New Cool Tips : 7 Actionable Ideas For Reducing Contact Center Call Volume

The ultimate goal of any contact center is to deliver a more positive and great Customer Experience (CX) while lowering the call volumes and costs. Many contact centers have invested in a variety of customer-facing technologies over the years, ranging from IVR, CTI, CRM, ACD and AI. Even after deploying these technologies, most businesses are not able to improve operational efficiencies, boost CX or maximise their ROI.

Most firms today assume that technology is the only way to cut expenses and by focusing entirely on technology implementation, they are ruining CX and fundamental operations. However, there are effective strategies to reduce the volume of calls received by your contact center while creating delightful CX and increasing business growth. Check out our new list of 7 actionable ideas on how you can reduce call volumes.

7 Actionable Ideas For Reducing Contact Center Call Volume

1. Map The Customer Journey

The first step to reducing inbound call traffic is to figure out why customers are calling in the first place. Recognizing the most prevalent difficulties that customers face with a product, process or service is part of this. The majority of inbound calls are often caused by a collection of similar factors.

We may map the customer care path using customer journey analytics once we’ve discovered the most prevalent reasons for inbound contacts. Analytical data allows us to assess the effectiveness of the service offered by the contact center agents and identifies the customer’s trouble points while customer journey analytics aids in the evaluation of publicly available data.

2. Measure Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score measures how easy it can be for a customer to interact with you and get a response to a request. Switch between channels, repetitive engagement, transfers and other high-effort experiences are examples of high-effort experiences. Tracking CES can help you cut down on call volume and expenditures while also enhancing customer satisfaction.

The single question is also recommended by Gartner for determining CES.

3. Focus On Multiple Channels and Provide Self-Service Options

Utilise exceptional channels for conversations and sell those channels evenly. Set KPIs for each channel and allow customers to choose their options. Enable smart self-service options across web, mobile and telephone. Here are some examples of self-service best practices.

1. Highly visible and updated FAQs.

2. Customized CRM portals.

3. Strong and NLP enabled knowledge base solutions.

4. Self-help links integrated into web pages that lead to the help documents.

5. Online community discussion portals.

A more modern and efficient self-service option through which customers can look for answers is through chatbots and conversational IVR systems. It can be deployed from handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets as well as from the desktop. Even social media applications such as Facebook, can be well-integrated with chatbots to give your customers optimal CX.

4. Using AI Chatbots

Chatbot adoption in contact centers have grown rapidly for more than a few years, across industries.

Chatbots are powered by conversational AI, NLP and machine learning. They offer the same conversational experience as communicating with a human agent : They are deployed as the first line of support in order to handle tier interactions.

Chatbots can be your great support as they have many exceptional abilities such as:

1. 24/7 availability and an easy-to-use conversational interface.

2. Efficient self-service option for customers.

3. Reduces the number of calls that human executives have to deal with without compromising on the CX.

5. Chatbot Agent Handoff

Chatbots are great for customer interactions by simulating human-like conversations, a common misconception that customer service leaders may have the chatbot alone sufficient to handle customer service.

The truth is there may be situations where the customer interaction needs to be transferred to a human agent. In such a scenario, the bot’s ability is to identify the interference of a human and seamlessly transition the conversation to a suitable contact center agent. In this way, the inbound call volume can be cut down by fulfilling basic, preliminary tasks such as distributing user information and recording customer concerns with the help of a chatbot.

6. Conversational IVR

Chatbot tech in contact centers is also intended to replace traditional IVR systems that tend to be a major pain point for customers looking for quick and effective issue resolution. Unlike traditional IVR systems, conversational IVR uses NLP and Machine Learning to understand the content of customer’s speech, enabling dynamic and hassle-free experiences. Customers can have a smooth transition through the complex navigation menu of a traditional IVR.

7.Ensure First Call Resolution(FCR)

The major reason that contributes to increased inbound call volume in contact centers is that most issues are not resolved in the first-call, requiring multiple calls to ensure the issue is solved in real-time. It leads to more calls that can impact customer satisfaction badly. Customer satisfaction is only great when First Call Resolution rate is always measured with CSAT to improve it.

Optimise In Order To Reduce Repeat Calls

When your contact center receives a call about a problem with a particularly ineffective customer service process, then you need to provide ample resources to your back-end team and properly modify or improve the self-help pages related to the processes. When you do this, you are able to help reduce the event of repeated calls for the same issue in the future by improving the quality of pages and processes based on support calls.

Lowering call volume is the better idea to reduce the cost of doing business in a contact center. It includes the process streamlining and automation plus you can work together intelligently. Discover more about what chatbots can offer for your contact center and how it can scale your business to greater heights.

Interested in leveraging the chatbot and creating smarter CX? Get in touch with us. Please call our CX and AI Expert for more information. Contact us today

Source: https://botcore.ai/blog/7-actionable-tips-to-reduce-contact-center-call-volume/