With the end of COVID restrictions, it had been hoped that 2022 would bring the opportunity for businesses to rebuild; however, this year has brought a number of different, but equally challenging issues for businesses to negotiate: the rising cost of fuel and raw materials, inflation, industrial action, worker shortages, changing cultural norms around the workplace, increasing European red tape, economic uncertainty and GDPR and cyber security threats, to name but a few. Read on to discover how investing in AI, automation and UK companies can go a long way to help drive operational efficiencies in your business, better satisfy your customers and retain and recruit staff.
Chatbots and Voicebots
A chatbot, or virtual assistant, enables you to automate your customer engagement through rich voice and text experiences. For businesses who have so far held back on implementing a solution either because of concerns around cost or the maturity of the technology, they should look again as bot technology is proven in the market with numerous examples of it delivering ROI for businesses of all sizes. Chatbots enable you to service your customers 24/7, removing the difficulties and costs around
having to find and pay for staff in the evenings or weekends. Often queries to your customer service team are routine but occupy the time of your agents who could be handling more complex issues. Bots can not only handle all your routine tasks like FAQ but with natural language processing can have near-natural conversations with your customers. As a bot can handle unlimited numbers of calls at any one time, it means that wait times for your customers are significantly reduced, improving customer satisfaction, and ensuring opportunities to delight and sell are not missed. Chatbots also allow you to revolutionise your metrics. When your customer service or contact centre team is having to handle customer engagement manually the focus may well be on calls handled per hour; however, as a bot can handle unlimited calls, it means your business can focus on the customer journey, satisfaction and first call resolution.
Key Chatbot Functionality
To maximise the opportunities that a chatbot can bring, you need to understand the full range of functionality available. Chatbots can also offer voice engagement, an accepted and popular method of interaction because of voice assistants like Siri. It is important to have a bot that offers voice, but it is also key to look at the channels that voice functionality can operate over. Not every group of customers is digitally savvy and they will want to pick up the phone and call you, so having
a solution that can work over phone lines is key. A bot needs to offer natural language communication, but multimedia interaction in terms of point and click elements and the ability to add photos or videos to a conversation makes engagement more productive.
Natural Language IVRs
As mentioned above many groups still like to pick up the phone to engage with businesses. IVRs carry out the valuable task of getting someone to the right department or person with the right skill set for their issue but suffer from their tree-like structures that can easily lead to someone pressing the wrong button, having to go back to the beginning and then dropping out of the process in frustration, determined never to contact your business again. Natural language technology integrated into an IVR can allow your customers to explain their problems more clearly, speak to the right person and more easily move back and forth through the menu system if they make a mistake, ensuring they stay on the line. This technology is particularly helpful to improve automated payment taking, allowing your customers to pay when it is convenient to them and saving costs. However, dropout rates are even higher than when compared to general IVR usage as doubts over handing over credit card details or making a payment mean customers can easily find an excuse to end the payment, making the natural language technology crucial. Security is also critical but if a payment IVR is done right, it can also descope your contact centre from some, or all, aspects of PCI-DSS compliance, reducing costs and time.
Remote Visual Assistance Software
Remote visual assistance (RVA) software is a relatively new technology that saw accelerated usage for customer service teams during the COVID pandemic but delivers efficiencies during all periods. Remote visual assistance technology allows your customer service agent to send a link to a customer that allows them to temporarily use the camera of a customer’s smartphone to see what the customer is seeing and then guide them to resolve the problem the first time round more easily. It also
includes the ability to use VR technology to annotate on the screen of the smartphone.
With RVA technology, businesses benefit in many ways:
- Your customer service advisors can solve problems faster and more likely on the first occasion. It means they can deal with more enquiries, reducing the burden on your team’s resources and lowering costs.
- First-time resolution of problems means happier customers and better Net Promoter Scores.
- For businesses that may have to send engineers into the field to visit customer premises or homes, it brings another extremely compelling benefit in that reducing ‘truck rolls’ saves on fuel costs, a major concern at this time. RVA is helping with assessments, surveys, inspections and support across numerous industries, including housing associations, retailers, telecoms, surveyors, and distributors.
Cloud Software
The pandemic necessitated the need to adopt cloud-based contact centre software to allow employees to work from home. At the time, some businesses adopted temporary or hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions expecting their staff to be back in the office full-time; however, fundamental changes to working patterns and costs this year have meant remote working or hybrid is here to stay and it is best to move permanently to the cloud.
- With a labour shortage in many positions, cloud software enables businesses to allow employees to work remotely, giving them access to talent in any part of the country or even the world. With increasing volatility around demand, it is essential to have a more flexible workforce.
- Remote staff who you don’t need to provide a desk for in a physical office make it possible for you to finetune staffing requirements and optimise operational efficiency.
- Staff working from home can also respond more quickly to staff absences as they only need to pick up a headset rather than arrange babysitting.
- The pandemic changed attitudes towards the workplace and work/life balance with many employees insisting on continuing with remote working, or at least a hybrid situation. If businesses want to attract the best talent, they need to offer these benefits.
- The cost of travel to work is compounding the desire to remain remote for many people. If businesses insist on asking people to come into the office, then the best employees will ask for pay rises or decide to leave. Remote working for the moment, therefore, helps retain employees and keep down wages.
- Finally, remote working helps businesses reduce the cost of their rent, and associated heating and lighting costs.
UK Based SaaS Providers
High exchange rates, economic uncertainty with the UK’s place in Europe, and considerations around GDPR and ensuring data is protected mean UK-based SaaS businesses offer a more secure, reliable and cost-effective solution. This is particularly important if you are taking payments - any payment IVR needs to be hosted in a PCI-DSS secure environment otherwise if there is a breach of credit card data it will likely have severe reputational and financial risks, resulting in the loss of your business's ability to take payments. If you are relying on a PCI-DSS environment hosted overseas it is a much greater risk for your business. In conclusion, automation and AI technology backed up by a UK-based technology provider can help mitigate fraud, cybercrime and reduce costs. With the challenges, we are seeing in 2022 the time to act is now, before it is too late.
