UXMACHINEBITSOur approach to improving call center KPIs has to change

With the rise of conversational interfaces, executives should stop settling for incremental improvements in call center metrics. All of our measures — from cost to efficiency to customer satisfaction — are about to change in a way we haven’t seen for twenty years and it’s time to take action.

The Incremental Paradigm

Without Conversational AI, businesses have five chances to save money on their contact centers while helping customers address their issues more effectively.

1. Customers purchase products or services that they need help with. Product Quality and Usabilityis the first opportunity you have to satisfy customers and keep them out of your call center.

2. When customers need help, they can turn to a knowledge base, FAQ or product documentation for answers. Great documentationcan help customers who like reading and researching on their own.

3. When information isn’t easily findable in documentation, customers turn to search. The more we optimize our content for search

4. If users need to take action, they can do so through apps or self-service portals. This saves customers time, reduces cost and meets customer expectations.

5. If we haven’t created the content customers need, they can’t find the content or they can’t take action on their own, they will dial a call center. IVRs provide one last attempt to help customers before they reach an agent.

At each of these gates, we employ tactics to deflect calls from our call center and help customers help themselves. Most businesses fine tune each of these over time to push their KPIs a little bit further.

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Implementing Conversational AI is a small bet-big win opportunity.

We can incrementally optimize these tactics by creating more content, improving our search, enhancing our portals or apps or making more continuous improvements to our IVRs. These investments build on what we’ve done and allow for incremental improvements in efficiency.

But advancements in conversational AI are reshaping how we think about engaging with our customers. Conversational AI allows us to significantly optimize our existing investments while opening up entirely new avenues for automated communication and self-service.

Implementing a chatbot or digital assistant is iterative by nature, relatively low-risk and brings visible, high-impact wins to the enterprise without a high-stakes budget gamble.

Navigation and Search Aren’t Enough

Today, customers communicate with us through methods that are static or overly hierarchical. While good navigation and search are essential in helping your users find answers to their questions, they are static interaction points that rely on your customers’ ingenuity and persistence.

That is the legacy approach.

Meeting customers in their channel of choice, modality of choice and experience of choice in the moment they need help is the new paradigm that consumers demand.

Right now, existing web-based experiences make customers work too hard, increasing effort, because we aren’t able to get at the heart of what they are asking for. Discovering this in conversation allows us to more precisely surface the information users are looking for and it lets us follow up and clarify if we’ve got it wrong.

Conversational experiences are different from any kind of automated interaction we’ve known to date and they play a foundational role in meeting new consumer expectations.

Isn’t my IVR Conversational?

Your IVR can provide benefits that your website doesn’t, but it’s far from conversational. IVRs are characterized by hierarchical trees that guide users to an answer or an agent.

IVRs have several well-known usability problems:

1) Users have to listen to options that aren’t relevant to them.

2) Users have to remember which options have been presented and which number they have to press to get to the next step in the tree.

3) Users might go several levels deep in a tree and realize they taken the wrong branch.

4) When users get to a point in the interaction where they are presented with the information or functionality they need, there is no way to ask follow-up questions or clarify inputs without talking to an agent.

5) The IVR is unable to take action, and often used as a decision tree or for smart routing. We need to enable the IVR to actually resolve the issue. Reset the password, change the flight, file a ticket.

Making your IVR conversational means that users don’t need to worry about the hierarchy of your decision tree, they don’t need to remember which button to press and they can ask questions and clarify their points rather than hitting a dead end.

The technology for automating conversations is available today for immediate and practical business application. We are currently able to take advantage of innovation quickly and iteratively rather than waiting for a breakthrough moment or tipping point where the use of the technology is suddenly feasible.

So, how do Digital Assistants optimize and evolve my KPIs?

Here’s how conversation changes the game for each of your KPIs:

Deflection

Users find information and can take action more quickly. Instead of browsing, searching and navigating, users ask questions, get answers and take action in a single interface. Users stay in a self-service mode because they are getting the information they need more efficiently. Also, there is something to say about “being engaged.” Users may take a brief pass at search, but are willing to go further down a conversation with a bot.

Customer Effort

Because users have an efficient experience in a single interface, their effort is reduced. Effective triage further decreases customer effort by making sure users get to the right agent or channel.

Abandonment

Users are more likely to be helped when there is less friction in the support experience. Conversational interfaces reduce this friction by quickly providing context-aware answers while promising the availability of a human agent if needed.

Average Handle Time

When calls do reach an agent, average handle time is decreased because the agent has access to the full chat or smart IVR transcript. Through conversational triage, calls are routed to the right agent. Skills-based routing can be informed by profile information surfaced in chat transcripts.

Customer Satisfaction/NPS

Customers are happy and become advocates for your company when they have context-aware interactions, can get the help they need efficiently and, when automated interactions aren’t enough, are routed to the right human who already understands their issue.

A key takeaway here is that these metrics aren’t improved by gaming the user interaction — waiting a few more seconds to answer calls, having engaging hold music or repeating your website URL. These metrics are taken to a new level by providing a fundamentally new customer experience that engages users in their channel of choice with a natural language interaction.

Making Your Job Easier, Not Just Your KPIs

Digital Assistants offer operational benefits beyond your KPIs.

Hiring, Training and Churn

Turnover rates in customer service roles are often high and require ongoing investment in recruiting, hiring and training. By effectively deploying conversational interfaces you will naturally reduce your headcount requirements. By having automated agents handle your Level 1 cases, your existing agents can handle more complex issues that are more engaging and interesting to solve.

Consistency

Virtual agents are always on brand. By developing a personality for your agent, your customers get a consistent experience every time they interact with Support. Virtual agents don’t require major investments in retraining as your brand identity evolves.

24/7 Support

Many companies only provide support during specific business hours. This doesn’t always map to when your customers need help. Virtual agents are available 24 hours a day to minimally address Level 1 cases.

Scaling Best Practices

Human agents require ongoing training and coaching to ensure that best practices are consistently followed. Virtual agents, by contrast, can make use of best practices through improvements to conversational flows.

The Conversational Future is Being Built Today

There is a growing wave of businesses actively pursuing conversational projects for automation and engagement. While most businesses see this in their near future, some are still sitting on the sidelines.

It’s time to get in the game.

There is no better feeling professionally than being recognized by your Executive Team or Board for driving a measurable, breakthrough change in your business. And there aren’t many opportunities that come along to make a dramatic change in how our organizations work. Our lives as consumers, employees and managers are being reshaped by technological change. Now is our chance — in this brief window of time — to stand out as leaders.