Are you familiar with that feeling of distress when you finally receive your Internet Box but it struggles to start up? Yet, you followed the installation manual's recommendations to the letter... Contacting customer service to quickly resolve your issue seems like an obvious solution. But once on the line, faced with a multitude of predefined options that none fit you, or worse, in the absence of a quick response, you end up hanging up. Irritated and dissatisfied.
To overcome these bitter experiences, optimization methods for exchanges have been conceived and developed for users' benefit. Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in the personalization and optimization of the customer journey and experience. According to Microsoft*, by 2025 nearly 95% of customer interactions will be through channels using artificial intelligence!
Indeed, AI today establishes itself as an essential technology in contact centers. Through the automation of repetitive and low-value tasks, it enables agents to fully focus on interactions requiring emotional human capabilities (creativity, innovation, conflict resolution). Customer service representatives are thereby able to offer an optimal client experience, finally worthy of the name! Technology thus proves to be a powerful tool to assist agents in complex environments. Welcome to the era of the Augmented Agent.
AI supporting Augmented Agents
Customer experience is unanimously considered as a key element of competitive differentiation. It even stands as the new battleground where companies seek to gain a decisive edge over their competitors.
The advisor, a contact point at various moments in the customer journey, has seen their role evolve and become central. Burdened with heavy responsibilities, being in direct contact with the client, they face two constraints. First, ever-more demanding consumers, but also a workstation that is becoming more complex due to several factors:
The progressive emergence of new communication channels;
The boom of e-commerce;
The Covid-19 health crisis and the need to be as productive while working remotely...
Often insufficiently trained, they find themselves having to satisfy fickle clients, expecting immediacy and transparency, juggling with endless interfaces, and ultimately not very user-friendly!
This is why the automation of manual and repetitive tasks through the intervention of AI significantly increases the efficiency and productivity of contact centers. These automations can reduce processing times by up to 40%. These aids include:
Keyword analysis in written exchanges (SMS, email, chat) allowing, for instance, to automatically propose suitable responses to the client;
Semantic analysis of exchanges helping the advisor to tailor their speech and progress;
Assistance in data entry for teleconsultants for considerable time savings, etc.
Such gains enable satisfying and retaining customers while reducing operational costs. Finally, one of the most promising uses of AI is in emotion analysis. Upon receiving a call within an IVR, for instance, it is possible to detect if a client is in a particular emotional state (irritated, angry, aggressive, etc.) before an interaction with the support team. This offers the possibility to tailor the discourse or transfer it to a specific service if needed, reducing the emotional burden borne by teleconsultants while enhancing the client's request handling.
Technologies evolving at the service of teleconsultants
Robots as job thieves, technology devoid of conscience and ethics... Fears of AI taking over are numerous, but often unfounded. These alarms need tempering: teleconsultants can leverage these various technologies, which will support rather than replace them.
One of the most striking examples of AI's use in service of advisors is certainly the deployment of callbots and voicebots in customer relations, especially within interactive voice response systems. The utility of voice assistants is well visible: it involves responding to the caller's request in the simplest and quickest way, without human intervention. These conversational assistants then automatically handle time-consuming but not complex tasks. If needed, the call is forwarded to an advisor who will take over the client's request. By creating a new form of enriched interaction with clients that is both simplified and personalized in natural language, the client experience is optimized. This technology meets the needs of contact centers in various forms and offers much to customer services to make the work of agents at home or on-site faster and more effective.
The ability of AI to formalize a customer context and analyze its data makes complete sense! It is thus possible to project further, to see in the technology not a replacement for the teleconsultant, but an extraordinary ally capable of making them an augmented advisor. While the trend to oppose human and voice assistant is part of the collective imagination, the association of artificial intelligence and the teleconsultant is destined to enhance the latter's capabilities and usher us into the era of augmented customer relations.
Ultimately, an augmented agent is a collaborator supported by their expertise and relieved of low-value repetitive tasks. It is an employee aware of the importance of their role within the contact center, finding themselves in an organization centered on the client, valuing them and providing them the means to significantly improve the customer experience.
ViaDialog, customer relationship management solution, ally of augmented agents
The challenge of AI's contribution to customer relations has been at the heart of ViaDialog's concerns for many years. This has pushed us to develop innovative solutions for automating the customer journey and improving teleconsultants’ working conditions.
ViaSpeech thus offers a comprehensive solution for automating the customer journey in natural language with tools enabling the creation of voicebots, callbots, and assistants directly integrable into your voice servers. And for a touch of floware, ViaDialog has developed ViaFlow, a natively omnichannel customer interaction management platform featuring our latest AI technologies.
*Powering the Future of the Customer Experience, Microsoft, 2017.
