Life-changing events are well-known triggers for inbound traffic to contact centers. The C19 pandemic is no exception; only this time there will be long-standing impacts. As we all shift to working from home and accept the reality that group events are cancelled, travel plans have changed, meal delivery service is a must, we are seeing agents in contact centers (both live and virtual) being called upon with more frequency. With a wider, less predictable set of tasks to perform, given the rapidly changing environment paired with increased volume of calls, more agents are needed and inevitably the growth will come from the remote workforce. This is the opportunity for IA (meaning “Intelligent Assistance” or “Intelligence Augmentation”) as a flavor of Conversational AI to shine.

With their reputations on the line, major brands have more incentive than ever to adhere to Conversational AI’s “prime directive(s)”. That is “to detect or predict a customer’s intent and deliver correct answers or recommendations accurately and at scale across all media and devices.” This is a mouthful and it is no small task.

The global pandemic exposes fissures in the fabric of everyday life that are even more exacerbated when you think about the impacts on the customer care contact center. Customer support agents have well-established sets of “workflows” and their performance is monitored and measured in terms of agent handling times (AHT), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and first call resolution (FCR). These metrics purport to reflect their efficiency at helping customer complete their tasks. Spikes in traffic, changes in call types and the move to remote working quarters, which we are seeing during this pandemic, disrupt their performance and impact customer satisfaction in considerable ways. 

Meanwhile, customers have workflows of their own as they alter travel plans and carry out more commerce from home. They engage in commercial conversations that, over periods of time time, span search engines, recommendation sites, vendor websites, and mobile apps. When any of these systems is disrupted, users can be very frustrated. There are inevitable moments in the ongoing conversation when they want their queries or instructions to be resolved quickly. They are thwarted when systems don’t speak with each other or the agents don’t have the most up to date information. They rightly demand consistent and correct answers or responses regardless of medium or modality. When organizations identify and implement conversational AI and automation to accelerate task completion, satisfaction goes up. This general rule applies regardless of whether conversations take place through voice or text and responses can even be rendered in a screen-pop for a live agent or spoken words through an IVR.

Automating Conversational Services is a Better Way

At the crucial moments described above, knowledge and process automation in real-time, plays a critical role. The need to discover, retrieve, and render correct responses to customers in real time during conversations drives the need for applied intelligence to simplify intent recognition and form-filling on the front end, and information aggregation and rendering on the back end. We call this “Conversational Service Automation” (CSA). It’s an emerging opportunity area with the potential to save businesses billions of dollars while, simultaneously supporting the transformation of customer experience.

During the last month, I spoke with Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Uniphore, an early CSA category leader and he shared with me some things he’s hearing from his global customers who manage some very largest contact centers. He said every one of his customers is looking for help alleviating the manual processes and routine calls that slow agent’s response times, especially in times like now when calls continue to flood in.

He also has several customers who because of mandatory work from home requirements, need help with remote agent management, including ways to stay compliant with strict regulations around the transmission of personally identifiable information (PII). Here are two examples he’s shared in an open letter he published recently to help during this challenging time:

We are pleased to see organizations step up to solve these problems in innovative ways. For example, a major insurance customer who was forced to shut down its branches and limit in person contact are now relying on an Intelligent Virtual Assistant that we co-created to handle queries and transactions to effectively serve their customers any time of the day or night.

In another example of leaders coming together to solve hard challenges, we met recently with a well-known brand who was struggling to enable remote agents, given the tight restrictions and regulations on the transmission and storage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The solution? A cloud based conversational analytics tool that redacts PII in real time before it gets to the agent, allowing the agent to work remote and address customers’ needs, while still being compliant with government regulations.

Opus Research sees both of these use cases as as showcases for CSA and its ability to support specific business objectives while balancing both customer and employee satisfaction. It is fundamental technology for promoting cooperation or collaboration among companies, their partners, customers and employees. In all cases, the first order challenge is to understand what each customer needs and to match that understanding to the automated processes that enable them to respond expeditiously and successfully.

I can’t say for certain what life will be like over the course of the next few weeks and months but this I believe: The pandemic has accelerated many changes that were inevitable. Both customers and customer care agents have more powerful tools than ever before to take command of automated resources using their own words (Natural Language) and we are validating and proving that CSA and other forms of Conversational AI are helping us all reach our goals in spite of physical and social distancing.

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