Lockdowns and work-from-home became the norm for most people in 2020. Can you recall how many times you tried to engage with a business or government office? How many times were you put on hold for a while because support teams everywhere were overwhelmed? How many contact centers were flooded by the unexpected avalanche of calls?
Experiencing a pandemic has changed us as customers forever. It disrupted and transformed the way people expect to interact with organizations. Customers expect 24/7 accessibility and support across channels. From medical support, rescheduling holidays to obtaining emergency loans, call centers have been at the center of it all. Slow responses, high attrition rates, call volumes and delays meant organizations faced a huge loss in brand confidence. Specially, during a time that heavily influenced consumer loyalty.
Rising Contact Center Challenges
Contact Centers today are still facing challenges born out of the pandemic. These continue to impact operations and customer satisfaction in three major areas:
- Supporting the Customer: call centers are still experiencing long wait times. Companies are having difficulty keeping up with the demand, which increases negative customer feedback.
- Digital transitions: the rapid pace of digitalization has left contact centers with disjointed self-services experiences. Additionally, they also now have fragmented operations that were implemented in a rush.
- Reactive operations: rising costs to serve, regulatory changes, staff shortages. Contact centers leaders are having to manage new strategic challenges. At the same time, they still need to keep up with rising customer contact demands resulting in reactive management.
But not everything is bad news; thanks to technologies such as Conversational AI, the future is bright but complicated. Legacy systems, staffing and costs are hampering change. However, if implemented right, Conversational AI (CAI) can bring solutions to the challenges previously mentioned. It also can offer quantifiable results to contact centers such as better NPS and cost savings.
We suggest that companies take a holistic approach to their omnichannel support. How? By using CAI to enhance those channels that make sense to automate. This is explained in the graphic below:
The impact that these will have on customers’ satisfaction will increase proportionally to the complexity of the use case and the maturity of the enterprise. See how in the graph below:
The Future of Contact Centers: Digitalizing using Conversational AI
Want to learn more about this topic? Teneo.ai and CGI hosted a webinar about “The Future of Contact Centers: Digitalizing using Conversational AI”. Adam Kobeissi (CGI), Chidi Akurunwa (CGI) and Mykola Sochynskyi (Teneo.ai) discused how, with advances in Process Automation and Machine Learning, the answer lies in using Open Question to provide human-like experiences with meaningful outcomes.
Click below to watch the full webinar on-demand and learn how Open Question is changing the way contact centers operate.