Leverage Automated Deep Interaction Analysis to Improve Satisfaction and Reduce Costs in Your Contact Center
The contact center has long ceased to be considered a necessary evil and a cost center to become the hub where much of the customer experience (CX) is built. Customers are increasingly demanding that this experience be omnichannel and connect the various media (telephone, email, chat, social) in a seamless manner.
The New Contact Center Challenges
But now customer stress and anxiety have imposed new demands to provide a flawless, top-quality service.
And the new reality created by the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need to interact remotely and multiplied the volume of conversations that these centers must endure. And all this in an environment of remote work settings that makes team management and agent well-being more difficult.
Today, the contact center is facing unprecedented difficulties in fulfilling its mission:
- How to respond? Having sufficient bandwidth to avoid being overwhelmed by the current demand.
- How to deliver quality? Ensuring customer satisfaction, response times, and resolution rates.
- How to ensure employee well-being? Prevent remote work from harming the physical and psychological health of agents and supervisors.
- How to comply? Ensure compliance with legal regulations and standard procedures.
- How to control and coach? Supervise and support the team when not physically present.
- How to optimize? Extend best practices throughout the organization.
- How to cut costs? Reduce unnecessary costs without compromising on quality.
In the following sections we explain how Gavagai’s technology can be applied to answer these questions.
Gavagai: A Language Technology to Discover Valuable Patterns
Gavagai provides an AI for text analytics that does not work like the ones offered by other vendors: where other products only apply predefined models that need to be exhaustively pre-trained to be effective and offer high inertia for their evolution and maintenance, Gavagai also provides unsupervised learning technologies that, without the need of previous explicit training, are able to discover sophisticated patterns in textual content, including topics, sentiment, and relationships between them.
Working directly with text-based sources (email, chat) or converting phone calls voice to text, Gavagai is able to surface the meaning structure of omnichannel contact center interactions and convert it into data that can be analyzed and exploited in high volumes, with high speed and low cost.
Understanding + Conversational
Gavagai not only provides technologies to understand unstructured contact center information, but to automatically interact with your customers. Its conversational AI enables intelligent bots that execute complex dialogues and can self-learn from historical records of interactions, deciphering customer intent, answering non-trivial questions and taking the most appropriate course of action in each case. In this way, less involved tasks, where human intervention is not justified, can be delegated to AI-based agents.
In the following sections we review the benefits of applying these technologies. Read on if you want to learn 10 ways Gavagai helps you make your contact center more effective, efficient, and compliant.
1. Route Every Interaction to the Most Appropriate Agent, Anytime
The main cause of dissatisfaction in the contact center is being routed to an agent, discovering that he/she is not the right one to answer, and chaining a list of handovers that make the problem take too long to be solved. Ideally, a system should be in place that can route a query to the most appropriate agent, depending on the nature of the request.
Given a first interaction in the request (via voice, email, chat, etc.) Gavagai is able to detect intent, emotional tone, brands, product, and product categories and involve company departments to route the request to the most appropriate agent based on their level of empathy, product knowledge, or department affiliation. This real-time intelligent routing achieves a higher first contact resolution rate.
2. Help Your Agents Connect, Persuade and Comply
Responding appropriately to calls can become a very demanding and stressful exercise for agents, especially in a high traffic and demand context, leading to a situation of cognitive overload.
This overload could be alleviated if agents have real-time guidance that analyzes interactions for things like inappropriate language, arguments and contradiction between customer and agents, non-adherence to regulations and scripts, up-sale opportunities or customers at risk of churning, and provides help.
Thanks to its understanding of interactions Gavagai can provide agents with interactive call guidance that optimizes the value of every conversation, helping them to
- Improve empathy, enhancing the emotional connection between customer and agent and improving the experience.
- Handle objections through relevant arguments, redirecting the conversation.
- Position products, detecting the timing and product benefits most relevant to the conversation and seizing upsell opportunities.
- Stick to regulations and scripts, detecting when a campaign script or legal requirements in regulated markets are not being followed.
- Prevent churn by making special offers to at-risk clients.
3. Help Your Managers Supervise and Coach
Remote work settings are a challenge for managers to supervise and coach their teams. With the dramatic, global shift towards remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, supervisors, in particular, now face the challenge of being less connected with their teams and are unable to walk the floor of the call center to have their hand on the pulse of the calls and provide real-time feedback and coaching.
Gavagai can provide remote supervisors with real-time analysis of all their agents’ calls, enabling them to virtually “walk the floor” in remote settings. It can raise alerts in situations such as:
- Low call empathy: use of inappropriate language/themes, continuous argumentation.
- Non-compliance with industry-specific regulation or campaign scripts.
- Up-sale opportunity
- Fraud-related behavior signal.
In essence, real-time monitoring and intervention enables supervisors to detect and manage “out-of-control” calls and provides opportunity for real-time feedback and coaching, to increase performance and satisfaction levels.
4. Extend Your Service with AI-Based Agents
Most contact center interactions are repetitive inquiries that do not require specialized attention and can be automated via intelligent bots.
Gavagai’s bot solutions, that build on its NLP Technology, allow you to use conversational AI for customer service automation, free your agents, and get instant ROI.
Gavagai Intelligent Bots can implement sophisticated dialogues thanks to natural language processing technology that enable them to understand topics, emotions, and intentions, process human language queries, and find the most appropriate answers. And their ability to learn from past interactions reduces implementation costs and risk.
And Gavagai bots can be connected to external systems’ APIs for end-to-end process automation. Build a conversational interface to your applications and “let your systems speak.”With Gavagai Conversational Intelligence, deflect up to 80% of repetitive inquiries and deliver 24/7 multilingual customer support.
5. Measure and Assure Overall Quality
Quality management in the contact center has so far been based on the sampling of a small percentage of calls and their analysis (including direct listening) by human experts. Natural language processing revolutionizes quality management in the contact center, enabling the exhaustive analysis of all interactions, and of the entire conversation in each interaction and avoiding errors and biases due to sampling.
Gavagai’s language understanding allows us to discover sentiment and emotions, and detect the effective resolution of queries, to measure and improve service satisfaction levels. With Gavagai, continuously monitor and improve the center’s key operational metrics including AHT, FCR, and CSAT scores for a more efficient quality management.
6. Ensure Compliance
The contact center has become the CX hub of many companies and, in many sectors and countries, is subject to legal regulations and strict customer requirements.
On the one hand we have regulatory compliance: there are many laws that affect contact center activity, both from a general perspective (such as data protection regulation, e.g. GDPR), and from industry-specific regulation (e.g., information requirements in the sale of financial products). Failure to rigorously comply with these regulations exposes our company to heavy fines and reputational damage.
In addition, contact centers must comply with the procedural requirements imposed on them by their customers, both internal and external (in the case of BPO providers). For example, in the case of an outbound telesales campaign, agents must adhere to the script defined by the customer, using precise language for the greeting, product positioning, offer presentation, closing of the transaction and farewell.Gavagai’s interaction analysis allows you to detect complex patterns in conversations to discover non-compliance with regulations and procedures: request for consent or confirmation of a product purchase, adherence to the different parts of a script, etc. Use Gavagai to improve your compliance assessment, avoid fines, and delight your internal and external customers.
7. Predict Contact Center Demand
As companies and organizations aim for growth both in revenue and market share, that also entails a probable growth in the volumes of contact center interactions. To predict this volume CX teams use text analytics to analyze conversations (in several forms such as chats, call transcription, support tickets, and complaints) to understand and continuously trace contact reasons and correlate them with sales of a specific service or product.
One example is when a company is promoting and selling a mountain bike for a customer segment such as active mountain bikers who continuously need to train and compete in intense events using their bikes. With the help of text analytics the CX team will be able to identify that this specific type of bike has a couple of parts that will most likely wear out in 3 months.
The next step for the CX team is to act on those insights by training contact center staff on how to communicate this product information with the customer. The last step is to produce a report expecting that a X% rise in sales of this mountain bike is likely to increase contact center reaches related to this product by Y%.
The advantage of this practice is that it can enable contact centers to better prepare so that they can provide customers with a much more satisfying interaction. And it can also enable companies to plan contact center resources by allocating the team members and contact center budgets required to efficiently address certain customer needs.
8. Reduce the Costs of Your Contact Center
The fact that the contact center has ceased to be a cost center to become a tool for multichannel business development and for generating value for the company does not imply that it can be run in an inefficient manner from a cost perspective. The contact center comes to represent a high proportion of the total costs of many companies. We need to leverage all cost reduction opportunities that we can find, especially if these don’t contribute to degrading the quality.
As mentioned, one of these opportunities lies in using bots (AI-based agents) to automate low value, repetitive requests.
Another opportunity, especially in inbound contact centers, is to reduce the number of customers who need to call the contact center. To that end, it is necessary to identify the root causes of the highest number of calls and address them.
Gavagai’s language understanding technology can mine a large set of interactions, discover the root causes and identify the most frequent ones (for example, breakdowns in a certain type of equipment at customer premises). And improvement programs external to the contact center can do everything possible to eliminate or mitigate them (e.g., by changing suppliers for that type of equipment).
This reduces the number of calls and, hence, the number of agents and the size of infrastructure needed in the contact center.
9. Prevent Fraud by Customers… and Agents
A hub as the contact center, where so many interactions are concentrated, is prone to fraudulent behavior, both from potential customers and from the agents themselves.
Gavagai can help with your fraud prevention initiatives thanks to its ability to detect complex patterns in conversations, which may be indicative of fraudulent behavior.
One example is sale validation processes, which attempt to uncover fraud by agents which is typical in remote sales scenarios. In these, an agent may attempt to pass off as a legitimate sale an interaction that in fact is not, in order to get his commission.
For example, the agent may use the argument that if he sends the purchase contract to a customer and the customer does not return it signed within a certain time, he is not really making any commitment and passes it off as a commissionable transaction. Gavagai can detect the use of such a scheme and invalidate the transaction.
10. Discover Best Practices and Replicate Top Performers
Contact centers are under constant pressure to optimize their performance. But in an organization so dependent on people’s performance, it is difficult to systematize this objective. In all contact centers there are agents who do well and others who don’t, practices that work and others that don’t. How to discover them, to be able to extend these practices and replicate top performers?
Gavagai allows you to structure and extract data from the interactions and to mine a repository of tagged conversations to discover the parameters that have the highest correlation with their success. What kind of language do they use? What topics are touched upon to create a more meaningful and empathetic connection? Once these best practices are discovered, they can be applied in agent training and coaching programs, rolled out across the organization to replicate top performers.
