With the holiday season around the corner, firms have to be prepared to answer the business needs those festivities bring. For contact centers, a spike in call volumes is one of the most common challenges faced during this time. Customers’ willingness to buy during this period is coupled with attractive offers by brands. According to a report, one-third of the holiday shoppers claimed that their weekend splurges were driven by brand promotions. Thus, along with the holiday cheer, contact centers get inundated with customer queries and complaints. Whether the spike in calls is planned or unpredictable, the holiday season is the ultimate litmus test for contact centers to define the quality of Customer Experience a customer can expect from the brand.
Challenges faced by contact centers in managing call volumes
Contact centers struggle to manage incremental calls because they did not forecast it ahead of time or they were not equipped to handle the incremental pressure of it. This disconnect may happen due to –
- Lack of analysis and insight generation
Relying on word-of-mouth insights and not analytics results in half-baked plans. Humans suffer from biases and form opinions based on isolated events. When contact centers plan according to vague opinions, they invite disaster. Therefore, contact centers should base their plans on analytics and insights from earlier years to prepare for the holiday season influx.
- Lack of adequate and trained resources
With a spike in call volume, contact centers need more staff and this may lead to untrained temporary staff handling a bulk of calls. Insufficient hiring due to incorrect forecasting poses a challenge at this time. This results in more workload per agent and invariably leads to longer hold time for customers. Not to mention, hiring more staff also impacts costs.
Thankfully, digital enablement provides itself as an unmitigated resolution. With the contact center AI digital enablement platforms such as CX Ninja, businesses can avoid the above-mentioned issues and offset any incremental pressure.
What is a Digital Enablement Platform?
A digital enablement platform is a software designed to assist people with performing digital tasks and improve their productivity in the digital workplace.
How can contact centers leverage AI to manage call volumes?
AI solutions such as CX Ninja can help businesses augment their Customer Experience while reducing their customer support costs by 70%. The tool reduces the average handling time for customer support personnel by routing more than 75% of calls to virtual agents. It utilises AI-based technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Conversational AI to successfully address customer issues in real-time. With this, agents are left to handle more complex calls that require a human touch.
Let us understand how the above-mentioned contact center AI technologies can help contact centers –
- RPA gives agents a peek into their performance
RPA significantly improves the operational efficiency of a contact center by automating its repetitive tasks. It identifies customers and provides them with faster support with its single customer view. It aids the agents by providing them with real-time information and eliminates customer waiting time.
It also gives agents a peek into their performance by measuring parameters such as the percentage of hold time violation for an agent, customer negative sentiment, process adherence metrics, and many other KPIs which help explore the intricacies of customer-agent interaction.
RPA brings both speed and accuracy to a customer-agent interaction. Its analytical prowess enables businesses to predict call surges and gives them the flexibility that a mere manual deployment of agents simply cannot.
- NLP eliminates customer wait time
Virtual bots utilise NLP to handle customer conversations and analyse the spoken words of the customer to trigger actions based on it. A bot can gather a multitude of relevant information such as understanding a customer’s sentiment by the tone of his voice or estimating his age, etc. This helps contact centers identify customer behaviour and purchase patterns. But, primarily, it helps in pinpointing the exact issue that perplexes a customer and helps agents improve their performance. Additionally, NLP eliminates customer wait time by giving them self-service options driven by NLP. All of this leads to faster resolution and happier customers.
As organizations are adopting bots across platforms, over 67% of customers have already experienced using a chatbot for customer support. Uber uses NLP to improve communication between riders and drivers. Similarly, MasterCard helps its banking partners serve customers over Facebook messenger. Its chatbot uses NLP to understand customer requirements. With no lag time and efficient resolutions, it is no wonder that 70% of millennials prefer talking to a bot.
Speech recognition enables businesses to provide a personalised experience to the customer. It can make recommendations to agents for upselling or cross-selling products by detecting the enthusiasm in a customer’s voice. Similarly, in the case of anger or disappointment, it can warn agents. It can also help in recognising the customers by their voice, thereby doing away with the troublesome process of remembering identification numbers and passwords.
- OCR leads to higher accuracy and improved interaction
OCR processing is the conversion of any text that is in printed, typed, or handwritten form into a digitally encoded text. It is an easy-to-use technology that allows efficient customer data entry from various sources such as passports, identification cards, emails, bank statements, etc. When text is digitally converted, it is easy for companies to store this searchable data for their agents to peruse while interacting with the customer. This helps bring down wrap time and boosts the overall quality of agent-customer interaction.
- Conversational AI can bring down the cost per customer interaction
Conversational AI in consonance with NLP, cloud storage, and computing has helped businesses process data for customer intent and sentiment analysis. It has resulted in virtual agents that can understand humans and interpret their intentions. It can also help contact centers in automating basic customer service tasks like tracking an order or reporting an outage. It can answer frequently asked questions by referring to knowledge repositories and guide the customers in a step-by-step manner for troubleshooting purposes. Because it can handle multiple calls simultaneously, it results in lower costs per customer interaction. Conversational AI bots bring intelligent automation to the forefront of brand-customer interaction.
With that, they take personalised customer service to newer horizons as they understand the customers intuitively. This is possible because they have a comprehensive customer history at their behest while being able to interpret their language and emotions. With these superpowers, they can offer the best products and deals to customers or resolve issues to their utmost satisfaction.
As per Gartner, call centers can face spikes of up to 10 times the normal call volume during festivals, promotions, and holidays. Improper handling of the situation impacts sales targets and hurts customer experience irreversibly. With contact center AI solutions such as CX Ninja, businesses can forecast their call surge and create a proactive strategy to tackle any incremental strain.