Call centers were flooded with unprecedented call volumes when stay-at-home mandates were imposed by the government to combat Covid-19. According to Forbes, the abrupt changes in consumer behavior and the day-to-day operations of call centers, paired with increased demand due to hot-button issues such as travel cancellations and insurance claims, have led to a 34% increase in hold times for customer service calls. As we recover from operational challenges posed by the pandemic, enterprises are realizing the importance of employing voice driven self-service and scalable automation capabilities to enhance customer experience.
Virtual Agents
A virtual agent is an online chatbot, that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to have intelligent and informed conversations with customers. They are extremely effective when it comes to handling high frequency and automatable calls, such as changing delivery time slots, cancelling appointments and executing password change, etc. These inquires are often routine and should not require interactions with an available agent.
Augmenting your live agents will change your entire operating model – While the hold time and average handling time (AHT) is reduced, the capacity is increased without compromising customer satisfaction, all at a lower cost.
Investing in conversational AI will optimize efficiency, allow your available agents to focus on higher-priority inquiries and provide sustainable 24/7 customer support. Call center solutions have been around for quite some time, but a recent surge in AI has led to massive amounts of growth, new features, and new players to choose from. We’re going to break down 7 different call center solutions to see which one fits your stack.
For a contact center with 2M calls per year and a 40% automated use-cases, savings can average $2.1M
1. Genesys
Pros
- Missed calls notifications. Strong notification system to ensure you don’t miss any missed calls.
- The ability of transferring the calls, WhatsApp messages, and emails to a specific agent to follow up with the client
- Friendly user interface & software
Cons
- Difficulty making three-way calls
- Support can be slow
Stats
- Over 11,000 companies in over 100 countries use Genesys
- Agent metrics report – displays detailed statistics about interactions handled by one or more agents during a date & time range; for each agent, the report includes: interactions that have handle time, number of interactions per day, average talk time, after call work, and handle time, hold and transfer data; the report sorts the information by agent name, date of the interactions, and media type
2. Avaya
Pros
- Voice to text transcriptions
- Easy to implement and integrate into your call center stack
- Web-based solution with support for screen recordings
Cons
- Visual UX and UI are outdated
- Lacks certain features that other solutions provide out of the box
Stats
- Serving organizations at 220,000 customer locations worldwide
- Avaya OneCloud solutions power more than 90% of the Fortune 100 organizations
3. Dialpad
Pros
- AI based speech to text transcriptions
- “Dialbot” – a bot that helps you when something is requiring your attention
- Easy to set up, and UI is fresh and modern
- Immediate assistance – Supervisors have the option to listen on live every possible negative interaction and work it out immediately.
Cons
- MMS messaging management (longer texts come through jumbled and out of order)
- Tune-ability and configurations of AI tools are limited
Stats
- 65,000 customers worldwide
4. Five9
Pros
- Help Companies remain compliant
- Helpful reports for employee examination
- Helped track progress for small call centers
- Ability to increase/decrease licenses on a monthly basis
Cons
- Installation is a multistep process
- Limited capability to eliminate spam calls.
5. Nextiva
Pros
- Amazing insights and data on customers
- Increased response rate and time it takes to clear out messages
- User tracking accurately measures availability and overall weekly performance
- Analysts are able to query database without technical support
Cons
- No support for SMS
- Difficult setup and onboarding process
6. RingCentral
Pros
- Difficulty making three-way calls
- Work from home support is top notch
Very customizable with tons of functionality
Pre-built “quick-start” templates for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) development
Cons
- Difficulty making three-way calls
- Support can be slow
- No automated response to texts
7. TalkDesk
Pros
- No-code IVR management
- Allow distributed team to take business calls on mobile numbers and not expose their personal phones
- Integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce
Cons
- Data interpretations and insights can be improved
How To Get Started
Forrester indicates, almost 3 out of 4 customers agree that their time is the most important thing when it comes providing good online customer service. Self-service is a hot topic in the call centre industry and it is time to make AI powered, voice-enabled virtual agents become a true competitive advantage to your business.
At Resemble, we offer seamless integrations to power up your call center stack. You can personalize your Voice AI with dynamically generated speech, create multilingual IVR flows with synthetic agents, and leave AI generated voicemail etc. Check out our Integration page, https://www.resemble.ai/integrations/ and talk to us here: [email protected]
