July 05, 2020
Pleasing the modern customer is hard and expensive. That is especially true when it comes to Customer Service. As an industry, we’ve come a long way in being more efficient at solutions like FAQ, Knowledge Bases and Self-Service-Platforms. For the most part, these advances had one thing in mind: slowing the consumer’s march to the most valuable resource of them all - the Customer Support Agent. Yet, in today’s digitized times, that isn’t enough anymore.
Real People Mean Real Problems
A human support agent needs to bring a lot to the table. Customers expect them to be readily available, competent, and efficient – among other things. Even for companies that already identified all these expectations AND manage to train their agents accordingly, it is still very difficult to achieve a proper level of training in terms of consistency, scale and availability. How do you ensure that all of your agents always stay on brand? How do you manage a temporarily growing team and maintain quality during seasonal spikes? How do you provide 24/7 support?
Conversational AI Can Help
Conversational AI will increase your self-service completion rate by giving your customers the exact information they need through a conversational interface. But it doesn’t stop at efficiently handing out data. Users oftentimes need to take some form of action: resetting passwords, updating addresses, checking delivery statuses. Conversational AI is capable of offering these interactions inside its interface without forcing the user to change lanes and by using the same natural language that brought them there in the first place.
This kind of interaction will help your KPIs directly. Examples include:
Average Handle Times
Average handle times for calls that will still reach the agent will decrease because they will reach the right one based on skill-based routing which, in turn, is informed by profile information extracted from chat transcripts.
Customer Satisfaction/NPS
Your customers will be happier and become advocates for you company when getting to their information easier or will be transferred to an informed and context-sensitive human agent if need be.
The only way is forward
Projects aiming at implementing a Conversational AI into existing infrastructure typically can be divided into three phases.
Phase 1 concentrates on implementing a simple informational bot on your website that serves in regard to common queries.
In Phase 2, your capabilities will be expanded by directly identifying your users and integrating the Conversational interface deeper into you back-end systems.
Phase 3 will enable your teams to gain operational efficiency and standardize activities to further the Conversational AI as a First-Class Support Channel.
Such a project needs partners that can deliver on all its far-reaching aspects. For that purpose, Valtech and Cognigy, both experts in their respective fields of Digital Transformation and Conversational AI, are joining forces.
Learn how we can help your business in our whitepaper: ‘A New Era for Automation in Customer Service with Conversational AI’. In it, Derek Roberti, VP Technology at Cognigy and Andreas Schönberg, Client Service Director at Valtech, go in depth about why it is paramount for modern companies to embrace a new view on Customer Service.
