In the contactless world, businesses are on the lookout for enhancing the customer experience with Remote Contact Center & Conversational AI.
In our JAPAC webinar, our speakers, Ravi Saraogi, Co-founder and President (APAC), Uniphore Software Systems, Kalidas Ghose, Vice Chairman & CEO, FE Credit, Bilegt Tumurkhuyag, CX Senior Specialist, Khan Bank, and Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder and Sales & Marketing Head, Ameyo, have unleashed the secrets to stay ahead of the pandemic.
Sachin Bhatia firmly believes that the problems in emerging markets need unique solutions. With this propelling thought, he goes on to say that empathy and personalization will be the new KPIs that businesses need to track while providing excellent customer service.
Q1 How to streamline Customer Experience in the post-pandemic world?
With the increased call volumes and decreased physical meetings, customers are more anxious today than ever before. And to handle this anxiety, businesses need to understand the value of human to human interaction. To the rescue is the world’s greatest technology: Conversational AI.
With conversational AI, you can provide the experience that your customers want while also enhancing agents’ efficiency and business productivity. Conversational AI helps you in the following ways:
- Improves agents’ efficiency by assisting them on a live call and provides real-time suggestions
- Resolves first-level or routine queries, helping agents focus on critical queries
On the subject of increasing business efficiency, Kalidas Ghose adds, “We would have needed 25-30% of more employees were required but AI solved our purpose.”
Q2 What are the top of the mind challenges that businesses face while working remotely?
During COVID-19, nearly all industries pivoted towards remote contact centers. But, there are significant challenges that need to be addressed. The biggest challenge that remains across industries is to build a high trust no excuse environment. While remote is here to disrupt the businesses, let’s look at the challenges and solutions.
Remote IT Governance
In a remote contact center, building a high trust environment is very important and to establish that, you need to be prepared with some of the challenges like agent reporting low internet connectivity, unsupportive devices, poor network, etc.
Now, what do you trust here, the network, the device, or the agent? While Work from Anywhere is becoming the New Normal, these challenges will continue to arise.
To identify the reasons for low productivity, you need a network & device management report that can help the call center managers track the agents’ activity, the health of the device, and the network problems.
Data Security
For businesses, the first priority is to protect the customer’s data. With Work from Anywhere becoming the norm, most contact center agents are using their own device to handle calling operations, putting customer’s data at high risk. Especially for BFSIs, data security is their primary concern.
Khan Bank, the largest commercial bank in Mongolia, equipped its agents with multiple layers of security and tools to monitor and protect customer information, using Ameyo’s Remote Contact Center Solution.
To further protect the data, you can restrict the call recording or screen capturing at various levels.
Virtual Onboarding & Collaboration
In a physical contact center environment, agents learned from their peers and managers without any barrier. The agents could freely ask their peers whenever they were stuck with any complex query. But, how do you share the tribal knowledge in a remote working environment? How do you onboard and train agents to be equipped with the right knowledge that they require to resolve customer queries?
The managers and supervisors can provide on-call assistance to the agents. Let the agents communicate with their peers using internal chat to help them resolve the customer queries and increase First Call Resolution rate.
Q3 Is Remote a reality or Hybrid a reality?
“In the time of need, if the technology is an enabler, people will latch into it,” says Ravi Saraogi. And with the latest technology, we can see that remote and hybrid present huge opportunities for tech-first businesses.
According to our contact center survey, 65% of people believe that the remote contact center is going to be the new normal in a post-pandemic world.
“With our 100% outbound agents working remotely, our telesales agents’ efficiency increased by 114%,” Bilegt Tumurkhuyag mentioned in the webinar.
He further adds, “With the help of Ameyo’s Automatic Dialer System our telesales agents are doing more sales and connecting to more customers now.”
Q4 How can we digitize more and maintain optimum quality for the calls that are transferred to agents?
“With almost 30-35% increased calls, the pressure on agents has also increased,” Ravi Saraogi mentioned in the webinar. “This has also led to an increase in average wait time for each customer, sometimes resulting in bad customer experience and lower customer satisfaction,” he adds.
What can you do to ensure that the customers do not wait for long in the queue and agents are also not burdened with a lot of calls?
Convert Inbound Calls to Outbound Calls
Our expert, Sachin Bhatia, has explained how converting inbound calls to outbound can help increase customer satisfaction. If the wait time has triggered a high number, you can play a message to give an estimated time to the customer for a callback. As we stated above that the customers are more anxious today than ever, this turns out to be really helpful for the customers.
Introduce a Digital Channel
While the customer is waiting in the queue, send them a message on WhatsApp, Chat, etc, and play a message that we have sent you a message, we hope that resolves your problem. If you have another query, you can write back to us on WhatsApp for your query. When a customer receives this message on their preferred channel, they are more likely to be open to chatting with the agent for their queries.
This, in turn, resolves the problem of increased call volume, minimizing it to a level where the agents can concentrate on critical issues and also helps increase customer satisfaction rate. You can also automate first-level queries using IVR, ChatBot, VoiceBot, etc. and help the agents resolve cases that require more attention using Conversational AI.
Q5 How is Remote Contact Center beneficial for business?
Working from anywhere is an opportunity for businesses to leverage technology and scale their business without compromising on efficiency and productivity. Contact centers are the only human interaction touchpoint between the customers and brands in the contactless world. Contact centers are going to play a pivotal role in sales, service, collections, and onboarding, providing an opportunity for businesses to move from cost centers to profit centers.
Remote CC can become a real game-changer for businesses:
Reduced Cost Pressure
With remote contact centers, businesses can reduce the cost of setting up an office, and investing in infrastructural facilities, amounting to approximately 12-15% cost of the contact centers. Providing the flexibility to work from anywhere can significantly reduce the cost pressure on contact centers.
Hiring Diverse Workforce
Businesses can hire from a large pool of talent across the geographies and verticals. This also presents opportunities for companies to scale up or down as per the business requirements without worrying about operational overheads.
For instance, a company headquartered in India is scaling its business in the Middle East can easily hire local people from the Middle East virtually and provide the local flavor to its ME’s customers.
Watch the Complete Webinar on Restructuring CX in the Contactless World
