What is Voice Self-Service?

Voice Self-Service could dramatically reduce your contact centre workflow

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Voice Self-Service
Contact CentreInsights

Published: April 28, 2021

Anwesha Roy - UC Today

Anwesha Roy

Self-service has the potential to dramatically reduce your contact centre workflows while simultaneously empowering your customers. And in a digital world, self-service allows customers the opportunity to interact with your brand in a seamless, convenient manner without increasing your FTE requirements. As Salesforce found, nearly 7 in 10 customer service decision-makers cite self-service as an essential strategic cog. An emerging and promising area of self-service application is voice self-service, intersecting customers’ continued reliance on voice with advanced self-service technology.  

What is Voice Self-Service?  

You can define voice self-service as a technology capability that allows customers to obtain support via voice commands and complete basic tasks through voice, without the intervention of a live agent. Voice self-service can be deployed either in integration with your IVR system or voice-based apps for virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, etc.  

The former is much more popular in the realm of customer service, as it allows contact centres to overlay self-service processes on top of their existing IVR infrastructure. Voice commands through personal assistance are much rarer. It is currently limited mainly to the exploration phase of the customer journey, where one can look up basic company information and solve FAQ queries using voice commands.  

Why is Voice Self-Service so Important for Your Contact Centre? 

Despite the proliferation of channels, voice continues to be the dominant mode of customer interactions. Around 92% of all business and customer interactions still rely on voice, a trend that paves the way for implementing voice-based self-service. Further, most contact centres already have the foundational infrastructure in place in the form of interactive voice response or IVR systems. But instead of keypad-based navigation and actions, it would use speech recognition and voice-based commands.  

Voice self-service could unlock the following benefits for contact centres:  

  1. Convenience– it is more convenient for customers to simply state their requirement than go through a complex combination of IVR response codes. This also improves CX
  2. Effort reduction– The availability of self-service reduces customers’ need to call up the contact centre, thereby shrinking your queues and FTE requirements
  3. Security– Voice self-service could use voice biometrics to verify customer identity without the intervention of a live agent. This significantly reduces fraud risk
  4. Speech analytics– Voice self-service interactions can be recorded to check for specific keywords, phrases, and vocal cues, such as a pause. This offers useful insights into customer intent
  5. Empowerment– Voice interfaces are particularly suitable for mobile usage, providing customers with a sense of empowerment, freedom of mobility, and channel flexibility
  6. Personalisation– You can configure the IVR flow based on voice self-service analysis, assigning every customer a personalised call flow based on their behaviour
  7. Automation– Voice self-service metrics can be used to further improve the IVR system, configuring options, responses, and user experience for optimal outcomes

Considerations for Implementing Voice Self-service 

Contact centre providers like Verint and Genesys have voice self-service capabilities, in addition to traditional IVR. Hosting your voice application (on-premise or on the cloud), integrating it with existing queueing systems, and training the self-service algorithm on different datasets, accents and customer profiles are some of the other considerations.  

 

 

AutomationSecurity and ComplianceSelf Service
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