Customer-centric companies have invested significantly in digital self-service channels to alleviate pressure on the contact center, yet most customers continue to call. That’s because customers want the immediacy of having their problem understood and resolved.
By deploying conversational assistants in the contact center, companies can bridge the gap between voice enquiries and their existing self-service channels, helping them to achieve Zero Touch Resolution.
What is Zero Touch Resolution?
Zero Touch Resolution is about fully solving a customer query without them ever needing to speak to a person. It’s about giving time back to the contact center by taking calls that can be automated and providing a really high touch, seamless, instant experience using conversational assistants.
This approach allows agents to focus on the most complex queries where customers who really need to speak to a person get straight through to a customer service agent.
Giving time back to the contact center
Every contact center is different. Many struggle with availability, staffing appropriately, leaving callers on hold for a long time, and training agents well enough to provide consistent, correct answers.
Conversational assistants won’t replace people. Instead, they will give time back to the contact center by managing both simple and moderately complex tasks. Agents can focus on conversations that require empathy and deep knowledge or tasks that require them to access systems that conversational assistants can’t. This hybrid approach drastically improves the customer experience and overall contact center metrics.
Driving customer-led conversations
Legacy voice technologies haven’t given callers the freedom to explain their problems, and even when callers give short, keyword-based answers, they’ve often been misunderstood.
Conversational assistants should be able to accurately understand intent, drive conversations that provide resolution, and reassure callers they are receiving the right answer. They should be customer-led, encouraging customers to state their problems in whatever way they want, be that non-technical terminology, regional slang or telling long stories in their own words.
Contact centers that aren’t delivering this level of service and leaving customers on hold are already losing customer trust. By picking up calls instantly, any time, day or night, in a language of the contact center’s choice, customer-led conversational assistants can do a lot more to help customers.
Using structured data to improve the customer experience
Structured call data has previously been a blindspot for contact centers with limited or no visibility of what customers are calling about.
By automatically collecting structured data during every call, conversational assistants give contact centers clear insight into what customers are asking at a granular level, enabling them to fine-tune the customer experience.
A phased approach to implementing conversational assistants
Zero Touch Resolution is a way to introduce conversational assistant technology into an organization in a manageable way.
Contact centers can start by using a conversational assistant to route calls to the right places, cutting down a proportion of misroutes and answering an exhaustive list of customer questions instead of typical systems that answer 15 FAQS.
