Automation is the primary business trend worldwide, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated it even more. Global lockdowns, economic turbulence, and reduced demand are forcing companies to seek ways to improve business processes, increase effectiveness, and serve their customers better to retain them.
AI-powered automated customer service is the solution that can solve this task by boosting the quality of communications, delivering the best customer experience, and simultaneously shrinking costs and elevating ROI.
What is the Contact Center AI, and how it works
Simply put, Contact Center AI is a solution that helps businesses in deploying automated virtual agents that can answer customers’ inquiries. This is not an IVR with pre-recorded answers and limited options the human can choose from. Instead, virtual voice agents can understand human speech and flexibly react. The quality of the technology designed by Neuro.net allows virtual agents to conduct conversations where 99% of customers do not distinguish an AI from a human.
AI-based agents can understand customer’s requests with a minimal error rate, detect and mimic emotions. Also, there are additional factors as added background noise (office or a call center) or interjections like “umm” and “aha” that sound natural and make the whole dialogue indistinguishable from the conversation with a human agent.
Here are seven practical and innovative ways this technology improves customer service right now.
The quality of the technology designed by Neuro.net allows virtual agents to conduct conversations where 99% of customers do not distinguish an AI from a human.
Fast responsiveness
Fast response is a crucial factor for any customer communication. According to stats, 44% of customers are not ready to spend more than 2 minutes waiting on the phone, 13% are not ready to wait at all, and 33% of customers are most frustrated by having to wait on hold, and when the customer is frustrated, this leads to churn. Also, investing in new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.
Numbers speak for themselves. The company has to reply fast, but this is hard to do when you have a contact center with a limited number of employees. It is a high season like Black Friday or Christmas when the number of calls significantly increases. AI-fueled virtual assistants solve this problem, as it is effortless to deploy as many bots as needed to handle all calls very fast.
A virtual agent answering with a human-like and almost indistinguishable voice, and customers do not have to wait on hold or hear “all of our agents are currently busy.”
Quick resolution
Customers hate continuous switching between support lines and the need to repeat the issue to multiple representatives. The number of people who threaten this is the most frustrating factor in corporate communication is as high as 33%. Another significant number here is 50% of customers who have left brands they were working with for a competitor who could stay more relevant and better satisfy their needs.
So, failing to provide resolution fast can lead to one-third of all customer base being frustrating and up to 50% churn. These are things no business can afford in the current economic conditions.
On the other hand, the Contact Center AI technology implementation allows businesses to solve up to 80% of customer requests without forwarding them to human experts. So, no switching between lines, the customer does not have to repeat themselves, and the solution is offered fast. This is precisely what people want to get from a communication with a brand, a solved problem with minimal time spent.
Always-on customer service
Companies that have customers in multiple time zones or regions often struggle to offer them a 24/7/365 service. It is hard to keep a contact center capable of handling calls from various time zones and covering holidays or weekends. In turn, consumers expect to get this level of service, and when they don’t, it is a disappointing experience.
With conversational AI technology, companies can deploy virtual agents that will handle calls regardless of the day and time. So, customers will get the solution right away or explain the timeline for the issue resolution.
Reliable service, wherever customers need it
According to stats, 90% of customers in the US threat customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. This means the service quality should be high and sustainable, which is hard to reach with the traditional contact center.
Call center agents get tired, forget to follow the script, and may even be rude. In the customer-centered world, every such mistake can have a high cost for businesses. AI-powered agents can solve the problem as they never get tired, forget relevant information, and always choose the right and cheerful tone for every conversation.
Personalization
For the last couple of years, customers got used to personalized experiences when dealing with brands. Businesses offer custom deals, recommendations, personalized content, and more. When it comes to customer service, the expectations are the same.
According to HubSpot, 62% of customers want to communicate with companies via Email for customer service. 48% want to use the phone, 42% live chat, and 36% “Contact Us” forms.” So, businesses have to provide a personalized support experience in every channel to win customers’ trust, increase retention, decrease churn.
If the customer asks to send some information to WhatsApp or Email during the call, failing to do so will result in a lost sale. However, this is somewhat hard to achieve with the traditional contact center, where employees most often can’t provide omnichannel communications.
In turn, AI-fueled virtual agents designed by Neuro.net can talk to customers via Email, on Whatsapp, or Viber if needed.
Scalability with speed
There are both high-demand seasons like Black Friday, Christmas sales, and unpredicted demand spikes. In the first case, the business expects a high load, but the demand may still be higher. When the spike comes unexpectedly, this may make the whole contact center clogged by the volume of requests, decrease the quality of support, and increase the wait time for customers.
Both cases require fast scaling. However, with the traditional contact center, you can’t add new agents immediately. You need to hire people, train them, and it also takes some time for the human agent to reach maximum productivity at work. When the spike comes, you don’t have this time.
With the Contact Center AI technology, the company can add as many virtual agents as needed to keep the sustainable quality of support even during high-demand periods like the holiday season. And this can be almost instantly, keeping the wait times at an acceptable level.
Cost savings
Conversational AI is a perfect solution to both grow revenues and shrink spendings. The most prominent part is savings on payroll, as the company can add dozens and hundreds of virtual agents at a fraction of a price it would pay in salaries.
Moreover, employee training is also a costly task, as the company has to develop learning materials, pay instructors, etc. AI learns fast – the algorithm needs an input of several hundreds of previous calls to learn on this data. The learning curve is shorter than for the human, which can’t even process that high volume of information. This means that the company gets a better-trained agent at the end of the day and gets the result faster!
Also, virtual assistants can increase revenues when used for lead qualification. According to Neuro.net’s stats, voice AI demonstrates 13 times higher conversions and 4 times lower drop-off rates.
Neuro.net develops intelligent virtual agents that are indistinguishable from humans, effectively handle a wide range of customer requests, and offer omnichannel communications.
Elevate your contact center using AI-powered virtual agents by Neuro.net!
