls using AI from babelforce GmbH on Vimeo.
Offer Callbacks on the Web or In-App
When a customer uses their app or website, a company can follow their journey. As a result, the contact center has much more customer context than it does for most other inbound queries.
Such context may include the customer's lifetime value, the value of the purchase they are looking at, and whether they have tried to cancel their account.