Outsource Magazine

Virtual Assistance and Artificial Intelligence are here for customer service and sales – so what does this mean for the CRM space?

What is happening to advance the relationship between the vendor and the customer that we as businesspeople depend on? Today, we all know – or at least sense – that the normal way to support and communicate with our customer base is awkward, expensive and cumbersome in a standard call centre environment. We all know the problems associated with call centre metrics (average handle time, peak call management, accent and language requirements, call queue management, call abandonment, training of live agents, attrition and retention of those live agents and ultimately customer satisfaction). Today’s dilemma is to get the customer connected to someone that can solve the problems for the consumer or end-user in a rapid timeframe and at a communication level that satisfies the caller.  

This interaction is expensive, so the strategy is to generally “minimise” the interaction. But what if interactions were so inexpensive that communicating with your customer at every possible avenue was possible? What if interacting with your customers was no longer an expense item but a revenue generator? Wouldn’t customer retention grow if customer engagement increased with no limits, all the while lowering expenses? And an added benefit: increasing your interactions with your clients means they’re not interacting with your competitors!

The call centre industry doesn’t really have many global platforms such as exhibitions to display the latest technologies available to enhance performance and capabilities. We must rely on the analysts and consultants watching our industry through the individual reports they produce.

Technology has been advancing in the call centre arena. Self-help has been a target of many vendors but, until recently, has not really offered a true solution. IVRs have been introduced and used over the past 15-20 years but have not really resolved self-help to a level of full acceptance. This is largely due to problems associated with consumer and end-user communication. Web technology has advanced self-help to a small degree thus far, but has not penetrated the greater numbers of users of a given product to full satisfaction. At the same time, call centres looked to cheaper labour in offshore sites to resolve the high cost of customer service and sales but realised that accent and language barriers are more surmountable to achieve full customer satisfaction. Many call centre companies got caught up in the misnomer that answering a call more quickly is more important than resolving the issue. What many have missed is that the consumer and/or end-user is more concerned with the correct answer and getting the required information than the treatment of the call. What we know today is that to achieve true customer satisfaction and resolution to the issue in a timely and simple path becomes paramount regardless of how that happens.

Today, we have new offerings in the call centre industry. Virtual Assistance (VA) is now offered through new artificial intelligent software (AI), which offers more in the communications between consumers and commercial end-users. Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows customers to converse in off-script dialect. Consumers and commercial end-users do not respond well to fixed IVR communications where a caller or contact needs to respond to a fixed script or fixed response. This sometimes says that the vendor is not concerned with me personally as a customer, which is not good for brand equity or customer relations. IVRs often introduce problems with getting callers caught into loops where the resolution is not attainable or then having the caller placed back into a long queue to wait for a live agent and to start explaining the problem all over again.

VAs can be the resolution to a call centre’s problems if used correctly. Yes, it is an emerging technology and, like most emerging technologies, has some falsehood with numerous vendors who sell more than they can deliver or support. However, there are some definite credible offerings commercially available today. Some offerings actually offer credible solutions that allow for inexpensive communications with your customers. Some even offer advertising, generating revenue options which can convert your call centre “cost centre” into a “profit centre”. In our research, we have looked at 40 vendors who tout VA. Of those 40, fewer than 20 are deemed somewhat viable to look at based on their offerings, based on their size of their company, functionality and corporate backing. Of those 20, only a handful really offer a true VA solution that meets the level of resolution to an issue without human intervention.

Of that 20, only five are big enough and have been in business long enough to lower the risk of consideration. Of those five, two stand out as viable candidates to employ today with little risk. Of those two, only one has multi-lingual capability offering many languages globally to offer multi-lingual value for the issues at hand. Multi-lingual capability is extremely valuable in cost-reduction as well as increasing customer exposure and satisfaction.

When choosing your vendor, keep in mind many do not have multiple channels, so seek out the ones that incorporate integrated multiple channels, such as IVR Virtual Assistance (live agent avatar), Web Virtual Assistance (live avatar guide), Virtual Chat Assistance (live agent avatar), e-mail capability and mobile (smartphone avatar).  Several include avatars, which converse as an animation and a few converse with video avatars.

It’s still early in the development but access to this technology is here today.  Solid due diligence and in-depth research based on what is provided here should assist you in finding what is available and what would fit your requirements.

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