4 Customer Service Calls You Should Automate
Customers prefer to handle things themselves. There are many reasons for it — speed, convenience, and ease among the top noted. Customers also expect their needs to be dealt with immediately as they arise.
For 60% of customers, slow response times are a significant drawback, while a swift response is deemed essential for a satisfactory experience by 90% of them. The quality of your customer service is crucial in determining the longevity of customer relationships. A favorable customer experience encourages 89% of consumers to return for more purchases, whereas a poor experience could lead to 96% of them turning away.
This explains why 81% of customers are more than happy to use self-service with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools integrated with voice, chat, and text. Intelligent virtual agents – via voice or chat – reduce hold times by 50% or more. Today’s technology not only means a higher CSAT score, but it also creates efficiencies for your business. For one company, virtual agents were able to handle an additional 1,000 more appointment reservations monthly than a call center that uses only live agents.
But not all conversations are created equal. While there are call types that require high empathy only a live human agent can deliver, there are repetitive calls that are best suited for AI-powered Virtual Agents to handle.
Welcome Greeting & Authentication
Greeting customers is a natural experience through virtual agents. The times of “Press 1 for appointments” are long behind us, as is authenticating a customer by requesting multiple pieces of information from them. With conversational AI integrated into CRMs, ERPs, or systems of record, the experience is changed from a customer doing the work to the virtual agent handling the load
Tier-1 Triage
The advent of AI-assisted virtual agents means live agents no longer have to offer tier-1 support. Today’s virtual agents gather information, assess the situation and the type of help needed, and then guides the customer through the steps necessary to resolve the issue.
In the following example, you’ll hear a virtual agent in action solving a technical support issue that, in the past, would have required human intervention. With no need to transfer to a live agent, the customer remains in self-service, and their issue resolved in under three minutes.
Scheduling
Finding the right date and time for an appointment doesn’t have to be a hassle. Our intelligent virtual agents are trained to understand and handle complex scheduling requests. Customers can easily book appointments, whether they’re looking for the soonest available opening or have a specific day and time in mind.
Virtual agents can handle inbound requests and outbound reminders via voice or text to empower customers to choose the best available appointment and confirm, reschedule, or cancel. And outbound reminders drastically reduce late arrivals and no-shows because a virtual agent can remind your customers about upcoming appointments.
In the video below, you’ll hear how one service provider uses virtual agents for service scheduling.
Payments and collections
Using Payment Card Industry Security Standards (PCI) compliant tools, virtual agents can handle one-time payments, complex payment arrangements, and recurring payments. They can also collect past-due payments (an unpleasant and stressful task for live agents). Customers can easily make payments through inbound calls, and outbound voice and text can deliver proactive payment reminders.
This video demonstrates how easy it is to make payments and collections for you and the customer.
Why implement virtual agents for these call types?
By deploying virtual agents for these call types, you meet the dual goals of enhanced customer satisfaction and contact center efficiency. You’ll reduce or eliminate hold times and offer 24/7 service without hiring additional agents. You’ll also eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks from your live agent’s workload, freeing them to handle customer calls that generate more revenue. This increases agent job satisfaction, helping to prevent churn.
Don’t keep your customers waiting. SmartAction offers AI-powered solutions that include voice assistants and chatbots finely tuned to manage automated voice and chat at scale so your agents can provide white glove treatment for more complex issues and high-revenue customers.
SmartAction is the number one rated virtual customer assistant platform, providing conversational AI solutions at a third of the cost of a live agent, with a 30% increase in customer satisfaction scores. It’s time to crush the competition and reap the rewards of conversational AI. Request a demo now.
