In a tight economy, every organisation is looking for ways to cut costs in order to maintain profitability and meet growth targets. When it comes to contact centres, poorly thought-out cost-cutting measures have, in the past, done more harm than good. For example, in recent years, there's been a clear shift back to Australian-based call centres after brands sent them offshore in an effort to reduce costs at the expense of the customer experience.
So, how can organisations get the balance right? Here are three ways organisations can leverage new technologies to create efficiencies whilst delivering seamless customer experiences.
- AI & Automation
This might come as no surprise, but AI-driven technologies are transforming the contact centre. Whilst we’re not at a stage where AI will replace the importance of human interactions, particularly for complex queries, it can transform the way a contact centre addresses simple, repetitive requests. For example, simple requests can be sent through to a chatbot, freeing up time for human agents to support on complex calls. This improves the customer experience, because hold times will be reduced, and the agent experience because they can reduce the number of repetitive tasks they perform day-to-day and instead focus on the higher value ones.
Beyond freeing up resources, AI tools can provide insights that can help to reduce customer churn and improve loyalty - which has in the past been seen as a difficult and costly task. Now, AI can capture each customer's conversation and accurately document it to enhance future interactions.
For example, AI tools can use speech analytics technology to analyse sentiment during calls so that customer service agents can be brought in when a customer sounds distressed or angry. In addition, AI can be used to create bespoke chatbot responses based on a specific customer's profile. Imagine your suburb had a serious hailstorm and it damaged your car. You go to your car insurer’s website to start a chatbot conversation and there is a personalised message waiting for you offering advice about your storm cover. Going one step further, conversational AI tools can provide instant voice translations without disrupting the flow of conversation. This means customers can speak to voice bots in their native language, drastically improving the customer experience and reducing costs spent on hiring multilingual staff.
- Consolidating platforms
The number of channels now used to communicate with brands continues to proliferate - from voice and email channels to chatbots and instant messaging. Continuing to bolt together disparate platforms introduces risks and the potential to create clunky, unreliable experiences for customers.
Deploying a single platform that brings together an organisation’s entire customer experience technology stack is increasingly critical. There’s also the benefit of saving resources by not having to train staff to use and maintain numerous platforms. Bonus tip: Make sure you choose a vendor agnostic platform so you can still choose the technologies that best fit your organisation’s needs.
- Move to the cloud
According to Calabrio, three quarters of contact centres are in the cloud. There’s a reason why the majority are and that’s because on-premises technologies are hard to maintain, difficult to update and lack flexibility. All of this drains both human and financial resources. Conversely, by moving to a cloud-based contact centre organisations can reduce infrastructure costs and improve scalability. It will also make integrating with new and innovative technologies much easier - all of which will support growth.
As with most things in life, long-term gains require upfront investments. The same can be said for contact centres as organisations look to leverage new technologies - whether that be AI tools, new consolidated platforms or moving to the cloud. However, these investments will future-proof contact centres to not only ensure future cost savings and efficiencies but also improve customer experiences resulting in stronger brand loyalty and growth.
Get in touch today to find out how SecureCo can support your organisation in reducing contact centre costs whilst providing seamless and meaningful customer experiences.