Is Conversational AI the Future of Contact Center Automation?

2021 was a nightmare for contact center managers across the United States - arguably the worst year to manage contact centers in recent times. The shortage of contact center employees, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and disrupted logistics (due to unpredictable weather-related events) are some of the key challenges before contact center professionals. 

According to the U.S. Labor Department, 4.5 million employees quit their jobs in November 2021, which was the highest in two decades since the government has been keeping records. In October of the same year, 4.2 million voluntarily resigned from their job.

How Conversational AI is Rescuing Contact Centers?

Without any doubt, conversational automation is a boon for contact center professionals struggling with a shortage of human agents. 

Robots cannot replace human agents completely, but they can address repetitive customer queries. You can analyze your interactions with customers and identify the types of conversation that you can easily automate. 

Up to 90% of customer queries can be automated through AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots      

Conversational AI does not only address the problem of the shortage of human agents, but it also optimizes your contact center operations. 

Benefits of Contact Center (AI) Automation

Contact center automation (through AI-Powered Voicebots and chatbots) is a win-win for everyone - businesses and customers. For businesses, this automation means low operational costs, more digital sales, loyal and happy customers, and seamless conversations with customers. For customers, it means round-the-clock customer support, self-service, no wait time for talking to an agent, and faster resolution of queries. 

Increase Digital Sales

Chatbots and Voicebots help you deliver a delightful, hyper-personalized buying experience to your customers. 

• Provide appropriate information to your customers and point them in the right direction, so they can make quick decisions 
• Enable interactive Q&A for your products and services while they buy from you  
• Keep intelligent Voicebot and Chatbot at your customers’ disposal when they need your assistance, so they always come back to you  
• Make appropriate recommendations on their favorite communication channels, SMS/Text, Messenger, or WhatsApp, to them for upselling and cross-selling  
• Automate repetitive queries, so your human agents can focus on building relationships, generating sales opportunities, and driving sales 

Automate Outbound Calls

Thanks to rapid innovations in conversational AI, Voicebots have grown mature now - they can easily manage outbound calling/telemarketing campaigns. Voicebots can 

• Make outbound calls to prospects and ask pre-qualification questions 
• Based on the conversations, they can qualify the leads 
• Book appointments of qualified leads with sales reps 
• Tag calls as 'not interested,' 'busy,' 'call later' etc based on the conversation that happened with prospects 

Reduce Customer Support Costs

Contact center (AI) automation saves you the time of your human agents wasted on manual, repetitive customer queries that AI-Powered Chatbots and Voicebots can manage.  

• Save resources spent on recruiting, training, and maintaining customer support agents 
• Automate up to 90% of customer queries 
• Reduce up to 40% of customer support costs 

Increase Agent Productivity

You would be surprised to know that, on average, agents spend more time finding relevant information than actually talking to customers. You can equip your human agents with AI-Powered virtual assistants (agent assists).  

• Listening to calls and providing real-time suggestions 
• Finding relevant information for human agents 
• Verify the identity of customers before handing them over to agents

Deflect Calls

Contact center automation helps you deflect calls to a great extent. You can deploy AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots across customer-facing channels and encourage them to self-serve rather than talking to a human agent. 

Provide a Superior Customer Experience

Happy customers mean more business. Contact center automation helps you deliver a superior customer experience and win the loyalties of your customers. AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots help you 

• Provide 24x7 customer support 
• Respond immediately to your customers without making them wait 
• Enable omnichannel customer support across all customer-facing channels - call, text/SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, the web, mobile app, Alexa, Google Home, and more 
• Increase customer engagement 
• Increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores 
• Enable multilingual customer support
• Connect to a human agent immediately when required 

Provide an Omnichannel Experience

Customer-centric businesses leave no opportunity to engage customers across all touchpoints. You can launch Voicebots in Voice channels, such as calling, and Chatbots in chat channels, such as text/SMS. Or, you can deploy Voicebot and Chatbot both in the same channel like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or a mobile app. 

Floatbot offers a unique Contact Center AI solution, Floatbot UNO, that acts as a Voicebots in Voice channels and Chatbot in text channels. 

Seamlessly Handover to a Human Agent

AI-powered Voicebot and Chatbots are great, but they don't replace human agents completely. Customers might need to talk to an agent if they have a complex query. In such cases, the bot understands the customer's intent and seamlessly handover the conversation to an agent. 

The agent can access the transcription of the call, so they can quickly understand what the customer needs without making the customer repeat everything. 

Authenticate your Customers with Voice Biometrics

Some contact center solutions may have a voice biometric solution, such as Floatbot Armor, to accurately authenticate the user identity. Voice biometrics helps you ensure the security of your transactions and provide a seamless authentication option to the customers. 

Final Thoughts

Every day, more and more businesses are investing in contact center automation through conversational AI Voicebots and Chatbots. However, building a conversational AI platform from scratch needs time and resources. That's why they turn to conversational AI platforms, such as FLoatbot, to deploy bots instantly.