3 Burning Contact Centre Challenges Voice AI Solves With Ease
3 Burning Contact Centre Challenges Voice AI Solves With Ease
As the frontline of customer interaction, contact centres are under immense pressure. More than 42% of agents have difficulty in resolving customer queries, because of broken processes and siloed systems. They must deliver exceptional experiences while juggling efficiency and scale. An exceptional experince means a 70% hike in retention and 55% improvement in sale value.
The consequences of failing to meet these challenges are severe: lost customers, damaged brand reputation, and millions in potential revenue slipping away. 89% of customers switch brands after one subpar customer support experience.
Enter contact centre automation – the AI-powered solution to the biggest contact centre woes.
This article explores the most pressing challenges facing modern contact centres and reveals how Verloop.io, a leading contact centre automation platform, can help you tackle them head-on.
Top 8 Contact Center Challenges and Solutions
Challenge 1: Maintaining Consistency Across Customer Interactions
In large contact centres with numerous agents, ensuring a consistent quality of service across all customer interactions can be extremely challenging. Variations in agent knowledge, experience, and communication styles can lead to inconsistent customer experiences, potentially damaging brand reputation and customer loyalty. 75% of customers will do business with a business again even in the face of mishap, if the company provides personalised and excellent customer support services.
The Solution
Advanced AI-powered tools like Verloop.io’s Co-pilot for Agents are revolutionising the way contact centres maintain consistency. Here’s how:
- Real-Time Assistance: Co-pilot for Agents actively monitors conversations between agents and customers, providing instant suggestions and responses. This ensures that even less experienced agents can deliver high-quality support consistently without a long training period.
- Knowledge Base Integration: With AnswerFlow you can add the company’s knowledge base, allowing agents with accurate and up-to-date information alongside responses quickly.
- Tone and Style Guidance: AI Tone Adjustment and Expression can detect and suggest appropriate tones and styles of communication. Using this feature agents can curate responses-based on the customer’s mood and the nature of the inquiry, helping them maintain a consistent brand voice.
- Best Practice Sharing: The AI learns from successful interactions and can share these best practices across the entire agent team, elevating the overall quality of support.
By implementing AI-driven assistance, contact centres can significantly reduce variability in customer interactions, leading to more predictable and satisfying customer experiences.
Challenge 2: Meeting and Exceeding Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) set the benchmarks for contact centre performance, covering metrics such as response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores. In layman terms it defines the expected level of service by the customer from a business. Meeting these SLAs consistently can be challenging, especially during peak periods or when dealing with complex issues.
The Solution
Traditional SLAs are evolving into dynamic SLAs, and having predictive SLA adjustment solutions can help reduce ticket size by 30%. Verloop.io offers several features specifically designed to help contact centres meet and exceed their SLAs:
- SLA Tracking and Alerts: Verloop’s Threshold tool monitors ongoing conversations and alerts in real time agents when they’re at risk of breaching SLA targets.
- Intelligent Routing: By analysing the nature of incoming queries and agent expertise, the platform can route conversations to the most suitable agents based on their skillset and department, reducing handling times and improving first-contact resolution rates.
- Automated Responses: For common queries, it can suggest accurate and coherent responses, dramatically reducing response times.
- Predictive Analytics: The AI analyses historical data to predict busy periods, allowing managers to allocate resources more effectively and maintain SLA compliance during peak times.
- Real-Time SLA Dashboards: Managers get access to real-time SLA performance metrics, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and interventions when necessary. They can even download schedule reports for agent productivity or get ad hoc reports as needed.
With these automation features, contact centres can meet their SLAs more consistently and set more ambitious targets as well.
Challenge 3: Enhancing Agent Productivity and Efficiency
Contact centre agents often struggle with juggling multiple tasks simultaneously – navigating various systems, searching for information, and managing customer interactions. This multitasking can lead to reduced productivity, longer handling times, and increased stress for agents. As per one of the recent reports average handling time increases by 15% because of complex queries. The high churn rate of 25% makes it impossible for contact centers to ensure consistency and handle the added pressure of training new agents.
The Solution
Verloop.io’s Co-pilot for Agents is a generative AI powered chatbot for agents, which comibined with one of our other gen AI features AnswerFlow, actively listens to the conversation and generates appropriate responses for the customer engagement. AnswerFlow uses document cognition to fetch and create responses from the pre-uploaded company documents from the system. Our GenAI agent assist features also includes tools like AI-Summary, AI-Rephrase, AI-Expand, Expression and AI-Tone Adjustment, which address these productivity challenges head-on:
- AnswerFlow: This tool provides agents with step-by-step guidance for handling different types of queries, reducing the cognitive load and allowing them to focus on customer interaction.
- AI-Summary: After each interaction, the AI generates a concise summary, saving agents time on documentation and ensuring important details are captured accurately.
- AI-Tone Adjustment: This feature helps agents maintain an appropriate tone throughout the conversation, adapting to the customer’s mood and the situation at hand.
- AI-Expand: This feature empowers agents to deepen responses, transforming short answers into rich, detailed explanations that enhance understanding and create a more valuable customer experience.
- AI-Rephrase: This feature suggests reworded options to ensure responses are polished, clear, and approachable. It adjusts language and tone subtly to suit various customer needs without altering the original message.
- Unified Interface: The platform integrates various tools and information sources into a single interface, eliminating the need for agents to switch between multiple systems.
- Automated After-Call Work: Many post-call tasks, such as categorising the interaction and updating customer records, can be automated, allowing agents to move quickly to the next customer.
This not only improves efficiency metrics but also enhances job satisfaction, potentially reducing turnover rates in the high-stress contact centre environment.
Challenge 4: Ensuring Comprehensive Quality Assurance
Traditional quality assurance (QA) processes in contact centres often rely on a random sampling of customer interactions, leading to more than 50% of actual data being left on the table. Typically a QA analyst takes more than 25 minutes to go over one conversation, leading to the method of random sampling for quality audit. This approach can miss critical issues, fail to identify systemic problems and provide an incomplete picture of agent performance and customer satisfaction.
The Solution
This is where Verloop.io’s Sparks comes into play. Sparks is a cutting-edge, LLM-powered quality assurance tool designed to transform contact centres by automating quality assurance processes, enabling comprehensive conversation analysis that boosts service accuracy and efficiency.. Here’s how Sparks addresses the limitations of traditional QA:
- 100% Interaction Analysis: Unlike random sampling, Sparks analyses every single customer interaction across all channels (voice, email, chat, social media).
- AI-Driven Evaluation: Sparks uses advanced natural language processing and LLM modules to evaluate interactions based on predefined criteria such as adherence to scripts, problem-solving effectiveness, empathy, and more.
- Customisable Evaluation Framework: Businesses can define their own quality criteria and weightings, ensuring the evaluation aligns with their specific goals and values.
- Real-Time Insights: Managers receive instant alerts about critical issues or exceptional performances, allowing for timely interventions or recognition.
- Trend Analysis: By analysing large volumes of interactions, Sparks can identify emerging trends, recurring issues, and opportunities for improvement that might be missed by human reviewers.
- Continuous Learning: The AI model continuously learns and adapts based on feedback, ensuring that the evaluation criteria remain relevant and effective over time.
By implementing Sparks, contact centres can move from sporadic, manual quality checks to comprehensive, AI-powered quality assurance. This provides a more accurate picture of service quality and enables data-driven decision-making for continuous improvement.
Challenge 5: Providing Objective Performance Evaluation and Coaching
Human bias can significantly impact the fairness and consistency of agent evaluations. Subjective assessments may lead to inconsistent feedback, demotivated agents, and missed opportunities for genuine improvement with personalised training programs This is one of the reasons 88% of organisations are investing heavily on quality monitoring and agent training programs to improve the service quality.
The Solution
Sparks by Verloop.io addresses this challenge by providing an objective, data-driven approach to performance evaluation and coaching:
- Standardised Evaluation Criteria: Sparks uses consistent, pre-defined criteria to evaluate all interactions, eliminating the variability that comes with human reviewers.
- Quantifiable Metrics: The system generates scores and metrics for various aspects of performance, providing a clear, objective basis for evaluation.
- Comparative Analysis: Agents’ performances can be easily compared against team averages, top performers, or historical data, providing context for individual results.
- Personalised Coaching Insights: By analysing an agent’s interactions over time, Sparks can identify specific areas for improvement and suggest tailored coaching interventions.
- Continuous Feedback: Instead of relying on periodic reviews, Sparks provides ongoing feedback, allowing for more timely and effective performance management.
- Recognition of Improvement: The system can track and highlight improvements in an agent’s performance over time, fostering a culture of continuous learning and development.
This helps contact centres create a more fair, transparent, and effective system for managing agent performance.
Challenge 6: Efficiently Handling Complex Customer Issues
As self-service options become more advanced, contact centre agents increasingly find themselves dealing with complex, nuanced issues that couldn’t be resolved through automated channels. These interactions often require extensive knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. More than 60% of the customer queries, as per a study, does not get resolved in the first call, thus showing a need for agent productivity centric solutions and programs.
The Solution
Verloop.io’s Co-pilot for Agents is designed to support agents in handling these complex scenarios:
- Contextual Understanding: Co-pilot for Agents analyses the entire conversation history and customer profile to understand the full context of the issue.
- Knowledge Base Integration: AnswerFlowintegration comes in handy not only to maintain consistency but also help agents solve complex customer issues with ease.
- Step-by-Step Guidance: For complex processes or troubleshooting, Co-pilot for Agentcan provide agents with a structured, step-by-step guide to resolving the issue.
- Real-Time Suggestions: As the conversation progresses, Co-pilot for Agent offers relevant suggestions, additional questions to ask, or potential solutions to try.
- Learning from Resolutions: The system learns from successful resolutions of complex issues, continuously improving its ability to assist in similar future scenarios.
By augmenting human expertise with AI-powered assistance, contact centres can significantly improve their ability to handle complex customer issues efficiently and effectively.
Challenge 7: Optimising Knowledge Management and Information Accessibility
Contact centres often struggle with managing vast amounts of information and ensuring that agents can quickly access the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge to address customer queries.
The Solution
Verloop.io’s Co-pilot for Agents incorporates advanced knowledge management capabilities:
- Intelligent Search: The system uses natural language processing to understand the context of a query and retrieve the most relevant information, even if the agent’s search terms don’t exactly match the stored content.
- Dynamic Knowledge Base: Co-pilot can automatically update the knowledge base based on successful resolutions, ensuring that the information remains current.
- Personalised Knowledge Delivery: The system learns individual agents’ preferences and expertise levels, tailoring the presentation of information to suit their needs.
- Multi-Format Support: Co-pilot can handle various content formats, including text, images, videos, and interactive guides, presenting the most appropriate format for each situation.
- Gap Analysis: By analysing customer queries and agent searches, the system can identify gaps in the existing knowledge base and suggest areas for content creation or improvement.
- Compliance and Version Control: For industries with strict regulatory requirements, Co-pilot ensures that agents always access the most up-to-date, compliant information.
By implementing such an intelligent knowledge management system, contact centres can dramatically improve information accessibility, reduce handling times, and enhance the accuracy of responses.
Challenge 8: Ensuring Scalability and Adaptability
Contact centres need to be able to scale their operations quickly in response to changing business needs, seasonal fluctuations, or unexpected spikes in customer inquiries. Traditional systems often struggle to adapt rapidly without compromising service quality.
The Solution
Both Co-pilot for Agents and Sparks by Verloop.io are designed with scalability and adaptability in mind:
- Cloud-Based Infrastructure: These solutions are built on scalable cloud infrastructure, allowing for rapid expansion of capacity as needed.
- Flexible Deployment Models: Contact centres can choose between full cloud, on-premises, or hybrid deployments based on their specific requirements.
- API-First Approach: Robust APIs allow for easy integration with existing systems and quick implementation of new features or channels.
- Customisable Workflows: Both tools offer highly customisable workflows that can be adjusted to meet changing business needs without requiring extensive development work.
- Multi-Language Support: As businesses expand globally, these tools can easily accommodate multiple languages and cultural nuances.
- Continuous Learning and Improvement: The AI models underpinning these solutions continuously learn and adapt based on new data, ensuring they remain effective as the business evolves.
- Predictive Scaling: By analysing historical data and trends, these tools can help contact centres predict future scaling needs and prepare accordingly.
By leveraging these scalable and adaptable automation solutions, contact centres can confidently handle growth, seasonality, and unexpected changes in customer behaviour.
Experience The Future of Contact Centres with Verloop.io
As we’ve explored, the challenges facing modern contact centres are numerous and complex. However, with advanced automation solutions by Verloop.io, these challenges are increasingly becoming opportunities for differentiation and excellence.
Ready to transform your contact centre? Book a demo with Verloop.io today and discover how our AI-powered solutions can enhance your contact centre operations.
