Contact centre leaders have always grappled with the trade-off between good-quality customer service and keeping costs at an acceptable level.
But if customer service was important pre-pandemic, it is now totally essential to winning and keeping business; for many consumers, it is more important than competitive pricing.
There may, however, be a solution: artificial intelligence.
Since the formation of their partnership last year, US reseller CDW and Five9 have been working to help businesses address, or even abolish, this trade-off.
We spoke to CDW’s Casey Bleeker who explained that the US firm has built Five9’s advanced contact centre platform into its portfolio to help businesses transform their customer experience.
This comes amid the Covid pandemic, which has challenged contact centres like never before, with facilities shut across the world and buyers shopping online in record numbers.
But even when sites reopen, demand from consumers will remain high.
Bringing practical AI solutions such as Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) and Agent Assist into the contact centre, Bleeker said, is helping businesses deliver the experiences that customers want without a huge expenditure.
He explained that AI technology can provide a level of instant self-service to customers before speaking to an agent, often addressing queries before human-to-human interaction is required. This quickens the service for the consumer and reduces the workload of the agent.
Bleeker said that AI in the contact centre is being driven in three key areas:
- Virtual Agents – Virtual agents are able to complete tasks that, while simple, can take up a sizeable portion of a human agent’s time, as well as the time of a customer that would otherwise have to wait in a queue. Bleeker gave the example of an energy provider suffering an outage, which could suddenly be flooded with thousands of calls from customers reporting a fault. “If you have 100 contact centre agents and 100,000 people are calling in to report an outage, they can only serve as a small percentage of those,” he said. “So, the diversion may be purely for a better customer experience, not just to reduce agent count. “If 10 per cent of a utility provider’s calls are about outages, they could remove that with a virtual agent; a 10–per–cent reduction is huge. “The ROI is being able to have those resources available for other customer interactions. Those 100,000 people can be diverted to the virtual agent and somebody who is calling with a billing issue wouldn’t be locked out.”
- Agent Assistance – The second use Bleeker described involves AI “co-piloting” the service provided by a human agent. In this case, the AI is listening to the call and taking relevant actions, quicker than a human would be able to. For example, if a caller is asking to reset their password, the virtual agent could surface the reset password screen for the agent. “This does two things,” Bleeker said. “It gives the agent the ability to better serve the consumer with better information, but it also allows the business to create processes. “A contact centre may have special offers for customers or a survey they’d like customers to take; so you can have these prescriptive steps that the AI reminds the agent to complete. “The ability to monitor the ongoing interaction with the caller means contact centres can drastically lower the training burden for new agents, rather than them having to remember everything.”
- Data Insights – The third category stems from the utilisation of the data that is generated by virtual and human agents. This can help businesses capitalise on trends that would have otherwise been difficult to identify and act upon. “You have a pool of big data and an analytics challenge,” Bleeker said. “But now you can start to get visibility of all the things that customers are calling about. It might be that in the last two days, there has been a 30 per cent uptick in login issues for customers; now the web development team can be notified. “Or perhaps a specific product has been reported as faulty by a number of customers, so now a retailer can now go and investigate. “You can get real–time analysis and visibility of your entire customer base and the trends that are taking place.”
Low Hanging Fruit
The benefits of AI integration in the contact centre are clear to see, but the route to getting there is often harder to envisage.
Together, CDW and Five9 take a collaborative approach in helping customers identify areas of the business where AI can be the most effective, but at a steady pace. It’s important to manage customer expectations and help them through a number of implementation stages.
“A lot of people imagine a glowing orb in their call centre that is predicting and orchestrating everything,” he said.
“But in reality, there is some low-hanging fruit that most businesses have that are easy-to-implement use cases for virtual agents that would massively transform their customer experience.
“We help customers get started by identifying those use cases because some of these are really easy but will have a huge impact.
“So, they don’t have to automate everything from day one. We might start with 20 per cent of call volume for a particular use case, then move it to 30 per cent when the virtual agent can handle it. We build a roadmap with our customers.”
Taking the first steps with AI in the contact centre may require careful planning, but what is clear is that businesses in all verticals can benefit.
The technology is no longer restricted to the world’s largest institutions with huge budgets, with smaller businesses now able to get started at an affordable price.
Bleeker says Five9 and CDW have worked with clients across multiple industries – including utilities, healthcare, financial services, telecoms, eCommerce and retail –– adding that he has never seen a technology move procurement processes as fast as AI in the contact centre.
“All customers want that value proposition,” Bleeker explained. “It’s moving down market quickly.
“One of the biggest barriers is finding a partner to get started with, but we’re coming out of that incubation phase.
“There are enough tools and platforms with Five9 and enough partners such as CDW to make real–world solutions that can go down the market very quickly.”
