Want to Improve Your Call Centre Customer Service? Here’s How Automation Can Help.
Thanks to the increasing business focus on customer service, the Call Centre industry is projected to reach a value of $481 billion globally by the year 2024.
While the U.S represents the largest market share, the Asia-Pacific region, including India, is projected to be the fastest-growing market during this period. Among the highest employment-friendly industry domains in India, the Business Process Outsourcing (or BPO) industry comprising of customer call centres contributes about 5.4% of the country’s GDP.
Despite its healthy growth rate, the call centre industry in India has had its share of challenges such as high operational costs, employee attrition along with a shortage of highly skilled workers who can provide advanced client servicing in their respective industry domains. In this highly competitive landscape, call centres are investing more into the training of existing call centre executives to reduce attrition and to equip them for specialized skills for high-end tasks in customer service. Additionally, the growth of call centre-specific technology such as VoIP phone systems and CRM tools are enabling call centres in providing better customer service.
In an era where we see automation in practically every sphere of business, call centres automation tools can lower costs and even improve customer satisfaction levels. Innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are no longer just buzzwords but are being practically adopted into various industry domains, including customer service.
Why Call Centre Automation is crucial in customer service
Research shows that around 70–80% of call centre queries for any business are repetitive and can be easily handled by automation tools without any human intervention.
Call centre automation tools are going beyond just customer interaction and are using automation technology to resolve business challenges related to agent recruitment, customer handling time, and auditing of the customer calls. For example, with its Vernacular Intelligent Virtual Assistant (VIVA) platform, AI and NLP powered multi-lingual speech solution provider, Vernacular.AI has been successful in implementing voice-based interactions in 10 different Indian languages. The result? This solution is enabling customers to save business costs, reduce the impact of high attrition, and improve their customer experience.
In the next section, let’s explore how any call centre business can benefit from automation tools:
Benefits of Call Centre Automation
Besides improving the customer experience, call centre automation platform like VIVA can improve business operations with the following capabilities:
- Scalable to handle higher call volumes
As a contact centre head, how often have you needed to increase your call centre agent headcount to address the increase in incoming call volumes? Pretty much, every time there is an upcoming holiday season like Diwali or Christmas, isn’t that right?
Hiring temporary agents for a short period can be relatively more expensive and time-consuming as compared to full-time agent recruitment. Automation tools like VIVA have built-in scalability features to handle thousands of incoming calls simultaneously seamlessly. This feature reduces the wait time for customers, along with the need for the business to hire large numbers of temporary agents.
2. Reduced training effort as compared to human agents
Be it for customer communication, product promotions, or in business policies, every on-boarded call centre agent requires an intensive training session for at least 30 days before making productive interactions with the customer. Along with the training of new hires, existing agents need to be retrained at regular intervals to be well-versed with changing business policies and revamped training material.
Virtual training assistants can reduce the overall training efforts through automated learning of the available business knowledge and documentation. For example, the automation tool can learn about a new product launch or business expansion by analysis of the company’s press releases and from integrated backend systems.
Through its self-learning functionality, call centre automation tools can even dynamically learn from ongoing customer conversations and provide appropriate responses or information to client queries.
3. Better feedback for agent conversations through 100% call auditing
A typical audit checklist for call centres includes agent productivity measures like the number of handled calls each hour or the percentage of outgoing calls that resulted in product sales and revenue.
Do you want to further improve your agent productivity and quality of rendered customer service? With a ratio of 1 auditor for every 40 call centre agents, is a personalized and targeted feedback system even possible for every client communication? As a call centre auditor, you are aware of the various challenges that you face.
Human auditors can only monitor and audit selected calls involving agents, thus limiting the scope of the agent feedback. Additionally, each auditor needs to spend some quality time providing the 1-to-1 feedback to each agent after the call analysis.
Call centre automation tools can automate the auditing process, thus allowing 100% of the calls to be audited. Through conversation analytics, the audit mechanism can be used to share valuable information with call centre agents, thus helping them to improve their communication with clients.
4. Reduction in average handling time
Among the leading metrics in the call centre industry, the average handling time (or AHT) is used to measure agent productivity and call efficiency. Calling customers expect call centre agents to understand their queries and provide resolutions in shorter call times. For each customer interaction, agents spend time going through customer information, interaction history, or past activities to provide a suitable solution to the customer, thus increasing the AHT.
Virtual assistants like VIVA are fully capable of handling customer calls by understanding customer sentiment and providing appropriate responses to their queries.
Even when it is not answering customer calls, this technology can indirectly assist human call centre agents by providing the right information and prompting them to say the right thing at the right time during the call. Thanks to this virtual assistance, customer support agents can now participate in sales calls that can improve sales and business revenue.
With the reduction in AHT, customers, in turn, report a higher customer satisfaction score (or CSAT) in call centres with automated technologies.
A leading restaurant chain in India reported a 42% decrease in call handling time along with an impressive CSAT score of 4.5 after automating its operations with the VIVA tool.
In Summary
In the coming years, call centre automation is set to play an influential role as the Indian call centre industry gears to witness significant growth in the next few years.
Apart from automating customer interactions, tools like VIVA from Vernacular.AI can help the industry meet the growing shortage of qualified call centre agents and improve customer satisfaction levels through its support for multiple Indian languages. As most Indian customers prefer to communicate in their local vernacular language (other than English and Hindi), call centres are finding it challenging to find and recruit customer service agents well-versed in vernacular Indian languages. With its multiple language support, the VIVA tool can equip the call centre business to respond in the same vernacular language or even a mix of spoken English or Hindi styles.
