How can AI-powered Virtual Agents transform digital experiences?

The growth of mobile and messaging apps generates a high volume of customer interactions, forcing customer care centers to deliver quality services and strive for superior customer experience. As the customer care centers’ strategy emphasizes improving customer experience, they are eyeing emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to shift from customer service to customer experience. 

When leveraging conversational AI in a customer care center, these intelligent virtual agents (IVAs)  follow an integrated and collaborative approach to customer service by automating highly repetitive and routine tasks using a bot and managing more complex and sensitive customer issues through human agents. 

The ability of IVAs to automate manual workloads and be available 24/7 yields multiple business benefits for a customer service organization, as well as improving the overall experience of both customers and agents. 

Traditional customer care center metrics are positively impacted by AI bot solutions as below:

Eliminate wait times: Customers today look for faster response times across all aspects of their daily lives. But, during peak times, agents can become overburdened responding to multiple inbound requests, requiring incoming customer calls or chats to be in a queue. As the queue increases and waiting times prolong, customers might abandon or get frustrated, leading to poor experience and potential business loss. 

Reduce Missed Chats or Abandon Rate: Live chat abandon rates can represent missed business opportunities and poor experience. Most of the time, the connection to the live chat agent breaks down, requiring the customer to start from scratch and launch a new chat window. Chatbots operate in an asynchronous mode where customers can start, pause, or continue a conversation hours later without having to start everything from scratch.

Shortens Average Agent Handling Time: A bot can assist an agent by providing them with suggested responses or information and automating the underlying tasks that better support the agent in responding faster. Since the bot can also detect customer intent, it can speed up access to the correct information and automate the live chat interaction. This is key to making agents more productive and resolving customer issues faster.

Increases accuracy and consistency: Although a customer gets through an agent, there are still chances of not obtaining the right or complete information. This can lead to serious consequences for businesses as well as their customers. AI bots alongside virtual agents can often bring the best results, where the former responds to routine requests and automates underlying workflows while the latter can tackle more complex issues with emotional intelligence.

Improves customer experience and retention: The application of AI within customer care centers is not just confined to handling simple customer requests and workflows. They also have the capability to automate complex customer journeys such as customer onboarding, subscription renewals, and claims management, all of which lead to increased sales conversion, higher retention, faster resolution, and more. 

Enhances productivity and satisfaction: Chatbots working alongside agents can help automate routine workflows, allowing agents to free up from mundane tasks and focus on areas that can add value and boost their satisfaction levels. 

As customer self-service models grow, customer care centers and BPOs are looking at ways that reduce operational costs and meet customer expectations. By adopting intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) that can support human agents through automating routine tasks and available round-the-clock, customer care agents can spend valuable time working on tasks that improve customer experience and drive business value.