As companies search for new ways to retain staff, streamline processes, and improve customer experience, many are turning to call center voice AI to offer 24/7 support to their customers, handling routine and complex queries to deliver exceptional customer service.
Here are eleven benefits of implementing call center voice AI.
1. Reduced call volume
Call center voice AI can help support teams by resolving up to 50% of customer calls, eliminating the need for agent intervention. This frictionless process is achieved by guiding callers to helpful resources through natural conversation and bridging the gap between the voice channel and your existing self-service options.
This approach not only reduces call volume but gives time and resources back to your contact center, enabling you to reduce costs, address labor shortages, and improve customer experience.
2. Create a better customer experience
With routine calls handled by a voice assistant, wait times are reduced, and your agents have more time to focus on high-value calls and customers who need their support the most.
Call center voice AI can improve your entire contact center program by allowing customers to access support anytime and solve issues as quickly as possible.
3. Mitigate seasonality and peaks in demand
Whether you’re in retail or home services, insurance, or hospitality, peaks in contact center demand can be predictable or completely unexpected. Finding enough agents to meet this demand quickly is increasingly challenging.
Call center voice AI enables you to adapt to varying call volumes by handling simple, routine tasks and ensuring consistent support during peak times without hiring additional staff. During quieter periods, call center voice AI allows you to wait for calls without incurring any costs.
4. Access customer insights from structured conversational data
Understanding why customers are calling is crucial for improving customer experience. However, contact centers often struggle to extract actionable insights from unstructured data and face delays in manual reporting, like after-call reporting by agents.
Call center voice AI efficiently uncovers insights that drive operational improvements and optimize resource allocation, allowing you to strategically deploy agents where their skills are most needed.
With access to structured data, your business can improve customer experience and identify opportunities to automate the customer journey further.
5. Identify issues as they arise to deal with them proactively
Access to customer insights also enables you to detect patterns in customer inquiries, allowing your call center to proactively address potential issues before they escalate.
If extreme weather conditions are impacting your deliveries or an error on your website has caused a spike in customer queries, call center voice AI enables a proactive approach to reduce the number of complaints and enhance customer satisfaction.
6. Improve agent satisfaction and retain your best agents
Contact centers often grapple with high attrition, especially within the first four months. It is not uncommon to see annual attrition rates of 100%, where 75% of staff are reliable, but 25% turn over four times in the year.
Call center voice AI can relieve agents of the burden of handling numerous calls, allowing them to focus on more rewarding tasks, take breaks, and avoid burnout. This streamlined approach will help your company retain experienced agents longer, reducing the need for excessive entry-level hires.
7. Answer every call immediately
The average person spends 43 days of their life on hold! You don’t want your contact center to be a contributor to those numbers. Call center voice AI enables you to answer every call immediately without incurring the cost of staffing your contact center 24/7. It also means your customers can get the support they need when it suits them, not the other way around.
8. Reduce cost-to-serve
Call center voice AI operates at 100% utilization, meaning you only pay for the time the voice assistant is actively working. This makes them an ideal solution for managing unpredictable or peak call volumes. Unlike your agents, they can work 24/7/365, don’t take sick leave, and come at a fraction of the cost per minute.
9. Generate revenue
Every phone call that is missed in your contact center has the potential to be a missed revenue opportunity. When call center voice AI handles your low-value calls, your agents have the time to focus on high-value and often revenue-generating calls. However, with the ability to take reservations, schedule appointments, collect payment information, and complete outstanding payments, solutions such as voice assistants can also actively generate revenue for your business.
10. Scalability
In the perfect world, your contact center could scale your support capacity up and down to match fluctuating demand and enable agents to focus their time on high-value calls that enhance customer relationships. But the reality is often very different.
Call center voice AI enables your contact center to scale its support without the lengthy and costly hiring and training process of onboarding new agents, driving substantial ROI for your company.
11. Security
The chances of cyber attacks, like the social engineering attack on MGM Las Vegas, can be significantly reduced with the introduction of call center voice AI.
While there will always be speculation about the risks of rapidly evolving technologies, call center voice AI can help your company reduce the likelihood of these attacks through the use of Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA).
KBA is designed to be user-friendly and conversational. While it does involve some effort from the customer, the process is generally straightforward and familiar to callers. Contact centers often employ KBA as a conversational means to identify and verify customers. The method is secure, as the likelihood of multiple customers matching a combination of personal details (such as name and date of birth) is low.
Conclusion
Implementing call center voice AI is a strategic move for businesses aiming to boost customer service, cut costs, and flexibly handle demand. With advantages spanning operational efficiency, proactive issue resolution, and revenue generation, the implementation of this technology is a crucial step toward optimizing contact center performance.
