Why Invest in Contact Center automation?
Did you know that customer-centric organizations are 60% more profitable than their peers who lack the focus on their customers?
Contact centers are the face and voice of BFSI, Retail, CPG, Hospitality, Tourism, Healthcare and many other sectors. Hence, it becomes imperative for them to be driven by excellent customer service standards. The latest industry trends reflect that contact centers will transform into experience hubs by 2025. They will drive positive experiences and lifetime value, and become intricately woven to overall business performance.
Further, Gartner research says that 15% of all customer service interactions will be handled solely by AI by 2021, a 400% increase from 2017. McKinsey further predicts that 70% of companies would have adopted at least one type of AI technology by 2030. So, organizations need to ensure that their contact centers undergo a major digital transformation and embrace automation and AI to be future-ready.
In fact, the future might already be here given that COVID-19 has expedited the adoption of AI in the contact center industry. Many banks, insurance companies and hotels are already deploying AI-powered chatbots and virtual customer assistants to:
- Handle the increase in the volume of inquiries
- Give rapid response and resolutions
- Lighten the workload of their employees.
These companies have braced themselves up for the first-mover advantage in the context of AI technology and customer experience.
Let’s take a look at the use cases for AI powered contact center automation to give you useful and actionable insights:
Order Management for CPG, Retail and Pharmaceutical industry
Inventory and order management has become a major challenge for most companies offering omni-channel customer experience. Customers expect a flawless order fulfillment and turn to the contact center when there are any issues with their orders. Order management becomes a complex web, especially if you manage different inventory locations or handle thousands of orders every day.
AI-based virtual agents can easily integrate with your inventory/order management system. They can take over routine, repetitive tasks and remove all the order processing bottlenecks. They can check inventory and order status to answer customer calls/chats regarding delays, cancellations, returns, etc to the precision. They can also make outbound calls to send reminders to customers to reorder. This can be a key driver in retaining existing customers.
Take for example a case of an FMCG which deployed AI-powered outbound contact center agent. This AI-based voice agent leverages Natural Processing Language (NLP) to integrate with catalog to capture current SKU information and ask for retailer inputs. Once the retailer confirms the order, the AI voice agent passes the control to an RPA agent which creates an order entry in the ERP. Accordingly, the distributor gets notified of the order to further plan capacity and delivery.
Data Collection, Capture and Entry
When a customer gets in touch with the contact center, the human associates (employees) take a good amount of time in the collection and entry of customer information. Some examples of manual data collection, capture and entry are:
- Customer authentication to provide access to the bank account
- Addition of a nominee to an insurance policy
- Helping with credit card/utility bill details
- Giving product info, supporting technical issues in a product
The more time human agents spend per customer, higher is the average handle time. This results in a higher cost per customer ticket and also, the delay in attending to other customers.
As per the industry standard,
- 80% calls should be answered in 20 seconds
- 100% emails in 24 hours
- 80% of chats in 20 seconds
- 80% of SMS/messaging within 40 seconds.
AI is the solution to reduce tedious amount of time spent on data-related activities and achieve these benchmarks.
AI-powered E-Workers can automate and speed up this process by seamlessly integrating with your CRM or ERP systems.
Improve Lead Generation and demo show-up rates
AI powered agents can also qualify a new prospect or lead and create contact in CRM. This helps improve your lead generation and increase sales pipeline for your sales team. Automatically trigger outbound calls to your leads for demo reminders based on their schedule, reaching out and confirming their attendance at a predefined time prior to the meeting. Reschedule the meeting, if necessary, while the likelihood of demo show-ups increased by over 90%. This way, allow your SDRs to focus their time on creating more sales opportunities and closing deals rather than spend it on repetitive and mundane activities.
Account and Membership Services
Account and membership management is a part of customer service. It goes beyond sales activities in the hospitality, airlines and wellness industry, and also professional network associations. You want to earn customer loyalty by being highly responsive to their service queries and offering meaningful incentives to them. But, these recurring activities could be a monotonous and time-consuming affair.
AI powered E-Workers can automate account and membership management related tasks such as:
- Updating personal information in the account
- New membership registration
- Password resets
- Loyalty rewards
- Reward claims
Appointment Scheduling and Reservations
If you are running a restaurant, salon, spa, medical clinics, hospitals, gym or hotel business, you should know this. A survey found that 56.4% of customers find waiting on hold and inconvenient office hours related to scheduling appointments by phone a frustrating experience.
The survey indicates that you need to provide a streamlined scheduling and reservation service to customers. If it is not handled appropriately, it could escalate customer grievance. You can even lose potential customers if your manpower lacks the capacity to attend the volume of calls or rushes them, especially during peak hours. These days, customers also expect 24/7 appointment scheduling and reservation services.
An AI-powered chatbot or virtual assistant can automatically schedule, reschedule, cancel or manage no-show appointments/reservations by looking up the booking calendar. It can also make outbound calls for follow-ups and confirmations. This kind of automation will also eliminate issues such as duplicate appointments, overbooking or missed reservations. Moreover, virtual agents can provide round-the-clock service, ensuring autonomy and a response to every customer.
Driving Registration and Participation for Events
60% of leadership consider events as the most important marketing channel to accomplish business goals. 92% of event and marketing professionals plan to integrate virtual events into their event strategy even after the pandemic. If you are hosting in-person or virtual business events with 1000+ participants, email marketing is the key to efficient event management. However, emails can often land in junk or be ignored by participants. Fewer participation results in loss of revenue stream from the event.
A good mix of chatbots and voicebots for outbound calling through your website and apps can keep participants actively engaged. It can prompt them to register and send reminder calls for attendance on the day of the event.
These use cases prove that AI is emerging as an instrumental technology to provide good customer experiences and work in parallel with humans. We will uncover some more use cases for contact center automation in our concluding part of this blog. Stay tuned!
Thinking about Contact Center automation for boosting your customer experience? Set up a demo and consultation session with our automation experts here.