Revolutionizing the Telecom Contact Center Experience

By Ravi Saraogi, Co-Founder and President, Asia Pacific, Uniphore

COVID-19 has led businesses and individuals to rely more heavily on the telecom industry for secure and reliable connectivity. Working and learning from home have exponentially increased personal and professional demand.

The Telecom industry in India is the second largest in the world with a subscriber base of 1.17 billion as of early 2021. Telecoms recognize that innovative technologies are critical to meet the evolving requirements and have committed to accelerating digital transformation (DT). In the 2020 Telecoms.com Intelligence Annual Industry Survey, three-quarters of respondents said their DT had either been maintained or increased during the pandemic.

The importance of digital technologies will only grow as the industry emerges from COVID-19. Accelerating the DT agenda will be essential for telecoms to increase efficiencies and lower costs during slower recovery and growth periods.

Minimizing Business Disruption

Over two-thirds of senior telecom executives cite CX as their top strategic priority. Executives identify CX and customer support as the top two most critical use cases driving analytics and AI adoption, according to EY’s Global Telecommunications Study 2019.

Telecom companies must move quickly to provide better CX, while simultaneously empowering employees to succeed in WFH environments and protecting company security to differentiate themselves. Based on data from Forrester Research, McKinsey & Company found that CX leaders had 3x higher total shareholder returns than laggards in the 2007-2009 recession.

As one of the most critical areas impacting CX, contact centers (CC) offer the highest ROI. Companies look to adopt advanced technologies to modernize CC to lower their average handle time (AHT), call waiting times, and increase customer satisfaction.

Three main areas where companies can continue to enhance customer value and achieve competitive advantage through CCs include:

• Customer self-service
• After call work (ACW)
• Post interaction analytics

Increasing Self-Service Options with AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP)

 Companies can automate mundane interactions through self-service channels such as intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) to drive better customer experiences. IVAs leverage AI and NLP across chatbots and voice-bots to empower customers to resolve simple and straightforward issues quickly and easily on their own. IVAs can be used to make payments, troubleshoot basic service issues, check the status of an order, etc.

In its report “COVID-19 Responsive Customer Service in Times of Change,” Accenture states that now is the time for companies to double down on AI and create a multi-speed human and machine workforce within CCs. Telecom companies can provide customers with instant, on-demand services to fulfill their needs through IVAs.

This type of conversational AI-powered self-service increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. IVAs speed time to resolution while lowering costs to serve by offloading routine tasks from live agents. This works to increase agent productivity, and reducing call volume.

Automating ACW for Immediate ROI

ACW represents a central component of CC operations, consuming considerable agent time and attention. ACW requires agents to summarize and precisely detail interactions after every call – agents must complete this work before connecting with another customer. According to the Call Center Helper's Erlang Calculator, ACW is also considered part of a CC’s AHT, estimated at approximately 6 minutes across multiple industries and geographies.

In addition to being a time-consuming, labor-intensive process, ACW can be error-prone. Summaries vary across agents. They may have small, unexpected interruptions following a call; this results in a slight delay in write-ups and causing them to forget critical points.

Imagine the following scenario. An agent picks up a new customer call, a comprehensive and visual dashboard opens, and the conversation begins. As the discussion ensues, the system automatically transcribes the conversation and captures top interaction insights. Applying real-time speech analytics, the system listens to the agent and customer conversation and alerts the agent to the customer sentiment, reason/s for the call, and provides in-call guidance to best handle the conversation.

Additionally, supervisors instantly connect to urgent situations, with immediate access to the dashboard. This allows them to quickly step in and deliver agent support as needed while improving the CX.

Capturing key conversation details, such as the call reason, outcome, and real-time transcription provides a comprehensive summary post the call. Agents can edit the summary if needed and instantly upload it into their CRM/internal system; this also increases data accuracy.

Transcription technology eliminates wait time for agents to enter data and ensures the conversation has been appropriately documented for future interactions. Today’s customers expect companies to know them and do not want to retell their history at each interaction.

Automating the process reduces agent ACW time, driving higher productivity and lower AHT. Companies can cut time spent on ACW to around a minute versus the 6-minute average through automation. The time saving allows agents to help other customers, focus their attention on providing personalized customer service and care and decrease customer hold times – giving telecoms immediate ROI.

Improving Post Interaction Analysis with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Consider the immense benefits if companies could easily and automatically extract data from every customer interaction and use those findings to improve business efficiencies. By using AI-based analytics, telecoms can transform their CC operations. AI capabilities enhance the value of post-interaction analysis so that telecoms can:

• Coach CC agents to higher performance
• Identify areas for business improvement
• Optimize overall CC processes

Telecoms can identify the important issues and determine the appropriate actions for planning and operational improvements with AI insights. Rather than sifting through different systems or reviewing thousands of summaries trying to draw out data, this information would be available at one’s fingertips.

Companies can detect customer and agent-centric patterns that otherwise would be lost in a sea of data. They can identify potential points of friction in the customer journey to optimize CX.

Automated post-interaction analysis on 100% of customer interactions enables operations to spot customer feedback trends and analyze pain points that occur most often across their customer base. The issues can then be addressed and improved within the digital experience, answering questions such as:

What are the top customer complaints?

Why do most customers cancel?

How often do agents change their automated summaries, and in what way?

What call categories occur most frequently?

Machine-learning capabilities let telecoms see things through a new lens and derive more value from their existing systems and data. By better understanding customer desires and repeated issues, companies can build a knowledge base and enhance existing processes accordingly.

Applying Digital Technologies for a Superior CX

As digital leaders, telecom providers must innovate and apply new digital business strategies. Paramount are technologies such as NLP, real-time transcription automation, and AI. They make it easier to drive a more personalized CX and simultaneously increase agent efficiency and performance by automating routine processes.

With a more intelligent, streamlined approach, companies can maximize their efficiencies and enhance their CC operations productivity. By speeding first call resolutions, telecoms increase employee productivity and reduce CC costs. Automating ACW delivers immediate efficiency benefits and lowers AHT, and post-interaction analytics give telecoms access to data that allows them to optimize further and enhance business systems.

Most importantly, by adopting these types of digital technologies, telecoms can deliver superior and secure CX. Operations teams are empowered to resolve issues faster and deliver higher QoS to drive customer loyalty in times of uncertainty.