Over the last 20 years, the Internet has allowed companies to outsource or offshore their contact centers overseas. Outsourcing has reduced costs and made customer service more accessible, but it hasn’t solved the three fundamental problems of contact centers:
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Predicting call center capacity is a challenge: Even with the best workforce management tools, it is difficult to predict customer calls’ volume and schedule the right amount of agents to handle fluctuating customer demand.
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Agent turnover is a reality: Agents don’t stay for very long. As a result, companies need to constantly hire, train, and retain new agents, which leads to higher costs.
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Customers have poor experiences, which negatively affects the customer’s experience: The more mundane the calls, the harder it is for agents to stay focused and engaged.
Now, AI is shaping how contact centers operate. Contact centers are becoming more responsive and efficient, and they’re providing elastic customer service for the first time. Elastic customer service means companies can scale customer service up or down according to customer demand without ballooning costs, training new agents, offshoring, or planning seasonal fluctuations. With elastic customer service, contact centers can meet customer demand 100% of the time while only paying for what they use. As a result, customer satisfaction increases, and agents are more productive.
What makes elastics customer service possible? Autonomous contact centers.
An autonomous contact center acts as the first line of defense to resolve, not deflect Tier-1 customer service issues without burdening your agents with repetitive, high-volume calls or keeping your customers on hold. Autonomous contact centers use voice AI to speak with customers naturally, understand intent, and resolve their issues. They don’t replace existing contact center software but instead, integrate with it and work either in front of an IVR to take all inbound calls or behind the IVR.
Autonomous contact centers solve the three problems that contact centers face by:
Resolving Tier-1 issues: Since machines are fantastic at performing tasks, AI can immediately resolve Tier-1 issues without agent intervention. For example, placing a food order, changing an address, or adding a vehicle to an insurance policy.
Providing always-on, elastic capacity: Your customer service capacity becomes elastic because AI can answer as many calls as needed. It doesn’t matter whether there are ten of thousands of calls an hour. There are no hold times; you don’t need to worry about having enough agents all the time and spikes in call volume flatten.
Improving CSAT: No hold times and shorter, more efficient calls result in higher customer satisfaction.
Companies can realize the potential of AI and autonomous contact centers today. Start by identifying one call driver to automate. The best use-cases are transactional, repetitive, and high-volume tasks.
Automating even a tiny percentage of your calls creates a path forward. You’ll eliminate hold times, be able to offer 24/7 customer service, and reduce your average handle time. Now, the pressure is off agents and shows success, motivating other internal teams to help roll out the technology on a larger scale.
