Call centres are way ahead of the time when they had no choice but to work around problems they face. But not anymore! Here are the top contact centre challenges voice AI solves for you.

Operating a contact centre is no five-finger exercise.

It takes a lot more than what you can simply count on fingers in one hand. Today, consumer behaviour is mercurial and not linear, making customer service a tougher domain to sustain in.

Is your contact centre able to operationally keep up AND offer great customer service at the same time? You will have many hurdles along the way as you scale your contact centre. 9 out of 10 doctors users say they will not buy from a business after just 3 or fewer bad customer support experiences. Botch up once, and they might slide it. Make it twice, and you will lose money.

This is when upcoming technologies like voice AI becomes your troubleshooter

But before we jump into the ways Voice AI solves, let’s look at the top challenges you will face in a contact centre.

Contact Centre Challenges We Know You’re Probably Dealing With

Every successful business is heavily reliant on good customer support. But, with that success comes a number of challenges and concerns — challenges which are growing in their complexity as technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace.

Challenge 1: Managing High-Volume Calls

Call centre is the destination for ALL your customers, whether here or seven seas across, to phone in to get their queries resolved. And when operating solely, it is also the department with the busiest days and nights. High call centre volume is a persistent problem in call centres. Several factors increase call volumes, such as changes to business hours or holiday seasons. When call volume increases all at once, it’s difficult for agents to keep up with demand, which means more people have to stay on hold with annoying music. Frustrated customers will eventually skip your service. At least 42% do without a doubt.

Challenge 2: High Attrition Rates in Contact Centres

Contact centre jobs have a notoriously high turnover rate. High attrition is a clear indicator of toxic work culture. Imagine just how unfulfilling can monotonous high volume work can be? 

People want to engage in meaningful work. Over 40% of agents switch employers because they feel their skills are undervalued. Call centre jobs seldom leave room for innovation and rewarding brainwork. This is when it starts reflecting on the customer experience your agents are delivering. That, or they simply quit. 

Challenge 3: Cost and Efficiency of IVR systems

Essentially speaking, IVR works as a broker, a middleman. At best, it is a script-based information provider. It can not really resolve any queries on its own. Moreover, IVR menus are inept and long. 

Now it becomes cost-intensive without any returns. Not to mention how the inefficiency trickles down to poor customer experience. High AHT and longer wait queues are bad news.

How Can Voice Technology Fix the Challenges?

Voice technology is the new wave to take on the biggest challenges in call centres. IVR is a form of reactive engagement, meaning you wait for the user to engage with you first.

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By 2025, proactive (like AI-driven voicebots or chatbots) engagement will outnumber reactive (like IVR) interactions. Cut-throat competition today requires you to reach your customers before others do or worse yet, they hop onto them. Voice tech, yet, again, comes to the rescue.

1. Voice AI is Helping Contact Centres Overcome the Challenge of Volume

Most of the incoming queries that make up the high call volume are elemental. For example, when will my refund come, I am unable to pay using my card, I want to give feedback – are the most common, recurrent queries. Let voice AI resolve these high volume low hanging fruit by itself. 

You can design your voicebot’s conversational flow that lets the user self-serve themselves in time of need. Rather than waiting for an agent to answer basic queries, voice AI can resolve a major chunk of the high volume in real-time.

2. Voice AI is Helping Contact Centres with Attrition and Talent Needs

Voice tech removes stagnancy. Since all L1 queries are deflected by the voicebot, agents are physically and mentally available to take up challenging work. It presents agents with a choice, an opportunity to grow higher up in the career and demand their labour’s worth. It drastically improves an agent’s day-to-day chaotic schedule with more value-driven work. 

Employee satisfaction is crucial because it immediately reflects on how your customers feel — especially for service-oriented businesses like call centres.

3. Voice AI is Increasing ROI and Profitability of Contact Centres

Evolution is perpetual. Newer technologies like voice AI are keeping demands and incoming call-flows in check for contact centres. Smart automation like this pays fairly well in the long term. Companies that deploy digital automation are 6% more productive than their competitors. AI-first companies also bring home 20% more ROI and profits, versus 5% of businesses that don’t use automation.

Why do you think that happens? Because automation is not only consumer-centric but also plays in favour of contact centre employees. More satisfied agents render better experiences for complex cases, which in turn makes users come back for more. Great CX is directly proportional to the revenue you generate.  

The Bottom Line

While other businesses can afford to ponder over a bit longer, time is ticking for call centres. The only way to stay afloat in a saturated market is to realise customer and employee satisfaction must be mutually inclusive. Voice automation is imperative.

Gone are the days when the human touch, or rather the human voice, was limited to just the B2C interactions. Soon, businesses all over the globe will realise that their customers want more from them. They want to be heard, they want a pleasant interaction and they want to feel valued. Verloop.io addresses all these challenges with its cutting-edge technology with an AI-based voice recognition built on highly trained ASR and STT.