As contact centers struggle to handle high call volumes, many turn to conversational assistants to resolve common customer queries.
But what kind of calls are suitable for AI conversational assistants?
One rubric our customers often use is a classification of call types based on customer call urgency and business priority.
Customer urgency: Urgency is defined by the customer. It is usually informed by one or more of the following:
- The issue is preventing the customer from doing something else, e.g., the customer can’t log in to online account services/app
- There’s a time consideration, e.g., tracking a delivery
- The customer requires comfort and reassurance, e.g., reporting a lost credit card
Business priority: Priority is defined by the business. All customer queries are important, but they still require an order of priority. The highest priority calls will have the greatest impact on profit and revenue. For example:
- Chasing an unpaid bill
- Incentivizing customers to renew contracts
The role of AI voice assistants is to free up your agents to handle high-urgency, high-priority calls while ensuring that all other queries are handled promptly and effectively.
What kind of calls should conversational assistants handle?
High urgency | Low urgency | |
High priority | Customer requires an immediate response. The cost of not resolving the issue quickly will have a negative impact on business revenue.
Reporting fraudulent transactions Cancelling an account (where an agent may be able to offer incentives to stay)
| Has a significant impact (positive or negative) on revenue, but is not urgent for the customer.
Chasing missed payments Offering account upgrades
|
Low priority | Requires an immediate response in order to maintain or improve customer satisfaction. Keeping callers on hold for these kinds of calls will result in a degradation in CSAT scores.
Lost credit card Where is my order? Broadband troubleshooting
| Has minimal consequences for revenue, and the customer is happy to wait for a response.
FAQs
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Conversational assistants are best suited to queries of utmost importance and urgency to the customer but have little or no impact on revenue.
Imagine you’ve ordered a suit for a wedding on Friday. It’s Wednesday, and you’ve just had a text saying your delivery is delayed. Finding out if your order is going to arrive on time is going to be very important and urgent for you.
If you phone up the company, no value is created for them. The call is minimizing or even eliminating the profit margin on the sale.
This type of high-value-to-customer, low-value-to-business call is perfect for AI conversational assistants.
Getting the most out of conversational assistants
Achieving a genuinely impactful level of automation means developing a conversational assistant with which customers can quickly and naturally engage.
If the conversational assistant isn’t capable of natural, free-flowing conversation, many customers will attempt to bypass it and speak to an agent. If you’re considering automating customers interactions, be sure to find a conversational assistant that can:
- Understand what callers are saying, regardless of accent or background noise
- Understand what callers mean, regardless of the words they use to say it
- Understand long utterances and storytelling
- Extract multiple values as they’re given
- Handle non-linear conversations
- Speak in a natural tone of voice
If you want to learn more about deploying a natural AI voice assistant, get in touch with PolyAI today.
