Self-service has the potential to dramatically reduce your contact centre workflows while simultaneously empowering your customers. And in a digital world, self-service allows customers the opportunity to interact with your brand in a seamless, convenient manner without increasing your FTE requirements. As Salesforce found, nearly 7 in 10 customer service decision-makers cite self-service as an essential strategic cog. An emerging and promising area of self-service application is voice self-service, intersecting customers’ continued reliance on voice with advanced self-service technology.
What is Voice Self-Service?
You can define voice self-service as a technology capability that allows customers to obtain support via voice commands and complete basic tasks through voice, without the intervention of a live agent. Voice self-service can be deployed either in integration with your IVR system or voice-based apps for virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, etc.
The former is much more popular in the realm of customer service, as it allows contact centres to overlay self-service processes on top of their existing IVR infrastructure. Voice commands through personal assistance are much rarer. It is currently limited mainly to the exploration phase of the customer journey, where one can look up basic company information and solve FAQ queries using voice commands.
Why is Voice Self-Service so Important for Your Contact Centre?
Despite the proliferation of channels, voice continues to be the dominant mode of customer interactions. Around 92% of all business and customer interactions still rely on voice, a trend that paves the way for implementing voice-based self-service. Further, most contact centres already have the foundational infrastructure in place in the form of interactive voice response or IVR systems. But instead of keypad-based navigation and actions, it would use speech recognition and voice-based commands.
Voice self-service could unlock the following benefits for contact centres: