Automation is a key tool in the contact centre industry’s efforts to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and improve customer service. With voice remaining a vitally important channel, it’s no surprise that automation finds its use in this location as well, being deployed to improve response times and more efficiently deliver excellent customer service. With a wealth of chatbots and automation products on offer, the question is how easily they can be implemented in existing contact centres.
In an exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Peter Broeckx, Sales Manager Contact Centre EMEA at AudioCodes, to discuss this topic, alongside the key role of voice automation and AudioCodes’ own Voice.AI Connect offering.
Making Contact Centre Automation a Success
The starting point for any automation project is to first understand customer behaviour, as Broeckx explains: “How do their customers prefer to connect and interact with them? What languages are involved? What specific use cases need to be addressed? Once that’s understood they can then consider how conversational AI, chatbot and voicebot technologies can help improve the customer experience.”
Personalisation is an area that can particularly benefit from the technology, with a recent study from Forrester showing that 90% of customer service leaders think personalisation is core to the future of automation. “The real value in conversational automation platforms is the personalisation that they can provide across the customer journey,” says Broeckx. “By leveraging customer, product and interaction data, automation platforms can improve a brand’s interactions and increase customer lifetime value.”
The Digital Transformation of Voice
While automation might sometimes be associated with more digital CX channels, the most popular form of contact centre interaction can also benefit. “Voice remains the most intuitive means of human communications,” says Broeckx. “It is faster, more effective and more emotional. In CX, customers understand that by using voice, they can more quickly and more effectively explain what they need and avoid uncertainty.” The downsides of voice can be mitigated via automation. “The value of conversational AI is that it requires no human intervention and can work 24/7. Quick response times naturally lead to better customer satisfaction, minimising the negative experiences associated with long response times, email inertia and call queues. This all has a positive impact on brand perception and reputation.”
Aside from benefiting the customer, agents can also benefit from voice automation technologies, as Broeckx explains. “Conversational AI can also support your agents by providing insights and recommendations, while agent assist technology can help the agent gather information, provide suggestions and next best actions. It ensures more consistent responses from every agent, old or new. From an economic perspective the use of conversational AI, especially for simple, transactional tasks, means that skilled (and more expensive) human resources can be applied to more complex tasks where live human interaction and intelligence is needed.”
The Benefits of AudioCodes’ Implementation
The enormous potential of the technology means little if it cannot be made to play nice with existing contact centre technologies, however. That’s where AudioCodes’ offering comes into play. “AudioCodes Voice.AI Connect enables contact centres to work with best-of-breed bot frameworks, speech recognition and text-to-speech services,” says Broeckx. “Voice.AI Connect can connect any contact centre to any bot framework and allows you to choose the cognitive services you want to use for your specific use case.”
Offered as a managed service, the solution does not require expertise for implementation or maintenance. “Voice.AI Connect connects to all contact centres via SIP APIs, as well as conversational AI web services, and orchestrates their activities to create a fluent and high-quality intelligent call experience. It supports all the main voice use cases, including virtual agent, agent assist and conversational IVR.”
As Broeckx emphasises, the solution is designed to bring the benefits of AI voice automation while avoiding the pitfalls. “As an enterprise, you focus on the customer journey and customer experience in general. AudioCodes takes care of the underlying voice technology and automation.”
To find out more about AI voice automation in contact centres, read the AudioCodes Voice.AI Connect whitepaper.
