Cutting Call Center Costs and Improving Customer Service with AI

As companies are battling service disruptions to their core business, call volumes are on the rise and revenues are in decline, they are forced with the difficult decision to reduce their cost-per-call while mitigating impact to customer service. The question on everyone's mind is, how do you do that?

Traditional Self-Service Isn't enough

In the past, companies have attempted to have their customers use company websites for self-service in the form of knowledge bases or web forms. But many times customers will still pick-up the phone and call. In this scenario, many companies have relied on outdated IVRs to either automate a small portion of calls or implement call routing.

These approaches, however, are ill-suited for the crisis the call centers are facing today with their COVID-19/Coronavirus response.

Fortunately, AI Self-Service can provide immediate relief for these overtaxed call centers.

What types of interactions can be automated?

A key tool to success that organizations have not had available to them in the past, is the ability to start small and iterate. Deploying a Conversational IVR or contact automation strategy does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. You can start with simple and routine calls, such as Frequently Asked Questions, or appointment setting, for example, and see immediate results. With machine learning, the system actually gets smarter with each customer interaction and can address more and more call types. The benefits compound quickly.

Frequently Asked Questions

The fastest and easiest way to improve service and reduce costs is to automate frequently asked questions from your customers. These could be questions specific to service changes or impacts as a result of COVID-19, or even general questions that customers have. Traditionally, the only way to address these types of customer questions was either through the company's website or with live agents.

Xaqt can automate Frequently Asked Questions within a day of getting started and the solutions require no integration into your existing back-office applications.

Appointment and Reservation Cancelling or Rescheduling

With service businesses in temporary shutdown, most customers need to cancel or reschedule their appointments or reservations. Unfortunately, because of the drastic nature of the shutdowns, all of these calls are coming in at once and thus overwhelming call centers.

These calls are a good target for automation because the are similar and repetitive in nature.

Xaqt can interface with your company's scheduling system and automate the cancelation of reservations, or enable you to reschedule them once your normal operations resume.

Order Management

With global supply chains in disruption, customers' orders and shipments may experience delays or customer's may simply be concerned about their order status and want to call you.

Answering these calls can come at the expense of taking calls for new orders or other revenue generating opportunities. Automating checking-order status or even facilitating exchanges and returns can free your agents-up to answer more complex customer service calls.

Tech Support

Similar in nature too Frequently Asked Questions, Tech Support calls typically follow a defined process. Conversational AI provides the ability to capture information from customers, such as their product models or serial numbers, that can automatically serve the best the answer to the customer or help them to access the best answer in the knowledge base.

Automating Level One Tech Support calls will reduce your total cost of service and let your agents focus on the tough calls.

Billing and Payments

During times of crisis, its critical to keep customer payments and revenue collection uninterrupted. With integration into your CRM or ERP system, Xaqt can begin automating these mission critical calls within days.

Outage IVR or Service Updates

In some cases, a company may need have a total service disruption and will need to field calls from impacted customers. Most contact centers either can't handle the sudden call volume, which results in poor customer experience, or they find existing IVR solutions expensive and cost prohibitive.

Xaqt's hosted Cognitive IVR allows you to automate voice interactions as well as send proactive notifications to customers on a moments notice, at a fraction of the price of existing IVRs or by handling the call with an agent.

Intelligent and Priority Based Routing

With the sensitive nature of calls such as bookings cancelations, it's critical to prioritize the handling of customers needs based on their individual urgency.

For example, many companies are experiencing an influx of calls to cancel or reschedule their reservations are experiencing high call volume from all customers calling at once, but need to prioritize those that who's reservation is in the near future.

Conversational AI provides the ability to capture the date of the customer's reservation prior to being routed to an agent queue. These routing rules can also as dynamic as your changing business needs so that you are delivering a quality level of customer service under every circumstance.

How to Get Started with AI Self-Service

There are multiple options for automating Customer Support with AI. Xaqt's omni-channel AI Self-Service solutions can provide a fully integrated experience for your customers and can be deployed quickly.

Here are easy tools that leverage Xaqt's cloud AI technology and can immediately improve your customer experience while reducing the load on your call center.

Intelligent and Conversational IVR

An Intelligent and Conversational IVR is can help you automate a wide range of calls that would normally require a live agent. A Cognitive IVR has the ability to engage in a natural language based conversation with a customer and take automated action based on the callers needs, thus resulting in a fully automated customer voice interaction.

Xaqt's Cognitive and Conversational IVR can be deployed within hours and can have an immediate impact on your customer service operations. It's also priced per minute and can reduce your cost-per-call by 85%.

SMS based IVR

An SMS IVR is a rather new option for AI Self-Service is to enable your customers to communicate by text-messaging your conversational IVR. By providing your customers the option to send you questions and their service needs by SMS, you create a 24/7 option for them without needing to staff a call center around the clock. Thank of it as an always on chatbot, but only by text.

Chatbot

Chatbots have exploded in recent years, however most failed to achieve their objectives and ended-up making customer experience worse. The reason is, most chatbots were poorly designed and tried to accomplish too many things not suited for chat.

Whereas, Xaqt's purpose built AI and chatbots are designed to solve very specific problems for your customers ensuring you provide a meaningful customer experience at a fraction of the cost.

Proactive Outreach

The best defense is a great offense. Many customer service calls can be deflected simply by providing personalized outreach to customers. This can happen by automating outbound calling, such as to reschedule appointments

Calls that need live agent assist can be routed back to the call center for live agent assist. Service alerts and shipping notifications can also be sent by SMS, thus avoiding the customer needing to call you.