Augmenting Customer Service departments to improve agent satisfaction
The modern customer service centre is constantly subject to scalability. Customer service trends and patterns can be unpredictable, often resulting in over exhausting resources and services to meet customer expectations. Conversational AI has the distinct ability to minimise this ordeal, creating a better experience for your customers and workers.
A streamlined, fluent customer service strategy is paramount. Temkin Group found that 73% of companies with “above average” customer experience maturity perform better financially than their competitors.
The benefits of conversational AI in the customer service industry are not confined to customer satisfaction. Businesses can redistribute resources away from mundane, uncomplicated queries in their service centre, towards more skilled, stimulating tasks. Run of the mill questions and issues can be handled through conversational AI, freeing up resources and time to up-skill co-workers to handle more sophisticated, complex customer inquiries.
Wasted Talent
Zendesk analytics suggest that AI-enabled conversational agents are expected to handle 20% of all customer service requests by 2022. Employees are invaluable in any business, the way we utilise them and harness their abilities is critical. Contact centre agents need consistent and regular training to maintain service quality across the board, meeting customer expectations always.
At VERSA, we understand that there are issues and queries that cannot be solved through conversational AI, and honestly, sometimes people just want to speak with a real human. However, customer satisfaction and trust can be severed when contact agents are not equipped with the training and knowledge to meet customer needs. These are honest realities of customer service, an unavoidable truth.
That is not to say that conversational AI will solve all issues, however, it can solve the common ones.
Supports Agent Training
Its no secret within this industry that agents come and go. That is the reality of the business and agent training is a hassle. Conversational AI can support your organisation by streamlining agent training, delivering data and knowledge to agents in an instant. Supporting an agent with instant access to accurate data, means agents spend less time searching for information themselves, reducing wait time and handling time, while improving first contact resolution. These are all known to be huge indicators of customer satisfaction.
The influx of standard, frequently asked questions is nothing new in customer service, we understand this. It is not stimulating work, often seen as somewhat of a tedious task.
We have seen this before; in 2016 health insurance company Humana found that 60% of the 1 million monthly calls were simple queries for basic information.
Looking after our agents
In recent years, it has become overwhelmingly apparent that customer service workers face many workplace difficulties. In the CV-Library report, 19.6% of customer service workers admitted to feeling bored every day, whilst 29.4% felt this way about their work every week. To put this in perspective, 57% of customer service workers surveyed admitted they have looked for a new job due to dull work life.
Workers will thrive in their new-found responsibility, and stimulate engagements with customers, understanding that their work is pivotal in customer satisfaction.
No longer will customer service agents be bogged down in routine questions; they will have the ability to impact customer experience, making a difference truly. These adjustments can be incredibly beneficial for workers; it will rejuvenate them, creating a healthy customer-business relationship.
Changes such as these are mutually beneficial for both the customer and businesses. Customers can complete routine tasks through conversational AI with fluidity and ease, not reliant on operation availability. Whilst businesses can up-skill and train workers in handling more complicated customer issues.
