As McKinsey & Company report: “IVR systems are evolving from dumb menu systems into smart ‘voicebots’ capable of handling complex customer queries.”
With the rapid rise in AI-sophistication, such voicebots offer solace for contact centres. No longer must they fixate on the finer details of deep, nested menu structures. Instead, they can evolve their thinking and simply consider: what can I ask my customer so that they - in just two or three words - transfer to the appropriate department?
All the complexity that the contact centre associates with developing the ideal IVR journey is erased. What’s more, the customer enjoys an effortless experience as they pass directly through to the right call queue.
However, this is just scratching the surface of what voicebots can do. There are many more advanced voicebot features that will further improve call routing and customer experiences within the future contact centre.
The Next Generation of Call Routing
IVR navigation is a common pain point within the service experience. Customers often press the wrong key, reach a dead-end, or become confused by the options presented – especially vulnerable customers.
By flipping this process on its head and enabling customers to simply state their reason for calling, all complexity can be removed. A voicebot can recognise their intent and then initiate a simple flow, so customers enjoy a smoother first impression of your business.
Furthering this, as the voicebot captures the exact reason why the customer is calling, it can funnel that information straight through to the most appropriate agent. In doing so, the agent is immediately brought up to speed with the issue at hand, streamlining the experience for both parties.
Contact centres can also leverage this information to automate ticket tagging and gain an accurate understanding of why customers contact them. CX teams may then pinpoint critical contact drivers, identify broken processes, and assess failure demand.
Within a matter of minutes, contact centres can deploy a voicebot with all this functionality, as Mashud Ahmed, a product manager at Puzzel, tells us:
“Thanks to advances in natural language understanding (NLU) and automated speech recognition, best-in-class models understand customer intent, from just a few words, without any pretraining. The only determination the contact centre has to make is: what are the cases that I want to capture so that the call reaches this queue?”
Of course, the time to deploy will take longer if the contact centre wishes to build a more advanced system with further automation and self-service capabilities.
Voicebot as a Self-Service Channel
Voicebots can also be trained to speak like humans and hold natural-sounding conversations with customers using neural voice technology.
Neural voice is a powerful technology that performs AI-based voice cloning. From a single sound sample of just five seconds, it’s already possible for tools to generate entire sentences in a person’s voice, as if they spoke the words themselves. That means contact centres of the future will be able to continually design new self-service flows in natural-sounding speech.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) powers these self-service flows, triggering a set of actions that enable the voicebot to complete tasks. As an example, consider the classic customer query: "Where is my stuff?" Upon understanding this question, the bot can ask for an order number. With this information, it searches the tracking system and brings back a reasonable answer, delivering it to the customer right there and then. This simplifies the CX massively, especially when compared to traditional deflection strategies.
Even when an issue is too complex to automate completely, a voicebot can assist with parts of the interaction. For example, the solution can collect customer information, process it, and pass it on to an agent. This reduces handle times and call abandon rates.