It wasn’t that long ago that call centres relied on a sophisticated version of a switchboard, with very little insight into the customer journey and no way of intelligently routing calls or monitoring sentiment. Things have changed significantly over the past decade, particularly when it comes to new products and processes created to assist agents.
Technological innovation has led to shifting customer expectations - the competition over customers who are able to switch to rival providers with minimum effort has driven the development and deployment of new technologies that accelerate the resolution of issues, reduce cost for the operator and provide best in class service to callers and agents themselves.
Artificial Intelligence
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Alex Fleming[/caption]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one such technology. It has the capability to provide huge benefit to the contact centre. Nowadays, agents are the most important resource in contact centres. They’re well trained and highly skilled, meaning that simple and repetitive tasks can quickly lead to boredom, burnout and their eventual departure.
Thankfully, AI can play a significant role in addressing these issues. By pushing customers through a funnel, contact centres can ensure that calls being answered by agents are those requiring more human input and interaction, alleviating the boredom of said agents, providing them with the appropriate challenge, and allowing business to retain key staff while ensuring their best talent is operating efficiently.
Contact centres have adopted omni-channel capability to enable interaction through a range of channels, including text, email, instant messaging and automated text bots within a browser. This enables flexibility and drives engagement but relies on the input being text-based. While text can be easily fed into AI tools, voice is still the primary means of interacting with the contact centre and provides the richest source of data.
Speech-to-text solutions enable the transformation of customer and agent voice into a text-based format which can then be amalgamated with other data sources for a unified insight across all channels. This unified raw data can then be used within AI tools to drive best practices and insight. But not just any speech-to-text solution will do, and the level of insight is proportionate to the capability of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) solutions that are adopted.
It’s the old adage that you get out what you put in. If the accuracy of ASR tools is poor, then the output will reflect this. Accurate data collection is the key to harnessing the power of the conversations being had within the call centre and can truly reflect what is going on in the organisation, to the benefit of both customers and staff.
Agent Retention
Call centres used to have one of the highest staff turnover rates of any industry. Today, organisations are investing huge amounts of time, effort and money in increasing the engagement of their agents and ensuring their retention. For example, an agents’ time is often divided into three sections: talk time, after call work, and downtime. After call work includes writing up notes, key actions, next steps, milestones and other important elements of a call, which means agents have to document important information while simultaneously engaging with the customer, not only leading to a poorer experience for the customer, but increasing the chances of an agent missing important information.
AI tools like speech-to-text mean that a full transcript of the conversation can be added to the interaction history automatically, almost eliminating the need for this after call work, while also significantly reducing the cost of storing audio files by replacing them with text.