The past few years were the transformation year for all and 2020 was the best example of it. The challenges caused by the COVID-19 give rise to a wave of uncertainty among consumers and its leads to customer contact service transformation.
For many years contact centres have been part of our lives. These centralized offices deal with an excess of requests every single day, empower businesses, and help people find what they need as fast as possible. The tendency of the customer to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels has increased and led to unprecedented call volumes and put pressure on support agents, and their ability to respond and address all queries. The unprecedented call led to longer wait times than usual, with calls dropping automatically after a few minutes, thus increasing customers’ frustration levels. Moreover, most customers don’t want to go through extensive IVR menus and frequent agent transfers or repeatedly ask the same query to get the right support.
As compare to traditional voice interaction, voice-based channels are too costly and difficult to scale. The Medium to provide customer support through voice isn’t going anywhere but is undergoing a massive change with the emergence of AI-powered voice bots.
What Are Voice Bots?
A voice bot is a computer software program that understands spoken language and uses artificial intelligence for communication, which works by converting users’ spoken queries and respond to inquiries using text or voice. These bots are a way to provide engaging, personalized, and interactive human-like support and ensure speedy resolution for your customers.
In other words, voice bots can ingest, analyze, interpret, and respond to customer inquiries spoken to them in natural language, with the end goal to answer a customer’s question in real-time.
Advantages Of Voice Bots-
- Provide Fast Resolution To Customers
A customer complaint handled quickly can turn into a potential opportunity to earn more profit for Contact Centres. Today traditional IVRs force customers to go through multiple menus and options, ask to wait for the next available agent, or force them to try again-n-again during regular business hours. However, voice bots offer instant query resolution to them with 24X7 support, and even scheduling agent call-backs if needed.
- Scale-Up Voice Operations And Reduce Costs
A single voice bot can engage with more than thousands of customers at the same time and provide personalized support to each user. Moreover, by offloading lacking interest, repetitive tasks from human agents, contact centers can manage many more support issues than otherwise possible and dramatically reduce costs.
- Reduce Transaction Times
When it comes to speed, voice is faster and more customer-friendly than typing. With bots specific tasks, such as purchases, bookings, and cancellations, can be performed more quickly by bots than humans, hence it reduces the overall transaction times.
- Humanize Support Staff
Repetitive tasks, the lacking interest nature of everyday operations, and the pressure to close as many tickets as possible often sap the humanity out of support centre agents. With bots you can take over most of the repetitive tasks and easing the workload of your staff, your support staff can take out the time to deliver human connection whenever needed.
- Create Sales Opportunities
Voice bots continuously learn from past interactions and are equipped with natural language understanding (NLU); they can understand what the customer means and deliver more contextual, meaningful, and human-like conversations and provide personalized product recommendations. Such interactive voice engagements create new sales opportunities for Contact Centres.
Why Voice Bots Make Contact Centres Customer-Friendly?
Voice bots are the need of contact centre customer engagement. They lead to an extensive reduction in cost by the resolution of common and repetitive queries at scale. The speed, accuracy, and 24X7 availability of voice bots improve first call resolution rates and give a positive impact on customer experience.
Moreover, voice bots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, even when they are not able to respond a customer needs, they learn from these personalized recommendations and begin to look for future responses based on these interactions. In other words, they are always learning and always seeking ways to provide customers with a better experience and increase revenue through cross-selling and upselling.
