3 Voice Technology Use Cases to Inspire Your Digital Transformation.
Countless companies rely on contact centres to service customer queries and generate sales revenue. The contact centre is an established institution but there is an ongoing change in the technology that underpins its operations.
Businesses that fail to engage with contact centre transformation risk irritating their customers and provoking the ire of leaders that question excess costs.
However, digital transformation is a challenging exercise and, understandably, the motivation to shift technology gears can be elusive. Yet the potential of technology in the contact centre is truly inspiring, and we think the following three voice technology use cases will prove why cloud contact centre solutions can be so game-changing.
The Cloud is Central to Contact Centre Transformation
Cloud computing has democratised cutting-edge tech: even the most advanced solutions are available to businesses big and small. The tech brawns of companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are no longer restricted to in-house requirements or enterprise clients with big pockets.
Instead, cloud solutions (including cloud contact centre solutions) make advanced technology available for everyday use – including AI and its branches, such as natural language processing (NLP).
In aggregate, the various advantages of cloud solutions imply that companies can save costs in the contact centre, enjoy more flexibility and scalability while also offering a level of customer experience never before possible.
Nonetheless, it is often the individual technology components of a cloud solution that can offer big breakthroughs.
One example is voice technology – NLP, for example, used to be too computationally intensive to be deployed by a typical business.
Thanks to the widespread availability of cloud computing, highly advanced voice technology is now widely accessible.
How Does Voice Technology Work in the Contact Centre?
Tech leaders have made major advances in conversationally responding to human inputs, and in responding to human inputs. Just think about voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, for example.
But why does a voice assistant matter to contact centre operations?
Well, advanced voice technology is now available to companies everywhere thanks to cloud contact centre platforms: consider Amazon Lex bundled with Amazon Connect, the cloud contact centre service built on AWS. Google also bundles its voice tech alongside its own contact centre solutions, all underpinned by Google’s AI brawns.
Voice technology in the cloud is incredibly powerful, utilising speech recognition alongside NLP to understand spoken input.
This natural language capability is combined with the AI capabilities that are now more broadly available, in turn enabling unique contact centre applications – in the cloud, and without the need for expensive local computing equipment.
Three Great Ways Voice Technology Works in Action
Voice technology is seeing rapid adoption as companies try to improve the customer experience while minimising costs. Here at Conn3ct, we’ve seen several instances where voice technology gives the contact centre experience a significant boost.
Let’s take a look.
1. Advanced voice makes the contact centre more personal
Yes, we all know how contact centres can feel incredibly impersonal – that feeling of starting over every time you call in.
AI and NLP make the contact centre feel far more human.
Using an airline as an example, voice technology could immediately detect that an inbound caller had missed their flight.
A voice-enabled platform will respond with an appropriate “Hello John, I noticed you missed your flight…” following with the immediate option to rebook, to which the customer could simply respond “Yes, please rebook”. It is powerful enough to understand any reasonable variant of that response.
The result: both the airline and the customer save time by addressing a key issue there and then. Cost savings for the airline, a better customer experience for the traveller.
2. Side-lining the IVR
Contact centres need some mechanism to separate inbound calls, directing them to a qualified agent.
IVR has been the commonly deployed technique, but IVRs are known to frustrate customers whose question often do not fit the mould – or who simply tire of listening to long lists of options.
NLP capabilities allow automated systems to easily understand what the needs of a customer are.
Instead of listening through options and jabbing at a keypad, customers simply say what they’re trying to achieve and contact centre tech gets on with sending a customer to the right call centre agent.
It’s a vastly superior customer experience and it also helps companies by ensuring that customers are rarely directed to the incorrect agent.
For example, Connect applied voice technology in retail by helping a large food retailer to improve call routing using Amazon’s Lex – moving from a situation where up to 70% of calls were routed incorrectly, to a massive improvement with 90% of calls correctly routed to agents.
3. Reducing Contact Centre Costs
Because cloud contact centre tech has direct access to advanced computing power a much larger degree of automation becomes possible.
Instead of live agents handling every mundane query and request, companies can utilise automation to talk with customers through typical issues.
We would argue that 40% of calls can be automated using voice recognition and NLP, resulting in a large saving for contact centre operators.
Whether it’s “Where’s my order?” or “I’m calling to pay my bill”, cloud-driven automation can reduce the burden on the contact centre staff.
Customers are happier thanks to quicker responses, and the call centre saves as it requires significantly fewer employee hours to deal with simple queries.
Feel inspired? Here’s what you need to do
First and foremost, it is worth noting that the capabilities of the cloud contact centre go above and beyond merely making existing operations more efficient.
Voice and other cloud contact centre technologies can drive a brand-new contact centre business model: delivering not just efficiency savings, but a renewed customer experience.
Whether it is applying voice technology in banking, retail or travel companies must consider the possibility of the new, rather than just diving in to establish cost cuts.
Partnering with a cloud contact centre expert such as Conn3ct can help your business find the unique ways in which cloud contact centre solutions can be applied to your unique business problems – and business opportunities.
There is no one size fits all solution to your business challenges, that’s why we use a consultative approach.
Our approach is to understand the business goals and the customers’ journey across all touchpoints, so we can design the best solution for you.
How our consultations work:
1. Connect Consultation Call
We will start out by talking on the phone to get a sense of what your challenges are right now, what you’ve tried so far, and if Connect could be the answer.
2. Opportunity Analysis
If we think we can help you, we will put together a high-level plan of how we could bring you maximum value.
3. Strategy Workshop
If you like what you see we will set up a strategy workshop session with your key stakeholders. We always aim to get you as many quick wins as possible, while agreeing specific, achievable goals.
Find out how we can help your business communicate better.
To discuss your communications challenges and requirements, get in touch with us today.
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