This nationally recognized pest control company has been keeping homes and businesses bug-free for over a century. With hundreds of branches across the US and around the world, their technicians are regularly honored as the best in the industry. From commercial fumigations, to annual residential sanitations, customers rely on their services to keep their homes and businesses safe.

Industry: Consumer Services
Size: 8,000+ Employees

Use Cases:

• Customer Authentication
• Intelligent Routing
• Account Management
• Appointment Scheduling

Download Case Study

The Challenge

Prior to partnering with Replicant, this business had a challenge converting new customers that called in to take advantage of free inspections. Due to the offer and the seasonal nature of their business, prospective customers would call in during the same time period. Often, they would wait on hold for 20+ minutes, overwhelming agents and increasing call abandonment rates. In addition, they were struggling to hire agents, and BPOs were no longer cutting it. They needed a way to automate their most common call flows so agents could focus on converting prospects and servicing urgent requests.

“We couldn’t hire, so we needed to either add more BPO capacity or automate.” – Pest Control Company

The Partnership

After over a year of evaluating automation solutions, this business chose to partner with Replicant for two reasons: “The Thinking Machine is so much more lifelike than anything we’ve seen before, which is huge with highly emotional customers,” they said. “The second reason was how attentive and helpful Replicant was.”

Replicant was deployed to automate call routing, authentication, account management, and appointment scheduling. Within weeks, customers were getting accurately routed to the right agent on first attempt, urgent requests were escalated quickly, and new customers could schedule inspections with zero wait times. At the same time, the contact center now had visibility into why customers were calling, providing new opportunities to prioritize request types and deploy agents more efficiently.

The Outcome

Replicant’s Consumer Services customers, from auto care to landscaping to pest control, have all experienced dramatic increases in their call resolution rates. With dozens of repeatable use cases and millions of calls automated, our experience helps service providers achieve high resolution rates on day one. With Replicant, this pest control company quickly began saving on costs, resulting from our partnership’s ability to establish the API calls, fields, and resources needed to get up and running quickly. Compared to the months to years-long projects most automation deployments entail, the ability to start automating flows in time for peak season paid dividends right away.

• Higher conversion rates for new customers
• Faster service for existing customers
• Better agent experience
• Lower training costs
• Eliminated need for a BPO

“The Thinking Machine is so much more lifelike than anything we’ve seen before, which is huge with highly emotional customers.” – Pest Control Company

The post Leading Pest Control Company Converts More Business with Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

The Consumer Services that make our lives easier every day are always in demand. 

For businesses, that’s a great thing. 

But for their contact centers, rising demand has become a major challenge.

Replicant enables Consumer Services companies to automate their most common customer requests so they can implement more efficient staffing strategies and resolve more calls with zero wait times.

With millions of conversations automated for Consumer Services brands, our customers consistently see one major outcome: Agents are freed to focus on urgent and revenue generating engagements, which increases conversion rates and bolsters customer satisfaction. 

In an industry where competition is high and customers can quickly jump to new providers, the differentiator of a better experience makes customers’ lives even easier and strengthens bottom lines. 

Which service areas are embracing automation?

Consumer Services is a broad category. But almost every vertical shares one or more of these common CX obstacles:

• Seasonality & Call Spikes: Call spikes are inherent to the Consumer Services industry. The warmer months spell demand for services like pest control, cleaning, landscaping and moving. Conversely, many services experience valleys in their demand which bring their own set of workforce challenges.
• Agent Staffing & BPO Challenges: It’s never been harder to attract and retain agents in a competitive field with a shrinking labor pool. This has made staffing for seasonal peaks more expensive, and even impacted the cost of after-hours BPO agreements.
• Challenging Marketing Programs: Consumer Services brands often must offer incentives like free estimates to compete. But these programs fail when the demand they create can’t be converted due to long wait times that frustrate prospective customers.
• Call Routing Issues with Current IVRs: Outdated IVRs force customers to navigate dialpad menus and result in a high number of misrouted calls – and agents wasting time on requests that weren’t meant for them (not to mention the poor CX they create).
• Lack of Visibility & Prioritization: Black boxes of data create blind spots where businesses don’t know the main reasons their customers are calling. This can result in an urgent call for a problem like a bursted pipe or flooded basement waiting on hold in the same queue as a customer simply looking to update their card on file.
• Lack of Consumer Loyalty: A single poor customer experience can be enough to lose their business and damage your brand reputation. Consumer Services leaders are all well aware of the long list of competitors in their area; driving customer loyalty is crucial. 

All of these challenges boil down to a single issue: Businesses lose money when they aren’t attending to their prospective customers, existing customers or urgent customers fast enough. 

The nature of the call center in all of the below Consumer Services means agents must focus on converting new business and can’t afford to spend time on tasks that don’t help the bottom line:

• Home Services: Pest Control, Landscaping, Cleaning, Security, Utilities
• Home Improvement: Repairs, Construction, Plumbing, Heating & HVAC
• Moving & Storage: Junk Removal, Moving Truck Rentals & Storage Rentals
• Auto Services: Auto Repairs, Collision, Auto Spas 

The most impactful use cases for automation

Agent burnout, emotional exhaustion and high levels of turnover are not new challenges for contact centers. In 2021, the contact center attrition rate in the U.S. was 42%, and climbed to 50% for contact centers with over 5,000 agents.

When mundane, repetitive tasks are automated, contact centers nip the problem in the bud. Rather than trying to squeeze more productivity out of agents, they’re freed to focus on more engaging calls that require empathy and creativity. 

Common use cases that improve the customer and agent experience when automated include:

Authentication & Routing 

• Authenticate existing customers and pull up their account details
• Accurately route existing customers to service agents and new customers to sales reps
• Route commercial accounts to appropriate agents to ensure that SLAs are met
• Route urgent and emotional customer requests to priority queues

Intake 

• Immediately screen new customers to determine eligibility and route more accurately 
• Collect the details needed to automate requests, or to save agents time during handoffs

Appointment Scheduling 

• Fully schedule an at-home or in-store service appointment
• Send an SMS flex form to select the best time or window

Account Management 

• Fulfill payments, enroll customers in autopay, update subscriptions and more
• Confirm, reschedule, update and cancel upcoming service appointments

Outbound 

• Send appointment reminders
• Provide status updates on service pro arrival times
• Reminders customers to schedule upcoming services

Case Study: How a leading pest control brand closes more business with Replicant

Customer Overview
Replicant partners with a leading pest control company recognized as the Best Pest Control Company by Forbes in May 2023. After over a year of evaluating automation solutions, they partnered with Replicant for two reasons:

“The Thinking Machine is so much more lifelike than anything we’ve seen before, which is huge with highly emotional customers,” they said. “The second reason was how attentive and helpful Replicant was.”

The Challenge
Part of their marketing strategy includes free termite inspections to capture new business. But due to the seasonal nature of the business, prospective customers would call in to redeem the offer at the same time and agents couldn’t handle all the volume.

Prospective customers were waiting on hold for 20+ minutes and eventually hung up, leading to poor conversion rates and high abandonment rates. 

The Partnership
Replicant was deployed to automate call routing, authentication, account management, and appointment scheduling. Within weeks, customers were getting accurately routed to the right agent on first attempt, urgent requests were escalated quickly, and new customers could schedule inspections with zero wait times.

At the same time, the contact center now had visibility into why customers were calling, providing new opportunities to prioritize request types and deploy agents more efficiently. 

The Outcome
Consumer Services customers that use Replicant have all experienced dramatic increases in their call resolution rates. With dozens of repeatable use cases and millions of calls automated, our experience includes learnings for achieving high resolution rates on day one.

In addition, this customer saw an accelerated time to value resulting from our ability to establish the API calls, fields, and resources needed to get up and running quickly. Compared to the months to years-long projects most automation deployments entail, the ability to start automating flows in time for peak season paid dividends right away. 

The post Service Simplified: Consumer Services Brands Close More Business With Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

Here’s a glossary of terms you need to know to understand, evaluate and deploy LLMs in your contact center:

Key LLM Terms

Large Language Models (LLMs): A type of AI model that can understand and generate human-like language. LLMs are trained to understand the past 40 years of all data on the internet, then analyze and process it faster than humans in order to produce natural responses.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): A field of computer science focused on making interactions between computers and human language more natural and intuitive.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU): A subfield of NLP focused on enabling computers to understand human language in a way that is similar to how humans understand language.

Natural Language Generation (NLG): A subfield of NLP focused on what to say back. NLG generates a free form response from a free form question.

Generative AI: A type of AI that uses machine learning models to generate new content, such as text, images, music or videos, that is similar to examples it was trained on. LLMs are a subset of Generative AI.

Pre-training: The process of training an LLM on large amounts of text data before fine-tuning it for a specific task.

Training Set: A set of examples used to train an LLM model, typically consisting of input-output pairs that are used to adjust the model’s parameters and optimize its performance on a specific task.

Fine-tuning: The process of adapting an LLM to a specific task by training it on a smaller dataset that is specific to that task.

Transformer: A neural network architecture used in many LLMs, including GPT-3, that enables efficient and effective language processing.

GPT-3, GPT-4:: Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, a widely known and powerful LLM model developed by OpenAI, with fine-tuned models GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 following. 

ChatGPT: ChatGPT is OpenAI’s accessible app for GPTs 3 through 4. The app puts LLMs into consumer hands to allow for dialogue-based interaction to create new text based content. 

Prompt: A user’s text input that initiates and guides language generation by an LLM.

Key CX Terms

Entity: A piece of information (e.g., text, item, number) that a machine needs to extract from a sentence to inform decisions and resolve requests. Collecting a set of entities is referred to as slot filling.

Intent: The nature of a customer’s request that must be extracted from their natural utterance (e.g. “I want to send an order back” is categorized as Return Request). The intent informs the machine’s next steps.

Multi-intent Recognition: LLMs enable Replicant’s Thinking Machine to recognize multiple requests from a single utterance (e.g., “I need to update my card on file and change my address), which significantly decreases Average Handle Time. 

Zero-Shot Learning: A technique used in LLMs that allows the model to generate outputs for tasks it has not been explicitly trained on.

Human-in-the-Loop: A design approach that involves incorporating human feedback and oversight into AI systems to improve their effectiveness. Unsupervised learning causes conversations and predictions to go wrong.

Hallucination: A problem inherent to LLMs where the machine makes up words or actions if it doesn’t know what to do from the information in the knowledge base.

Toxic Reply: An inappropriate response generated by an LLM, often the number one reason why LLMs can’t be connected directly to customers. 

Prompt Engineering: The process of guiding LLMs to generate accurate and relevant outputs by creating high-quality prompts.

Adversarial Examples: Inputs that have been intentionally designed to mislead an LLM or other AI system.

Bias: In the context of LLMs, bias refers to systematic errors or inaccuracies in language generation or understanding that result from the model’s training data.

Explainability: The ability to understand how an LLM arrived at a particular output or decision.

Key Terms for LLM-Powered Automation 

Contact Center Automation: A hybrid approach that uses AI and LLMs to create a customer-centric contact center that efficiently serves customers at scale while elevating agents to focus on the most complex and nuanced issues.

Thinking Machine: Replicant’s Contact Center Automation brain which serves millions of customers across every channel and allows them to speak naturally and fully resolve issues with no wait. 

Application Programming Interface (API): A set of protocols that specify how software components should interact with each other. APIs can connect LLMs with existing platforms like Contact Center Automation to enhance their performance.

1-Turn Problem Capture: The Thinking Machine’s ability to accurately capture several issues in a single turn of the conversation to increase completion rates and speed to resolution.

Contextual Disambiguation: The Thinking Machine’s ability to be fully aware of nuanced and complex differences in callers’ varied answers determine their meaning (e.g., “You got it,” means “Yes”).

Dynamic Conversation Repair: The Thinking Machine’s ability to seamlessly repair conversations when callers change their mind or need to correct previously provided information. 

Intelligent Reconnect: The Thinking Machine’s ability to automatically call, chat or SMS customers back and pick up where they left off when a conversation drops for any reason.

Few Shot Learning: The Thinking Machine’s ability to decipher intents from thousands of unique phrases using only a few training examples, significantly decreasing how long it takes to deploy Contact Center Automation. 

Dialogue Policy Control: Replicant’s coded set of rules that ensures accuracy and control over scripts, workflows and actions the LLM follows, and prevents hallucinations and toxic responses. 

Enterprise-grade: Replicant’s advanced expertise gained from automating 10M+ conversations over the past 6 years which has created prompt engineering best practices and methods to rigorously evaluate and leverage LLMs.

Prompt Injection Prevention: A prescribed set of workflows and scripts that filter and safeguard against sharing sensitive information with a third-party LLM. 

LLM-Agnostic: The Thinking Machine’s ability to leverage any LLM based on security and performance to ensure contact centers receive the best LLM available. 

Guardrails: A set of rules and preventative measures that allows LLMs to be used to improve the performance of Contact Center Automation without connecting customers directly to third-party platforms. 

The post The ChatGPT Glossary for CX Leaders appeared first on Replicant.

For over 60 years, this leading auto insurance company has provided five-star coverage to their members. Their policies offer a variety of support, including liability, collision, and full coverage. A contact center of over 400 agents handles inbound customer service requests, with voice making up the majority of customer interactions.

Industry: Auto Insurance
Call Volume: 4.7M+/Year

Use Cases: 

• Customer Authentication
• Intelligent Routing
• Account Management
• Policy Management
• Request Documents
• Check Claims Status 
• Make Payments 

Download Case Study

The Challenge 

Prior to partnering with Replicant, this auto insurer was focused on one thing: increasing their operational efficiency. Like many contact centers, their team was facing new disruption patterns, including unpredictable customer demand and difficulty hiring and retaining agents. They needed a solution to reduce agent workloads, improve the customer experience, and gather more insights about their callers. While the company had long-term plans to implement automation, the need for a flexible solution suddenly became urgent. 

The Partnership 

As a first-time initiative for their business, the partnership began with education. Our teams worked closely to first analyze the company’s business operations and identify where Contact Center Automation could have the greatest impact. High-volume call flows like Customer Authentication, Account Management, Proof of Insurance and Policy Questions presented automation opportunities that could save agents time and greatly improve the customer experience. 

Our partnership also focused on aligning the technical goals of the insurer with Replicant’s platform. This enabled a successful integration of Replicant into the company’s contact center system, even as they underwent a CCaaS migration. Within ten weeks, the insurer successfully implemented and deployed Replicant into production. In another two months, Replicant was fully ramped and taking 100% of calls for their selected call drivers.  

“To see the deployment through and be a part of this game-changing solution from inception to launch to maintenance with such swiftness has had a huge impact on our mindset and what we are capable of.”  – Director of Business Solutions at Insurance Company

The Outcome

Replicant achieved an 80%+ success rate in resolving or accurately routing calls within the first eight weeks. Meanwhile, where their team previously lacked reliable data into why customers called, Replicant’s advanced analytics helped the insurer discover that unsupported call flows accounted for 50% of their call volume. This enabled them to expand their automation strategy to additional data-backed call drivers. 

Soon after, Replicant was moved up in their contact center’s IVR to handle more than 4,000 calls a day. Throughout the expansion, containment rates remained consistent, prompting the insurance company to further expand Replicant to handle their total call volume of 4.7M+ calls a year and replace their legacy IVR entirely.

• 80%+ Claims Success Rate
• 4.4/5.0 CSAT Score 
• 100% Scaled to replace IVR
• 50% More Calls Answered 
• 4,100+ Calls Automated/Day
• <2 Min. Average Handle Time

“Replicant is a true partner in helping achieve your self-service and strategic automation goals. They are going to make sure you understand every step of the process and that you are getting the most out of their platform.” – Operations Leader, Customer Interaction, Leading Auto Insurance Provider

The post Auto Insurance Leader Resolves 50% More Calls Using Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

Customers depend on punctual rides and easy-to-reach assistance to get where they’re going on time. When interruptions in service happen, customers need fast access to status updates, weather reports and ETAs. 

But if customer service agents are asked to handle repetitive, high volume call types, phone lines get clogged quickly, making it harder for customers to schedule, cancel, and modify rides.

And while transportation companies are dealing with many of the same challenges as every industry – rising customer demand, economic uncertainty, and labor shortages – they also face a unique set of obstacles. 

From public agencies like statewide mass transit to private organizations like taxi, bus and train services, factors like seasonality, outages, and compliance must be accounted for.

As customer satisfaction continues to be priority number one, passengers and transportation contact centers need an answer fast. With Contact Center Automation, not only can a solution be deployed in a matter of weeks, it’s already making an impact at some of the world’s largest transit agencies. 

The Challenge

Budgets and Economic Uncertainty 

Transit agencies went through some of their hardest years during the pandemic, when ridership hit record lows and caused revenues to plummet. This has forced many organizations to increase fares while cutting the amount of routes offered. 

“The largest systems are very pressured at their lookahead on their budgets,” said the President of the American Public Transportation Association. Now, with economic headwinds driving further uncertainty, contact centers must find new ways to cut costs while increasing efficiency.  

Staffing and Retention 

Since the pandemic, hiring agents has become more competitive than ever. Job candidates want higher wages, better benefits, and stipends to support a work from home environment. In addition, the strict training and compliance requirements associated with onboarding a transportation agent lead to higher costs than other industries. 

Given the tightened budgets seen across transit agencies, these expectations are often impossible to meet and sustain. Similarly, outsourcing customer service to BPOs has become expensive and ineffective in improving SLAs. 

Call Spikes and Wait Times

Commuter ridership is experiencing a steep rebound as more employees return to offices. This has proven to be a major challenge for contact centers, who already experience seasonality from the spring to fall months. 

As a result, riders who call in for support are experiencing longer wait times; they’re also abandoning calls at a higher clip than ever. On the whole, call spikes caused by both predictable and unpredictable events are impossible to staff for and only further harm customer satisfaction. 

Compliance Transit agencies face unique regulation hurdles that make reliable service not only a priority, but mission critical. Agencies that offer paratransit service for disabled patrons, for example, must adhere to SLAs set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

Failure to meet these expectations can lead to violations, legal repercussions and monetary fines. With stakeholders that can include agency boards and elected officials, a transit contact center’s Average Speed to Answer can have political and PR ramifications, in addition to the direct business impact.

How Automation Keeps Riders Moving

Whether you’re a public transit agency or a private taxi, bus or train service, Contact Center Automation can elevate the customer experience while adding guaranteed efficiency gains that drive cost savings. 

Contact Center Automation is not your standard IVR experience. Customers can speak naturally, receive SMS updates, and ask any amount of questions to receive end-to-end resolution, not just routing or FAQ information. 

For an industry that has long relied on legacy technology to deflect and contain callers, a modern experience makes self-service more intuitive for customers’ most common requests. When these call types are fully automated, agents are spared from answering thousands of simple calls every week.

Common automation candidates for transportation companies include:

Trip Management:

• Rider authentication & call routing
• Ride status
• Same-day travel problems
• Book a trip
• Confirm a trip
• Cancel a trip
• Reschedule a trip
• Cabin & Seat Upgrades
• Pre-Travel Reminders
• Trip status notifications
• FAQs:  Confirm Fares, Bags, Boarding

Rider Management

• Manage Subscription Service
• Manage Rewards 
• Check Card Balance 
• Purchase Card
• Lost & Found FAQ
• FAQs: Replacing a lost card, balance questions

Accelerated Value for Contact Centers 

Replicant plugs into contact centers’ existing tech stack to help resolve common rider requests that don’t require a live agent. Starting with rider authentication and routing, Replicant handles fare confirmations, ride status checks, new bookings, booking confirmations, modifications, cancellations and reschedules. 

With zero wait times and quick resolutions, customers get what they need over any channel and agents are given the context they need to resolve high value calls. The result is increased containment rates, high customer satisfaction, eliminated call wait times and decreased abandonment rates.

The post Moving Forward: How Transportation Companies Serve More Riders with Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

No industry is more aware of the ongoing turbulence in the market than contact centers. After all, contact centers represent a key connection point between businesses and customers. As economic concerns persist, Replicant partnered with Demand Metric to explore how leaders in the contact center industry are responding:

• What are contact centers prioritizing in their strategies?
• How are contact center budgets being impacted?
• How are leaders planning for potential staff reductions?
• Why are technology investments a leading hedge against uncertainty?
• What role will automation play in new investments?

The report summarizes the results and shares insights from over 150 contact center primary decision makers or those highly involved in contact center strategy. It provides hundreds of fresh data points for a deeper understanding of how contact centers are preparing for the unknown and remaining optimistic in the face of uncertainty. Below is a preview of some of the key findings.

The full report can be downloaded here.

Key Finding #1

Automating customer service is the top investment priority. Over two-thirds (68%) of contact centers in the study rank automating customer service as the first criterion they will use to evaluate investments.

While automation was a priority for nearly every contact center in 2022, persisting economic uncertainty has made it an urgent need. For every new technology investment, stakeholders across operations, customer service, and finance will evaluate solutions on their ability to offload customer requests. The reason why is simple. Hiring agents is no longer a sustainable way to meet demand and Contact Center Automation has proven to give customers end-to-end service for tier 1 calls without harming CSAT.

Key Finding #2

Almost every center in this study is prepping in some way for a downturn. 93% of study respondents are preparing in various ways for an economic downturn in 2023.

While no one can predict the future, contact centers are preparing for a downturn in the event the market doesn’t recover in 2023. This can mean investing in new solutions, prioritizing agents to reduce the risk of churn, and replacing legacy technologies that prevent efficiency. 

Key Finding #3

Technology investments are the leading hedge against economic uncertainty. Over half (61%) of primary decision makers or those highly involved in contact center strategy and planning are investing in technology to prepare for the possibility of an economic downturn.

Customer service solutions like Contact Center Automation have the ability to optimize business processes throughout the contact center, and even across organizations. But for leaders, the predictable ROI of an automation solution is the biggest benefit in an uncertain economy. Contact centers can deploy a proven solution in weeks and begin realizing cost savings in just months by reducing outsourcing, temporary hiring, and training costs.

Key Finding #4

Customer satisfaction is the most important KPI. 82% of contact center leaders and strategists in this study state customer satisfaction is the most important KPI. Average handle time is a distant second at 55%.

It’s no surprise that CSAT remains mission critical to contact centers despite the uncertainty. Many industries, like travel and hospitality, are still experiencing massive spikes in demand as customer behaviors rebound from the pandemic. The result is an added focus on lowering hold times and freeing up agents to be more available for complex customer requests.

Key Finding #5

For Contact Centers that will reduce staff this year, Agents will be the primary target for layoffs and hiring freezes. Despite uncertainty about the economy, half of contact centers expect to increase staffing levels in 2023, and another 23% expect levels to remain the same. However, for centers that anticipate layoffs, agents will bear the brunt of force reductions.

The consistent rise of customer demand means increasing staff will remain a priority throughout economic uncertainty for many contact centers. For others, a downturn would mean cuts to their staff will impact their service capacity. In either case, agents have borne the brunt of nationally decreasing customer satisfaction. Empowering agents to spend more time on quality calls – and less on the quantity of calls – will pay dividends for both customers and bottom lines. 

The full report can be downloaded here.

The post 2023 Benchmark Report: The Impact of Economic Uncertainty on Contact Centers appeared first on Replicant.

“Artificial Intelligence is now playing a more important role in our lives,” said Maria Jimenez, chief nominations officer for Business Intelligence Group. “We are so proud that such an incredible group of companies won this year’s program. Congratulations to all the creativity and hard work of every employee involved.”

The award, given in the Product category, recognizes the advancements of the Thinking Machine and its natural language processing (NLP) core. As a key engine behind Replicant’s Contact Center Automation platform, the recognition of the Thinking Machine’s AI technology is a ringing testament to our customers who leverage it.

In the last year alone, the Thinking Machine has automated millions of conversations for some of the world’s most trusted brands. These organizations span industries including insurance, consumer services, healthcare, travel & hospitality, financial services, and many more.

By implementing Replicant’s Thinking Machine, our customers bring cutting-edge NLP to their own customers. Their success has helped the Thinking Machine realize incredible achievements, like a 90% first call resolution, 50% reduction in cost per contact, and a soaring inference accuracy rate.

Through natural human-to-machine conversations, customers are able to solve requests with no wait times, and none of the pain points usually associated with automated customer service. These use cases range from quick account management questions, all the way to complex, multimodal requests like requesting emergency roadside assistance.

Thanks to a strong NLP core, contact centers can serve more customers across every channel, in any language, without sacrificing their satisfaction. This has proven to be a tremendous boost to an industry challenged by rising unpredictable demand and growing difficulty hiring and retaining customer service agents.

See how customers respond to receiving service from the Thinking Machine:

Replicant is honored to be recognized as a leader in AI excellence alongside many of the industry’s most influential people and organizations. As AI continues to advance, we’re thrilled to help lead the charge for creative and innovative customer service transformation.

About Business Intelligence Group
The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives having experience and knowledge. The organization’s proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.

The post Replicant Wins 2023 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award appeared first on Replicant.

According to the report, 43% of customers yelled or raised their voice to express displeasure about their most serious problem, up from 35% in 2015.

The blowback has been hard to miss. Customer service horror stories are often widely shared online, covered in the news, or experienced firsthand.

But the survey isn’t merely an observation. It’s a result. As many industries are still in recovery mode after being upended by the pandemic, customer service and hospitality at large are declining in the eyes of many Americans. 

For contact center leaders, the data shouldn’t be taken as an indictment of their performance, but an opportunity to reassess their priorities around today’s customer perceptions. Here are the biggest takeaways:

Points of failure outside of the contact center increase demand

74% of Americans reported having a product or service problem in the past year. The incidence of customer-reported problems has more than doubled since 1976. In the last few years, that trend has accelerated. Though the effects of product and service shortcomings are far from contact centers’ fault, the impact hits them the hardest. 

Labor shortages outside of the contact center, for example, can cause a massive spike in airline call volumes when flights are canceled due to staffing issues. Similarly, supply chain delays can lead to thousands of order status checks and cancellations. 

“What it’s creating is even more of a rift, is what the data would suggest, between companies and their customers,” said Scott M. Broetzmann, the President and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

When irregular scenarios happen, communication becomes even more important. As long as unpredictable service disruptions exist, contact centers must become more efficient at automating their most common, spike-prone call drivers.

This approach can include the rapid deployment of outbound messages, quickly customizing automated scripts, and reallocating agents to help customers understand how you’re prioritizing their requests. 

Agent well-being must be priority number one 

43% of customers yelled or raised their voice to express displeasure, an 8% increase in aggressive customer behavior in just eight years. While this is an obvious red flag for brands, more importantly it’s a problem for the agents that have to deal with the rage. 

At a time when hiring and retaining agents has never been more challenging, contact centers must place an emphasis on improving the agent experience. One strategy for accomplishing this is a focus on quality over quantity.

Agents want to help customers solve real problems. Enabling them to spend more time on nuanced issues and less on a high volume of repetitive questions is a great place to start. 

“We need to change the social contract and not think of these employees as ‘low skill workers,’” said Amas Tenumah, author of Waiting for Service: An Insider’s Account of Why Customer Service is Broken and Tips to Avoid Bad Service. “These are complicated requests, because if they were easy, a bot or a machine could do it. And the quicker we evolve as an industry, the better off we will be,” he said. 

That sentiment is well reflected by agents themselves. When contact centers deploy a cutting-edge AI platform like Contact Center Automation, employees don’t fear for their jobs. After years of being given tools that encourage them to answer more calls faster, automation is a welcome solution for finally offloading their most mundane tasks. 

Poor technology frustrates more than it optimizes

To meet the expectations of today’s customers, contact centers need to revamp their automation strategies. With natural AI conversations becoming mainstream thanks to releases like ChatGPT, it’s no longer enough to offer a low-intelligence chatbot or rigid IVR.

Customers are more willing than ever to speak to a machine, as long as that machine meets today’s AI standards. When those standards aren’t met, customers not only notice, their satisfaction plummets.

“You start this interaction and you’re met with an automated system — press one, press two — or a machine you’re trying to communicate with,” said Tenumah. “They can’t understand you, or you’re met with a chatbot on the website, and then you get past that and then you give them your information. And then you finally get to a human, and the human asks you to repeat your information.”

A comprehensive automation solution no longer should exist in a silo, focusing only on containment and deflection. Instead, it should be integrated into every part of a contact center’s tech stack.

For the customer, this means natural conversations, omnichannel experiences, fully automated resolutions, and intelligent escalations that don’t force them to repeat information when they’re passed off to an agent. 

The post The National Customer Rage Survey: 3 Takeaways appeared first on Replicant.

• A challenging labor market has increased wait times and made it harder than ever for customers to reach an agent.
  
• Narrow automation solutions like chatbots and IVRs have added new features to single channels, but created inconsistent, deflection-oriented experiences.
• According to recent research, only 11% of organizations claim to have a sophisticated omnichannel implementation.

In 2023, more businesses are making omnichannel experiences a central part of their Contact Center Automation strategies. With omnichannel automation, businesses can provide a unified and integrated customer experience across all channels, including phone, SMS and chat.

More importantly, they can resolve more requests end-to-end and free up agents to focus on complex and nuanced requests. Here’s how you can build an effective omnichannel automation strategy:

Step 1: Define Your Objective

The first step in nailing omnichannel CX automation is to define your objectives. What do you want to achieve with omnichannel automation? Are you looking to improve customer satisfaction, increase engagement, or reduce costs? Your overarching priorities should be paired with a breakdown of the biggest bottlenecks in your contact center. These may be single flows on a specific channel, like Customer Authentication over the phone. Or, they may be general requests that are high in volume across channels, or even between several. These can range from Account Management requests to multimodal requests like Finding a Location via a text message during a call. Defining your objectives and choosing ideal use cases will help you to create a roadmap for your omnichannel automation strategy. 

Step 2: Map Your Customer Journey

Mapping your customer journey involves identifying all the touchpoints that customers have with your business across all channels. By mapping your customer journey, you can identify areas where some level of automation may already be in place, but currently forces customers to use another channel. A common gap is often found in IVRs, where customers are often told they can solve their request online or in an app instead of over the phone. By adding end-to-end automation to common requests within each channel, customers are met where they are. Additionally, mapping the customer journey can reveal touchpoints where phone handle times can be significantly reduced by offering an SMS form or confirmation to collect or send out information. 

Step 3: Choose the Right Tools

The third step is to choose the right tools for your omnichannel CX automation strategy. There are many tools available, including chatbots, voice assistants, and AI-powered solutions. It’s important to choose tools that are aligned with your objectives and that can be integrated with your existing systems. If your goals are to lower costs, increase CSAT and reduce demand on agents, Contact Center Automation offers a proven solution for consistent experiences powered by a single automation engine. This means that whether a customer reaches out over SMS, chat, or the phone, they can expect the same experience. These experiences are easy to integrate, can be launched in weeks, and can fully automate millions of calls at a fraction of the cost of temporary agents or BPOs. 

“Consistency within the customer experience is an extremely high priority for us at Because. We decided to double down on automation across channels because we know that by leveraging the technology, our customers will always receive the same excellent level of service, regardless of which channel they prefer,” said Replicant customer, Kelsey Holshouser, VP of CX at Because

Step 4: Test and Optimize

Testing and optimizing your omnichannel CX automation strategy involves monitoring the performance of your automation tools and making adjustments as needed. A comprehensive Contact Center Automation solution will give you the ability to A/B test scripts and monitor conversations across channels from a single dashboard. Admins can view customer satisfaction, conversation outcomes, and custom data like inbound volumes per channel or contact driver. 

Step 5: Scale You Solution

It bears repeating: Omnichannel automation is all about providing a superior customer experience while also reducing the time it takes to reach an agent. In order to achieve both goals, automation must be focused on fully resolving as many requests as possible so agents have a greater capacity to assist customers. That’s why scaling automation across more channels and use cases is key to unlocking the most business value. Contact centers can use advanced analytics to discover unsupported automation flows, deploy new use cases, and scale their total automated volume. With a sophisticated omnichannel solution, this becomes the sole focus. AI-powered platforms like Contact Center Automation continuously improve and automatically surface insights, meaning contact centers only need to worry about fine-tuning and growing their solution across every channel.

The post 5 Steps to Nailing Omnichannel CX Automation appeared first on Replicant.

With Replicant’s Thinking Machine, contact center agents can get to the point faster with automated customer service intake. Automated intake works across channels to effortlessly capture initial customer details. These may include a customer’s name, date of birth, request details, and alphanumeric details like phone number and address. 

The Thinking Machine can even confirm business-specific information like insurance numbers, booking IDs, screening questions, and help determine a customer’s best support option. The result: Agents spend less time gathering a customer’s initial details and handle times are substantially reduced. 

For customers, resolving their request can begin the moment they reach out with zero wait times.

When combined with the Thinking Machine’s ability to fully resolve most tier 1 requests, intake can make an exponential impact across customer experiences, agent experiences, and contact center efficiency.

How the Thinking Machine Automates Intake:

Reduce handle times with effortless data collection 

In today’s hiring climate, agent time must be optimized to be spent on tasks that only humans can complete. Replicant’s pre-built, multi-modal flows are designed to enhance the customer experience while reducing the amount of time agents spend on repetitive tasks. Even when compared to an optimized BPO, Replicant delivers an average 55% in cost savings.

Risk-free deployment ready to go live in weeks 

The Thinking Machine is powered by proven, pre-built components that allow your business to get up and running with end-to-end automation faster than ever before. Out-of-the-box Powers make it easy to automate use cases like Intake without heavy development. The Thinking Machine can quickly authenticate customers, accurately collect information and deliver request summaries to agents during escalations. 

Reduce busy work and onboarding friction 

New and existing customers don’t want to wait on hold just to register products or resolve a simple request. Conversely, agents don’t want to spend time completing endless busy work and data entry. By automating customer service intake, agents are freed from back-office work and contact centers are able to save costs without sacrificing CSAT. 

Unlimited scale tailored to your needs 

The Thinking Machine is designed to meet today’s hiring and retention challenges with an elastic scale and unlimited capacity. With Replicant, contact centers no longer have to rely on inaccurate forecasting to plan daily and seasonal headcounts. By automating intake, agents are more available to focus on high-value calls.

Make end-to-end digital self-service effortless

Almost every customer service request requires some sort of intake, historically handled by agents or offloaded to rigid IVRs that harm CSAT. Automating intake allows customers to flexibly submit information 24/7 without ever waiting on hold. In addition, automatically generated conversation transcripts and built-in continuous learning make it easy for managers to improve customer experiences without manual, development-heavy processes.

Drive Business Value With the Thinking Machine:

Proven automation. Replicant has resolved 90% of common call drivers across millions of customer service interactions. With battle-tested conversations designed for trusted enterprise businesses, the Thinking Machine brings out-of-the-box success to intake.

Omnichannel made simple. Remove the guesswork from your automation implementation with exceptional experiences across channels powered by a single conversation engine. Customers receive consistent service across voice, chat and SMS, and can switch between channels for a more efficient experience. 

Seamless integrations. The Thinking Machine is a natural fit with any tech stack. Replicant’s Contact Center Automation platform works with your IVR, CCaaS, CRM, and telephony to enhance, rather than replace, your existing technology.

Deep analytics. Get visibility into all support conversations and analyze insights about why customers call. Analytics include conversation data, success rates, unsupported call flows, CSAT, self-serve script edits, and more. Gain real-time visibility into each conversation using out-of-the-box or custom dashboards to optimize performance over time.

Natural conversations. Instead of an endless IVR or keyword-driven call trees, the Thinking Machine is powered by conversational AI that allows customers to speak naturally when providing information. They can say things like “I need to make an appointment,” or “do you have availability next week,” or even ask the Thinking Machine to list available options. 

The post How Can I Help: How the Thinking Machine Automates Intake Flows appeared first on Replicant.

The 2023 competition for The Stevie® Awards, recognized as the world’s top customer service awards and sales awards, received more than 2,300 nominations from organizations in 49 nations and territories. 

Entries were considered in categories for customer service and contact center achievements, sales and business development, and categories recognizing new products and services, solution providers, and thought leadership initiatives. Winners were selected by the average scores of more than 170 professionals worldwide on seven specialized juries. 

The Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award placements from among the Finalists were revealed during the gala awards banquet in March at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, attended by more than 400 executives from around the world. 

Replicant’s award – the Silver Stevie Award for a Contact Center Solution, New Version – recognized the impact of our 2022 omnichannel launch, which added SMS, and chat to our Contact Center Automation platform. 

How Omnichannel Automation Improves Customer Experiences

According to Salesforce, 75% of consumers seek a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels – social media, mobile, online, in-person, or through the phone. A staggering 73% will likely change brands if they don’t get it.

Because Replicant initially created AI-powered customer service for what has traditionally been the hardest channel to effectively automate – the phone – adding SMS and chat was always an obvious next step. 

The ability for contact centers to now automate every channel using a single conversation engine has been instrumental in relieving agents and improving customer satisfaction. 

Resolve customer issues naturally across channels
Omnichannel automation allows contact centers to power their voice and messaging channels with a single conversation engine that leverages a shared intent library to deploy and scale conversational AI faster across languages and channels for every conversation flow. In other words, they can fully automate their most common customer service requests with a single solution. 

Give customers a consistent experience across channels
With Replicant, contact centers can resolve issues naturally when and where their customers need it most with seamless channel switching across voice, messaging, and other digital channels. Contact Center Automation can share conversational context across channels, so that customers don’t need to repeat themselves when they switch from SMS, to voice, or vice versa.

Contact centers can use customizable FlexForms to easily switch from voice to SMS and collect information faster. And with channel-specific NLU, customers get accuracy for understanding communication like emojis and misspellings in text.

Visualize conversations across channels in a single dashboard
Contact center managers don’t just need holistic automation options – they need a solution for disparate data sources per channel. Replicant omnichannel automation allows leaders to view conversation transcripts for every customer interaction, across all channels, in a single dashboard.

With every conversation, our Thinking Machine automatically generates transcripts and makes them available for live monitoring within a single dashboard. Managers can quickly find actionable insights into omnichannel conversations with advanced analytics, and take action to optimize customer experiences.  

Handoff escalations seamlessly to live agents
Omnichannel automation is only as good as its ability to relieve agents from repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Replicant integrates seamlessly with live agent platforms to handoff complex issues that require human empathy without losing customer context.

This benefits both agents and customers: agents get full context into every escalation using their existing platforms, no matter the channel, and customers receive a unified experience. And with API integrations to all existing data systems, Replicant can leverage customer data stores for a personalized experience across channels.

About the Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 nominations each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.

The complete list of Stevie Winners by category can be viewed here.

The post Replicant Wins Stevie Award in Sales & Customer Service Category appeared first on Replicant.

Many providers will boast the ability to resolve tier 1 cases, automate service across every channel, integrate with your existing systems, and add deep insights through built-in analytics. 

These are all critically important features, of course, and part of why Replicant is a solution of choice for many contact centers. However, no element is as important to a successful Contact Center Automation deployment than conversation design.

At Replicant, we believe that great conversations are those that resolve customer issues quickly and naturally, no matter the channel or language. 

Without great conversation design, customers quickly grow frustrated by automation. As a result, agents end up fielding just as many tier 1 calls as they did before a solution was deployed. On the other hand, great conversation design means customers get smooth resolutions to their requests on the first try, every time. 

Here are five reasons why conversation design is key to effective Contact Center Automation:

Great Conversations Drive CSAT

At the end of the day, no amount of call containments or resolutions matter unless Contact Center Automation can serve customers the way they want to be served. 

How effectively can it extract intents from free-form, natural language? Does it allow customers to quickly rattle off a list of questions and address them all without needing the customer to repeat themselves? Does it understand positive and negative intents, even when it’s not a simple “yes” or “no?”

If an automated conversation doesn’t go well, customers are quick to ask for an agent. This not only defeats the purpose of automation in the first place, it sends agents customers who are already frustrated by a poor experience. 

Replicant’s Thinking Machine excels at understanding human contexts for every conversation. Rather than repeating long menus or asking for keywords, it allows customers to state any number of requests and responds accurately in less than a second. 

With every turn in a conversation, Replicant’s Thinking Machine nudges customers closer to resolution, even when conversations are non-linear. It’s a major reasonwhy the Thinking Machine regularly returns CSAT scores on par or better than those of human agents. 

Consistency Is Key

Effective Contact Center Automation brings customers a consistent brand experience across every channel. To achieve this, conversations must be designed and powered by a single engine that shares a vast intent library. 

Without an effective single-engine library, customers receive disjointed experiences for every channel they use to contact support, including instances where they need to switch channels during a single conversation. 

This is even more important today given that 49% of consumers, on average, use three to five different communication channels to contact customer service. In addition, a majority still feel that the phone is the easiest to use channel. 

Replicant believes that great automation starts with the voice channel. The Thinking Machine has successfully automated millions of calls that include loud background noises and a range of languages, accents, and dialects – and it gets better with each conversation. By using a voice-first approach, consistency across chat, SMS and other digital channels becomes more achievable than ever, not merely an afterthought. 

Great Design Speaks to Everyone

Replicant’s conversation design principles are built on the understanding that automation must be human-centric. But humans are complicated, and no two are the same. 

Customers speak in different languages, dialects, colloquialisms and in different environments. Your Contact Center Automation should leverage conversational AI that can effectively serve all of them. 

At Replicant, being human-centric doesn’t mean humanizing our AI or serving up artificial empathy to frustrated customers. It simply means helping every customer effectively and consistently, no matter how they speak. 

The Thinking Machine is upfront about being a machine, avoiding sounds and crutches like computerized typing sounds that only confuse customers and add time to conversations – not value. 

We meet the customer where they are, whether they’re a family in Detroit with an accent, a cashier in Quebec with a unique French vernacular, or a truck driver accustomed to using colloquialisms to call into tow shops. 

Speed Is Everything

Latency is the number one complaint a customer has when it comes to automated voice or chat systems. That doesn’t only mean how long the duration of their interaction is, but how long it takes between turns in a conversation. 

We believe that patience should not be a requirement for customers speaking with automation. In fact, many of our millions of automated calls have been urgent situations like emergency roadside assistance requests. Low latency (less than one second between turns) means Replicant’s Thinking Machine lowers AHTs and pushes conversations toward resolution faster.

Our experts design conversations around clear and concise questions that are cooperative, action-oriented and eliminate misunderstandings. But we also know that customers sometimes need a moment, whether to find a piece of information, talk to someone nearby, or take another call. 

The Thinking Machine can be placed on hold at any moment, and pick up the conversation right where it left off or refresh the customer on the context with ease. In addition, the Thinking Machine leverages every piece of data it can so that it never asks a question for which it can find an answer to itself. 

Escalations Should Be Seamless

Many conversation designs look great in theory, but how they handle unpredictability and real-world challenges can be a different story. Out of the millions of calls and chats the Thinking Machine has automated, many have included customers that don’t simply take the “happy path.”

That’s why we highlight sentiment analysis and use every turn as a chance to catch whether a call is going poorly. When they are, escalations can happen even faster. 

With Contact Center Automation, containment becomes less about achieving a high number, and more about ensuring that customers who want to speak to an agent are able to, while those who speak with the Thinking Machine receive the best possible outcome. 

When escalations do occur, the Thinking Machine focuses on getting customers where they need to go as efficiently as possible. We make sure that live agents who pick up a conversation are equipped with every piece of information and context they need via an automated screen pop so that customers get the most seamless experience possible.

The post Conversation Design: The Key to Effective Contact Center Automation  appeared first on Replicant.

When large-scale disruptions happen, especially during peak demand seasons, travel and hospitality brands draw an outsized share of scrutiny. As a result, the pressure heats up on travel and hospitality leaders to come up with fast contact center solutions. 

Until recently, that was a lot easier said than done. 

For decades, contact centers tried to deflect customers and add capacity with solutions like IVRs, low-intelligence chatbots, and outsourced workforces. Unfortunately, none of these strategies could simultaneously accomplish two things: reduce the workload on agents and improve customer satisfaction. 

But Contact Center Automation has made a smooth landing possible. Contact Center Automation is an approach in which companies automate their most common customer service calls using conversational AI while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. 

According to a recent survey, deploying Contact Center Automation is a priority for almost every customer service leader: 95% have either already adopted, are implementing now, or are planning to implement automation within the next year.

Among travel and hospitality brands in particular, the rising adoption of automation will be especially impactful. After a period where guest and traveler satisfaction hit all-time lows, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. 

Automation Is Delivering Differentiation For Airline Customer Experiences

Key Challenges
In the years following the pandemic, every airline has been wrestling with the same challenge: capacity issues. While travel numbers have soared to record highs, weather-related delays and mass cancellations have continued to disrupt operations. In these cases, contact centers are unable to add staff quickly enough to handle both predicted and unpredicted spikes in call volumes.

More than anything, both controlled and uncontrolled irregular operation events drive up costs and anger customers. In the most recent holiday travel season, irregular operations led to 8+ hour hold times across several airlines. “We can’t just hire 300 agents for a single day,” said one Replicant customer, the Director of Guest Care at a top-10 airline. 

How Automation Helps
Replicant helps airlines handle high call volumes without the need for costly outsourcing or increased agent staffing. Replicant handles caller authentication and routing and resolves reservation management calls such as FLIFO, flight cancellations, and flight modifications, freeing up agents to focus on revenue generating activities like new bookings. Common use cases include:

Travel Reservations:

• Traveler Authentication
• Call Routing 
• New Booking 
• Flight Cancellation 
• Reschedule Flight

Reservation Management:

• Travel FAQs
• Flight Information
• Refund
• Modify Booking 
• Add a bag
• Add a seat
• Upgrade seat

Top 10 Largest Airline Automates Calls With Replicant to Meet Unpredictable Demand
One Replicant customer, one of the ten largest airlines, was dealing with significant capacity issues. Irregular operations caused huge surges in their call volume that they couldn’t staff for. The impact of their capacity restraints resulted in multi-hour wait times and negative press across social media.

They partnered with Replicant to automate their contact center, specifically by having Replicant automate Flight Information, Flight Cancellation, and Add a Bag calls. After deploying, they gained the extra capacity they needed to manage irregular operations call volume spikes without adding staff, and freed up their agents to take on more high value customer service engagements. 

“We don’t staff for the craziness. Otherwise, we’d increase our agents by 3X and only fully utilize them 5% of the year. Instead, we look to where we can automate.” – Director of Guest Care, Top 10 Largest Airline

Hospitality Contact Centers Fix the Guest Experience with Automation

Key Challenges
It doesn’t matter if you’re a cruise line, hotel, resort, or casino: Demand for destination travel has more than rebounded in the last twelve months. But after years of lower revenues and down travel rates, hospitality contact centers have been hard-pressed to be operationally ready for the demand.

The result has been long wait times, frustrated travelers, and revenue loss due to uncaptured business. In most cases, contact centers must maximize their agents’ time to be spent on converting callers who are interested in booking a stay. According to a recent survey, the top challenges in the hospitality industry are: Business travel: 60.8 percent; Staffing: 55.7 percent; and Increased costs: 53.2 percent.

As both business and leisure travel continue to ramp up, hiring agents has become exceedingly difficult, while churn rates have climbed due to mundane tasks. As a result, hospitality companies have tried to increase wages in order to attract talent. But even after increasing wages, hiring agents in hospitality contact centers remains a huge challenge.

How Automation Helps
Replicant helps the Hospitality Industry handle high call volumes and prevents overflow calls from going to costly outsourcing centers. Replicant handles repetitive tasks like caller authentication and routing, and resolves reservation management calls like confirming, modifying and canceling bookings.

This frees up agents to focus on more engaging, revenue generating activities like new bookings. Common use cases include:

Hospitality Reservations:

• Guest Authentication
• Call Routing 
• New Reservation
• Cancel Reservation 

Reservation Management:

• Property FAQs
• Confirm Reservation
• Modify Reservation
• Refund

Paramount Hospitality Lowers Wait Times and Relies Less on BPO Using Replicant
Replicant customer Paramount Hospitality is a hotel management company with 6 large resorts in Florida. Because of the challenges related to hiring and retaining agents in the hospitality industry, contact center capacity was an issue for them. They relied heavily on a costly BPO to answer all overflow and after hour calls which amounted to about 25% of their total call volume.

Even with the help of the BPO, they had an average 10+ minute call wait time and a 10% abandonment rate equating to 1,200 missed reservations a month Paramount Hospitality partnered with Replicant to automate incoming booking, confirming, and modifying reservations calls during regular and after hours. Paramount will now spend significantly less with their BPO, need fewer agents, all the while increasing their contact center capacity. 

The post Travel & Hospitality Brands Deliver 5-Star Service With Contact Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

But for businesses, the AI landscape may still look a bit blurry. 

That’s because AI is a broad term. The current wave of new tools, apps, and software updates that are centered around AI can make it difficult to keep track of the specific impact each is intended to have. For customer service leaders, the difference between Contact Center Automation and ChatGPT is of particular interest. 

On the surface, both are AI-powered solutions designed to improve and expedite communication with users. Both leverage natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to process and respond to questions. And both are constantly improving and evolving through continuous learning and optimization.

But ChatGPT and Contact Center Automation solutions like Replicant differ in several ways. From how they can help customers to how they’re managed by administrators, both ChatGPT and Contact Center Automation offer distinct benefits in each a general business setting and a specific customer service environment.

Here are five key differences:

Scope of Conversations

ChatGPT is a chat application that leverages OpenAI’s GPT3.5 Large Learning Model (LLM). It is trained on a large corpus of text data from the internet, and is designed to provide natural, informative answers to any question, based on public knowledge. The large training dataset used by ChatGPT’s LLM allows it to accurately predict what each word it types in a response should be. 

Contact Center Automation shares the goal of natural automated conversations, but is designed to resolve specific customer service issues for businesses based on their unique policies, know-how and systems. In practice, this means that Contact Center Automation is deployable in customer service, where questions don’t just require general answers but full resolutions. Contact Center Automation is centered around the idea that customer service leaders need a way to automate their most common customer service calls. In this way, it focuses on predictability and responses that lead to specific resolutions – not just natural conversations. 

Communication Channels 

ChatGPT is designed for use in text-based communication channels, such as messaging apps and chatbots. Using ChatGPT over voice can present several challenges, as voice-based interactions are typically more conversational and fluid than text-based interactions. Contact Center Automation, on the other hand, is designed for voice, chat, and SMS conversations. For businesses, the phone channel remains a crucial and popular method of customer service.

Customer service leaders choose Contact Center Automation because phone conversations present many different accents, background noises, and unique patterns of speech. It’s imperative their automation solutions are voice-first to be truly impactful. In addition, Contact Center Automation solutions that are powered by a single conversation engine across each channel enable customers to have consistent experiences. 

Customer Interactions

According to ChatGPT itself, the customer service opportunities for the application are typically those “that can be resolved through self-service, such as answering frequently asked questions and handling simple inquiries.” That means it can give you some of the information you could find on a website (e.g., what is the return policy for a product) but not help you if the replacement product was not shipped. For this, a solution requires access to internal systems and policies that are specific to that business. Contact Center Automation, on the other hand, excels at resolving more complex customer interactions that traditionally require human intervention.

Take an appointment scheduling call, for example. In this scenario, a customer may ask “can I come into the Brooklyn location in two weeks?” Thanks to domain-specific conversation design, Contact Center Automation can understand this to mean a customer desires an appointment at a certain location, in a certain timeframe. It can respond with, “Sure, does 9AM on Tuesday, March 14th at our Brooklyn location work?” In this scenario, an LLM would lack the context to understand the customer’s intent and the ability to to take action. It may simply respond with something along the lines of “yes, the Brooklyn location is open on Tuesdays,” and wouldn’t have the functionality to schedule on your behalf or estimate a cost based on your customer profile.

Contact Center Integrations

GPT3.5’s capabilities can be leveraged by businesses using the OpenAI API. This can help make several processes more efficient, including data sorting, brainstorming, and information summarizing. However, it can’t be integrated directly into a contact center’s tech stack. Contact Center Automation integrates into every existing CCaaS and UCaaS platform, allowing agents to keep using their everyday tools while automation takes care of tier 1 requests.

Contact Center Automation can be placed in front of, within, or behind an IVR, or replace it entirely. For businesses, it is crucial that customer service automation solutions can connect with a CMS, telephony, and industry-specific software in order to add meaningful value for use cases like customer authentication, booking & reservations, account management, and many more. 

Analytics and Observability

There are many ways customers can ask the same question, and contact centers need immediate visibility into how their automation solutions react to new utterances. ChatGPT does not offer the observability to track unknown intent detections, nor does it offer the kinds of analytics contact centers require to constantly improve their experiences. Conversely, Contact Center Automation provides visibility into all customer support conversations in an end-to-end dashboard. From there, managers can monitor realtime data for KPIs like resolution rates, call volumes, and call drivers.

Automation also provides transcripts for every conversation that redact PII and allow businesses to dig deeper into their customer experience. Additionally, contact centers can immediately update conversation scripts to better understand the unsupported flows in their automation flows that can help improve their website, IVRs, or further automation opportunities. 

Conclusion

On the whole, both ChatGPT and Contact Center Automation present massive opportunities for businesses to drive efficiency. ChatGPT has many applications as a productivity tool, a powerful API call, and a brainstorming and research resource. Long-term, LLMs will become more ubiquitous and add productivity gains for many existing applications. But using LLMs in isolation with customers is risky at best. Currently, it lacks important security and compliance features like SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI for external, out-of-the-box use by enterprises. 

Conversely, Contact Center Automation represents the most advanced external-facing application of conversational AI. Designed specifically for customer service, Contact Center Automation is built on the key tenets that enterprise businesses require: reliability, trust, and end-to-end resolutions. Replicant is already automating millions of conversations every month to help businesses meet objectives specific to their operations, including lowering cost per contact, increasing service capacity, improving CSAT, and most importantly freeing agents to focus on more complex tasks.

The post Breaking Down the Key Differences Between ChatGPT and Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

Like ChatGPT, AI image generators create outputs from natural language inputs. A user can ask for a painting of a mountain range in the style of Van Gogh and get an impressive result instantly:

Also like ChatGPT, AI image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 are trained on billions of parameters scraped from the web. Recently, this point came under legal review when a trio of artists launched a lawsuit.

They argue that AI image generators need consent from the original creators of its scraped data. A similar lawsuit is also underway against an AI programming model. The case’s representation describes it as “another step toward mak­ing AI fair and eth­i­cal for every­one.”

While the validity of such arguments is certainly up for debate, legal and business experts largely agree that there is no clear answer as to who “owns” AI-generated work. 

“I believe this is one of many lawsuits that will shape the case law that will define how copyright laws should operate in the era of AI,” said Replicant CEO and Co-founder Gadi Shamia. “Depending on how ChatGPT will be monetized, the next wave will follow right after.’

And from ChatGPT itself: “The question of copyright eligibility is a complex one. It’s ultimately up to courts and legal experts to determine whether or not ChatGPT’s output can be protected under copyright law. In the meantime, it’s important for users of the technology to be aware of the potential legal implications of using it to generate original content.”

Regardless of generative AI’s legal future, customer service leaders planning to use ChatGPT for their own purposes must proceed with caution. For the time being, these tips provide a framework for doing just that:

Understand the Capabilities

We’ve already covered the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT in contact centers. But the overview is this: Large Language Models (LLMs) provide impressive conversations, but unreliable results. LLMs are trained on a dataset largely irrelevant to enterprise customer service, with human-in-the-loop oversight that doesn’t take into account customer service. In addition, ChatGPT is not capable of connecting with internal systems, understanding organizational workflows, or resolving customer requests. LLMs can provide plenty of support for common back-office tasks, but customer service isn’t one of them. 

Don’t Mortgage Your Future

While it’s easy to dream on the future capabilities of ChatGPT, its limitations mean that contact center leaders shouldn’t be centering their digital roadmaps around it anytime soon. “Regardless of how much humans come to depend on iterations of AI generation over the next months and years, it is probably a correct prediction that legal experts across the spectrum will weigh in and courts will see it come across their dockets,” says Priori Legal. 

Know Your AI Options

LLMs are trained on a massive corpus of text (essentially the entire internet). This means a lot of what’s inside the “black box” of data is potentially offensive or problematic. While ChatGPT includes some level of human oversight to prevent such content from showing up in responses, there are no guarantees. On the other hand, deterministic models of conversational AI use a set amount of scripts to speak with customers. This means everything that’s said can be reviewed and pre-approved by your legal and business teams.

Check For Plagiarism

Though ChatGPT may not be ready for customer service, it can be a great tool for training conversational AI models or helping with back office work. When doing so, it’s important to confirm that nothing you publish outwardly is, as FindLaw puts it, “substantially similar to existing copyrighted works”. While ChatGPT may be doing the writing, it still needs a human to edit any content it creates.

Know Your Industry

Having a human in the loop also applies to reviewing content for inaccuracies and defamatory or misleading statements. This can be doubly important in certain industries. A financial or healthcare contact center, for example, may choose to generate pages of training data for a customer service chatbot. But letting a few sentences slip by that make inaccurate financial or health statements could spell catastrophe in a chatbot down the line. When reviewing any LLM-generated content, always lean on your own compliance and subject matter experts.

Protect Data at Every Turn

If you’re hoping ChatGPT can assist your team in summarizing, synthesizing, or iterating off of existing data, ensure that data never includes personal information. Contact Center Automation solutions have robust security and compliance, as well as redacted transcriptions that never reveal PII in any setting. ChatGPT, however, does not. An input of PII can easily turn into an output of PII, which immediately compromises customer data whether the administrator realizes it or not.

The post Six Ways To Navigate the Customer Service Risks of ChatGPT appeared first on Replicant.

Some of the issues they’re susceptible to include:

• High abandonment rates
• Impersonal customer experiences
• Inaccurate transfers
• Complex, layered menus
• Unnatural conversations
• Outages and overloads
• Inefficient agent handoffs

These issues can lead to serious costs, like a negative brand perception, lost revenue, and tumbling CSAT scores. That’s why more and more contact centers are ditching IVRs in favor of Contact Center Automation. Contact Center Automation provides customers with the modern experiences they expect while freeing brands from the rigid constraints of legacy IVRs. 

When contact centers deploy the Thinking Machine at the top of their phone tree (their “Front Desk”), callers are greeted immediately, customers get authenticated personally, and every request is routed with seamless accuracy. The result: every key metric, from containment rate to CSAT, sees an immediate improvement. 

What customers want, right when they want it

Effortless authentication and routing
Unlike rigid IVRs, Front Desk immediately gets customers where they need to go without the friction and frustrating experiences. Replicant routes customers to the right department with 99% accuracy, while lowering Average Handle Times along the way.  

Allow customers to speak naturally
Proprietary NLU allows customers to speak freely to resolve their concerns. Keypads and repetitive menus are replaced with natural conversation where customers can state any number of requests and be understood no matter their language, dialect or background noise. 

Risk-free deployment meets ROI
Replicant’s shared intent libraries and pre-trained models lead to lower AHT and equip agents with the context they need to resolve concerns quickly. Front Desk allows contact centers to deploy automation quickly, and immediately begin saving customers and agents time with more efficient handoffs and less time spent asking basic questions. 

Gain visibility into your greatest automation opportunities
With Front Desk, contact center automation is never a black box. Contact centers gain insights into every customer request with real-time analytics to understand the call drivers that are ready for automation. Front Desk is an ideal starting point for many contact centers to begin an automation transformation, first replacing their IVR and scaling to end-to-end resolution for their most common requests. 

Effortless authentication and routing with every call

Replicant’s battle-tested components are built based on millions of customer service conversations that scale the best of conversation design across every industry, encouraging customer adoption and improving ROI for our customers.

How the Thinking Machine Automates Front Desk:

Proven automation. Replicant has resolved 90% of common call drivers across millions of customer service interactions. With battle-tested conversations designed for trusted enterprise businesses, the Thinking Machine brings out-of-the-box resolutions to appointment scheduling. 

Omnichannel made simple. Remove the guesswork from your automation implementation with exceptional experiences across channels powered by a single conversation engine. Customers receive consistent service across voice, chat and SMS, and can switch between channels for more efficient appointment scheduling. 

Seamless integrations. The Thinking Machine is a natural fit with any tech stack. Replicant’s Contact Center Automation platform works with your IVR, CCaaS, CRM, and telephony to enhance, rather than replace, your existing technology.

Deep analytics. Get visibility into all support conversations and analyze insights from conversation data, success rates, unsupported call flows, CSAT, self-serve script edits, and more. Gain real-time visibility into each conversation using out-of-the-box or custom dashboards to optimize performance over time.

Natural conversations. Instead of an endless IVR or keyword-driven call trees, the Thinking Machine is powered by cutting-edge NLU that allows customers to speak naturally when scheduling appointments. They can say things like “the Tuesday after next,” “sometime in the morning works great,” or even ask the Thinking Machine to list available times. 

The post Ring for Assistance: How the Thinking Machine Automates Front Desk Calls appeared first on Replicant.

Bring the right data and minds to the table
You’re not in this alone! Work collaboratively to identify the best fit for your business – starting with key stakeholders and data sources to help you identify the right call flows.

Identifying the Right Use Cases

High Volume Identify conversations that take place thousands of times per week in order to achieve economies of scale and significantly impact your contact center operations and ROI.

Low Complexity Identify conversations that achieve a desired goal like resolving a payment issue or changing a delivery time or date. These requests are predictable, repeatable, and easy to script.

Low Emotion Identify conversations that require low emotional intelligence and empathy, while also evoking low emotion from the customer. Think transactional or operational requests like scheduling a service, updating an address, or requesting a proof of insurance.

Call Spikes Identify conversations triggered by unexpected or expected events that lead to high request volumes like spikes during lunch hours, holidays, seasonal periods, or even one-off surprises like a power outage.

IVR Leakage Identify conversations in your IVR that are getting stuck, not fully resolved, or prematurely routed to an agent and also meet the criteria above: high volume, low emotion, or seasonally driven.

Personalized Identify use cases that would benefit from greater personalization. When integrated with existing software, Replicant can make data dips into CRMs to authenticate customers and recall user information faster for contextual conversations.

Key Stakeholders

• Contact Center Managers
• Contact Center Operations
• Data & Analytics Team

Deploy Quickly and Securely

Scale the best of conversational design principles across every use case and industry with hundreds of pre- built conversation components that work out-of-the-box and make it easy to design the most optimal conversation flows without heavy development.

Every Industry Benefits From Contact Center Automation

Tried and true use cases that industry leaders automate with Replicant:

The post What Conversations Should You Automate? appeared first on Replicant.

This growth is already bringing transformational benefits to many customer service organizations looking for savings, added efficiency, and support against unpredictable demand. But it has also created confusion for others as the market becomes filled with more noise and greater saturation. Whether you’re an early adopter of Contact Center Automation – the leading customer service application of AI – or a leader just digging into your options, chances are you’ve run into one or more of these common misconceptions:

• Automation, IVRs, and chatbots are all the same
• Automation is more expensive than it is beneficial
• Customers don’t want to talk to a machine
• Automation can’t resolve customer issues
• Customer-facing bots hurt CSAT
• Automation aims to replace agents

Despite the confusion, however, thousands of customer experience innovators are already reaping the benefits of Contact Center Automation. But for those still gathering information for their own organizations’ automation plans, a clear understanding of the solution is imperative. 

Read on for 10 of the most common misconceptions about Contact Center Automation as well as the data and firsthand accounts that have proven them false.

Misconception #1: No one wants to talk to a machine

Fact: Nearly 80% of consumers would converse with a machine to avoid long hold times.

Rigid IVRs and keyword-driven chatbots have conditioned many contact center leaders to think customers have lost faith in machines altogether. But Contact Center Automation is neither an IVR nor a chatbot. And the results speak for themselves. Customers are often surprised by the capabilities of conversational AI, the engine that powers automated conversations. 

Contact Center Automation allows customers to speak naturally, ask multiple questions at once, and be understood in scenarios where legacy technologies fail. This includes seamless conversations even when there’s background noise, multiple languages, and unique accents or dialects present. “You solved my problem and that’s all that I cared about,” is a common response to Thinking Machine. Additionally, a recent customer survey found that nearly 80% of consumers would rather speak to a machine than wait on hold, and 44% of people report being annoyed, irritated or angry with a 5-15 minute wait time. 

Misconception #2: Automation can’t resolve customer issues

Fact: Replicant’s Thinking Machine achieves a 90% first call resolution without agent escalation.

Unlike traditional automation solutions that aim to deflect or reroute customers to self-service channels, Contact Center Automation is all about resolution. Replicant’s Thinking Machine has automated millions of conversations to achieve a 90% first call resolution rate without agent escalation. This is driven in part by Natural Language Understanding trained specifically for customer service scenarios, as well as expertly designed conversations that focus on pushing conversations toward resolution, not searching for ways to send customers to a webpage or app. Automation can connect with platforms like CRMs, scheduling systems, and even partner platforms to offer end-to-end resolutions for call drivers like appointments, orders and returns, dispatching, and much more. 

Misconception #3: Customer-facing bots hurt CSAT

“For us, the value of automation has gone far beyond containment. It’s about actually improving the customer experience and cost savings. It’s so much more than we could have imagined.” – Rob Dunning, Operations Leader at The General

It’s no secret that faster resolutions and eliminated hold times increase customer satisfaction. But with Contact Center Automation, improved satisfaction comes to life in many more ways. Error rates in automated conversations are flattened, handle times are cut in half, omnichannel experiences are made easy, and agents are more available to focus on complex issues. Customers who need a quick resolution to a request like a medical appointment or a flat tire are able to get instant service without waiting for an agent. Meanwhile, those with complex or urgent requests can be connected with an agent faster, without having to wait in the same queue as a customer with a simple account question. 

Misconception #4: Deploying automation is too risky

Fact: 91% of contact center leaders report that Contact Center Automation is a critical or important priority in the next year.

Many organizations believe that automation comes with inherent risks. These perceived risks may be monetary, time or resource-related, or the simple risk of deprioritizing other projects. But when you zoom out, it’s clear that the risk of not beginning to automate, even in an initial testbed project, is far greater. According to the 2022 Benchmark Report, almost all contact center leaders (91%) report that Contact Center Automation is a critical or important priority in the next year. 80% are planning or evaluating automation and intend to invest in it within the next 12 months. Given the fact that automation can be deployed in weeks, combined with the knowledge that your competitors have likely already started, it’s easy to see why prioritizing automation is not only strategic for most, but imperative.

Misconception #5: Building a solution yourself is cheaper

“Implementing conversational AI requires expensive professional resources in areas such as data analytics, knowledge graphs and natural language understanding” – Gartner

While it may be tempting to go at an automation project alone, the “build” approach can get off the rails quickly. “Implementing conversational AI requires expensive professional resources in areas such as data analytics, knowledge graphs and natural language understanding,” says Gartner. “Once built, the conversational AI capabilities must be continuously supported, updated and maintained, resulting in additional costs.” Many contact centers who attempt to build automation from scratch end up committing magnitudes more time, money and resources than they anticipated to the project. Even in these cases, it’s not uncommon for an in-house automation project to never reach deployment and set digital transformation roadmaps back years.

The post 10 Misconceptions 
About Contact 
Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm.

But for close followers of Large Language Models (LLMs), the renewed debate of what it is and isn’t capable of is nothing new. This is especially true for contact centers. 

As one of the first industries to apply chatbots in a consumer setting, contact centers have always kept a keen eye on AI’s progress. The advent of comprehensive solutions like Contact Center Automation has only boosted that interest in recent years. 

So, after ChatGPT’s latest quantum leap in Large Language Models, what should contact centers know this time around?

What it doesn’t mean

LLMs have not reached near-perfect accuracy
ChatCPT is a mind-bending display of computational power. But it is far from perfect. As the largest scale generative AI to date, ChatGPT’s input is essentially the entire internet. This gives it the ability to accurately infer most questions correctly and generate a reply to each question. However, while this scale means that answers will almost always be conversational, ChatGPT is not always reliable. ChatGPT will quite often answer questions inaccurately, inconsistently or illogically. From OpenAI’s own disclaimer: “we do not warrant that the services will be uninterrupted, accurate or error free, or that any content will be secure or not lost or altered.”

It can’t be unleashed in customer service
The accuracy risks of ChatGPT are not the only reason it’s far from customer service relevant. Notwithstanding the ethical and legal hurdles that remain to be cleared, one of the biggest limitations of ChatGPT is the fact that answering questions and resolving customer issues are two very different things. In order to resolve customer requests, automation requires a few elements: understanding the workflows of an organization; access to internal systems to perform requested actions (like booking a flight or requesting roadside assistance); and, security and compliance so PII and sensitive data are never at risk. None of these features are part of ChatGPT right now. In addition, the customer service environment is one where patience can quickly run thin, and urgent requests must be escalated to agents quickly. Contact centers require solutions that don’t exist to simply converse, but provide customers with end-to-end resolution at every step. 

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

Agent jobs are not at risk
Neither Large Language Models nor Contact Center Automation can replace the creativity and empathy that live agents provide. However, both can help an employee group that has experienced massive pressure in recent years. Contact centers can leverage ChatGPT as a tool for their agents to write new scripts, brainstorm responses, and even write simple replies. Contact Center Automation, an AI solution trained specifically for customer service, can go beyond that to fully resolve any amount of customer requests with high accuracy and 24/7 availability. Agents, who often spend hours on end on repetitive requests, benefit the most from tools that free them up to focus on more high-value requests.

What it does mean

AI has become mainstream
The field of AI can be traced back to the 1950s. The first examples of conversational computers followed soon after. Over the past few decades, AI has come to life in the public sphere mostly as clunky chatbots or laggy voice assistants. ChatGPT represents another step forward in AI becoming a household technology. It signals growing demand from customers for voice and chat assistants that truly allow them to speak naturally. This reflects the findings of the 2022 Benchmark Report, which found that most contact center leaders (95%) are prioritizing automation in part due to customers’ growing willingness to interact with an efficient machine.

CX should reflect the state of technology
The fact that ChatGPT has launched AI into the mainstream is in many ways a direct call to action for customer service organizations. Now more than ever, almost every consumer is acutely aware of the capabilities of automation. They can quickly pick up on the differences between an IVR that is trying to deflect them and an AI-powered solution that can actually help them. On top of that, 72% of customers are likely to share their positive experiences with six other customers, whereas one in three customers will leave a brand entirely after one bad experience. For contact centers, this means the time is now to begin automating – at the very least to avoid your competitors from beating you to the punch. 

Contact Center Automation will only get better
ChatGPT has raised the bar for AI. While it may not be suitable for direct use in contact centers, the solution will raise the tide for almost every existing AI solution. In the case of Contact Center Automation, ChatGPT has many useful applications. It can help engineers feed a larger scale of utterances into their own models as a powerful conversational AI training tool. It can serve as a model for summarizing call notes more efficiently so agents spend less time catching up during escalations. Industry-wide, ChatGPT has shown that automation is not only the future, but that the future is closer than many think. For contact centers, this means the sooner automation becomes a part of your gameplan the better.

The post What ChatGPT Means – and Doesn’t Mean – for Contact Centers appeared first on Replicant.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine makes it possible to create, change, confirm, and cancel appointments across every channel with Contact Center Automation. 

And with out-of-the-box features like Natural Language Understanding, Machine Learning, and integrations into any platform, contact centers can deploy a proven automation solution in just weeks. 

Week 1

Choose which appointment types to automate 

The Thinking Machine is designed to fully resolve appointments that are high in volume and prone to spikes. Contact centers often choose to automate appointment types that take up the most agent time so they can focus on requests or specialty appointments that require greater context or human assistance. 

Week 2

Calculate your expected ROI

Based on the appointment type(s) you choose to automate, determine what a successful outcome looks like using benchmark metrics and goals and a solution-specific ROI model. Replicant uses existing customer data to recommend future use cases and build a business case for deployment by forecasting results against KPIs and initial costs.

Week 3

Perform technology assessment

Bring together IT, CCaaS, and telephony stakeholders to generate a comprehensive assessment of your technology stack. Replicant uses this stage to align integrations, connect with accurate data systems, and comply with your security and privacy standards.

Week 4

Design conversation with pre-built components

Determine which capabilities your business needs to create a new appointment. The Thinking Machine comes with NLU and intent-recognition that continuously gets better through Machine Learning, meaning contact centers don’t have to dedicate resources to maintaining a cutting-edge solution.

Week 5

Deploy with confidence

The Thinking Machine is built on millions of conversations that resolves tier 1 concerns out of the box, meaning you can deploy with guaranteed success. Once deployed, contact centers can begin automating in a few ways. They can start by automating appointments 24/7, during spike or overflow events, or for a percentage of requests

Week 6+

Discover insights

The Thinking Machine collects CSAT in real-time for every conversation, and surfaces insights based on conversation transcripts so you can A/B test new scripts to ensure constant improvement. Discover data-based improvement opportunities to offload more customer requests and compound ROI while freeing up more agent time.

Learn more about automating appointments with Contact Center Automation.

The post Roadmap: Automate Appointment Scheduling With the Thinking Machine appeared first on Replicant.

After a chaotic summer that saw 3X the number of traveler complaints than pre-pandemic levels, airlines spent much of the year in the media spotlight for all the wrong reasons:

• Airline passenger spent total of 11 hours on hold to customer service
• Lufthansa Cancels Nearly All Flights in Frankfurt and Munich, Stranding 130,000
• Overwhelmed airports lose luggage, leave travelers in dark
• Wasn’t Airline Customer Service Supposed to Be Fixed by Now?

Heading into the new year, airline contact centers are among the 95% of leaders planning to implement automation in the next 12 months. The reason is simple: automation addresses several of the key challenges that led to all-time low customer satisfaction scores. 

From workforce management to mass cancellation events, here’s the why and how behind airlines’ race for Contact Center Automation. 

Why the turbulence?

Labor shortages
The nationwide labor shortage that defined the economic summer didn’t spare airlines. Staffing challenges impacted contact centers directly and indirectly as shortages stretched across business units leading to more delays, cancellations, and baggage incidents. US airlines canceled at least 35,000 flights in a two week midsummer stretch, leaving passengers “frustrated amid rising travel disruption due to lack of staff and high demand.“ In all, workforce shortages resulted in larger spikes in inbound calls and longer wait times across the board.

Rebound pandemic demand
Despite above average fares caused by record setting fuel prices, travelers hit the skies in droves this summer as pandemic restrictions eased. Oftentimes, this caused mass confusion with inconsistencies in travel requirements between countries and airports. “Obviously as demand has surged, that continues to put more pressure on the phones. As international [travel] is opening, that puts more pressure on the phones,” Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian said in April. Heading into 2023, travel is expected to continue rebounding and airlines are focused on providing reliable service before they set their sights on flight growth.

Sky high customer expectations
Today’s customers want fast, efficient service more than anything else, but they also want personalized customer care over whichever channel of engagement they prefer. In other words, expectations are high. In the world of air travel, frustrating experiences have become low hanging fruit for customers to publicly call out companies who fail to meet their expectations. Whether or not these experiences are the contact center’s fault, customer service represents the front door of airlines and will continue to garner notoriety if improvements aren’t made. 

How Replicant guides a smooth landing:

Built for the ups and downs of travel
Customer experience leaders choose automation because it enables them to provide no-wait service to every customer without increasing costs. In fact, Replicant reduces costs by 50% on a cost per contact basis while resolving 90% of calls on first touch without agent escalation. During irregular operations events where cancellations lead to massive spikes in demand, automation scales infinitely to meet real-time customer demand. Compared to the low containment rates of IVRs, automation is built to fully resolve common use cases like reservations, rebooking and outbound flight updates so contact centers are protected from high-volume spikes.

First-class experiences for all
Replicant’s Thinking Machine provides end-to-end customer service that lowers average handle times by 50%. With an advanced NLU brain, customers are able to speak naturally in any language they choose and converse as they would with an agent. On the other side of the phone, agents are freed to focus on traveler issues that require a human touch, like families stranded at an airport or security issues that compromise customers. In both cases, customers with common requests are able to get service immediately, and agents are relieved from the repetitive calls that eat into their precious time.

Ready for takeoff
Even as technology improves and AI becomes more mainstream, automation can be a daunting proposition for both customers and contact centers. But with Replicant, contact centers can launch a comprehensive solution and start resolving calls in just weeks without taking on resource-intensive projects. Replicant’s industry-leading resolution rates are backed by millions of conversations and pre-trained models are ready to deliver natural conversations without heavy development cycles. The Thinking Machine is SOCII, HIPAA, PCI and GDPR compliant and ready to integrate with any combination of CCaaS, CRM and telephony platforms.

What’s Next

Airlines will use several strategies to respond to the chaos of 2022. In one extreme example, Frontier Airlines has already eliminated the phone option entirely from its customer service offering. This is a dramatic step to address the rising costs of operating call centers and the challenge of hiring and retaining agents.

But it’s safe to say the move won’t help combat the plummeting American customer satisfaction index, as travelers are directed to engage with Frontier on WhatsApp for flight issues. Conversely, the hybrid approach of Contact Center Automation will continue to rise in popularity, freeing up agents to handle urgent requests and allowing routine questions to be handled with zero wait times. 

The post Contact Center Automation Is A Soothing Ginger Ale for Airlines appeared first on Replicant.

• Long service queues that dismay customers in a time of need
• Inbound ETA calls that clog up phone lines and bury urgent requests
• Outbound calls to service partners that are repetitive and time consuming

With Replicant, dispatch requests are fulfilled end-to-end using Contact Center Automation. Customers can speak naturally, quickly capture their location, request a tow or service truck, and receive accurate updates until assistance arrives. 

For contact centers, the value is transformative. They’re able to provide every customer with reliable service, drive efficiency and ROI, and reserve agents for complex requests – even during spike events. Here’s how:

How the Thinking Machine Automates Dispatch:

Proven automation. Replicant has resolved 90% of common call drivers across millions of customer service interactions. With battle-tested conversations designed for trusted enterprise businesses, the Thinking Machine brings out-of-the-box resolutions to brands whose businesses rely on timely, efficient dispatching.

Omnichannel made simple. With Replicant, customers receive consistent service across voice, chat and SMS. This opens up infinite possibilities for dispatch requests. Customers can seamlessly switch between channels for actions like making a request, capturing geo-location, receiving outbound updates, and more.

Seamless integrations. The Thinking Machine is a natural fit with any tech stack. Replicant’s Contact Center Automation platform works with your IVR, CCaaS, CRM, and telephony to enhance, rather than replace, your existing technology.

Deep analytics. Get visibility into all support conversations and analyze insights from conversation data, success rates, unsupported call flows, CSAT, self-serve script edits, and more. Gain real-time visibility into each conversation using out-of-the-box or custom dashboards to optimize performance over time.

Natural conversations. Instead of an endless IVR or keyword-driven call trees, the Thinking Machine is powered by cutting-edge NLU that allows customers to speak naturally when executing a dispatch. They can say things like “the Tuesday after next,” “sometime in the morning works great,” or even ask the Thinking Machine to list available times. 

Drive Business Value With the Thinking Machine:

Modernize your dispatch process without increasing costs

Replicant removes the barriers that prevent customers from getting service or force them to wait during urgent situations. Outbound messages remind update customers about their dispatch and make it easy to cancel or speak to an agent. As a result, Replicant reduces no-shows while lowering cost per contact by 50% and delivering 55% in cost savings on average compared to a BPO.

Risk-free deployment ready to go live in weeks 

The Thinking Machine is powered by proven, pre-built components that allow your business to get up and running with end-to-end automation faster than ever before. Out-of-the-box Powers make it easy to automate use cases like Dispatch without heavy development. The Thinking Machine can quickly authenticate customers, accurately collect information like insurance, provide available times, dispatch a truck, and send outbound updates.

Unlimited scale that can tackle any spike event

The Thinking Machine is designed to meet today’s hiring and retention challenges with an elastic scale and unlimited capacity. With Replicant, contact centers no longer have to rely on inaccurate forecasting to plan daily and seasonal headcounts. By automating disptaches, agents are more available to focus on high-value calls.

Make end-to-end dispatch service effortless 

With a 90% first call resolution and CSAT scores that regularly outpace agents, the Thinking Machine delivers a premium dispatching  process for every customer. The Thinking Machine can speak hundreds of languages, pass-off escalations to agents with full context, and work with any tech stack to create dispatch.

Reliable service with zero wait times

The Thinking Machine allows contact centers to eliminate wait times for their customers and provide dispatch support outside of normal business hours. Automatically generated conversation transcripts and built-in continuous learning make it easy for managers to improve customer experiences without manual, development-heavy processes.

The post Help Is on the Way: How the Thinking Machine™️ Automates Dispatch Requests appeared first on Replicant.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine makes it possible to initiate and resolve dispatch calls like roadside assistance across every channel with Contact Center Automation. 

And with out-of-the-box features like Natural Language Understanding, Machine Learning, and integrations into any platform, contact centers can deploy a proven automation solution in just weeks. 

Week 1

Choose which dispatch types to automate

The Thinking Machine is designed to fully resolve dispatch calls that are high in volume and prone to spikes. Businesses like auto clubs often choose to automate dispatch requests like roadside assistance, allowing agents to focus on urgent requests that require greater context or live agent assistance.

Week 2

Calculate your expected ROI

Based on the dispatch type(s) you choose to automate, determine what a successful outcome looks like using benchmark metrics and a solution-specific ROI model. Replicant uses existing customer data to recommend future use cases and build a business case for deployment by forecasting results against KPIs and initial costs.

Week 3

Perform technology assessment

Bring together IT, CCaaS, and telephony stakeholders to generate a comprehensive assessment of your technology stack. Replicant uses this stage to align integrations, connect with accurate data systems, and comply with your security and privacy standards.

Week 4

Design conversation with pre-built components

Determine which capabilities your business needs to initiate and resolve a dispatch request. The Thinking Machine comes with NLU and intent-recognition that continuously gets better through Machine Learning, meaning contact centers don’t have to dedicate resources to maintaining a cutting-edge solution.

Week 5

Deploy with confidence

The Thinking Machine is built on millions of conversations that resolves tier 1 concerns out of the box, meaning you can deploy with guaranteed success. Once deployed, contact centers can begin automating in a few ways. They can start by automating dispatch requests 24/7, during spike or overflow events, or for a percentage of requests.

Week 6+

Discover insights

The Thinking Machine collects CSAT in real-time for every conversation, and surfaces insights based on conversation transcripts so you can A/B test new scripts to ensure constant improvement. Discover data-based improvement opportunities to offload more customer requests and compound ROI while freeing up more agent time.

Learn more about automating appointments with Contact Center Automation.

The post Roadmap: Automate Dispatch With the Thinking Machine™️ appeared first on Replicant.

While many businesses have turned to self-service solutions to address this challenge, they are not the most effective channels. According to Gartner, only 9 percent of customers can successfully find answers to their questions via self-serve channels, which leads to frustration. 

Fortunately, these repetitive, mundane, and easy-to-answer calls are ripe for automation. Using artificial intelligence in contact centers, businesses and organizations can resolve Tier One calls immediately and without human intervention. This, in turn, frees up live agents to handle more complex calls that require human empathy and intelligence.

By taking advantage of technology such as Replicant’s Thinking Machine, businesses can improve customer satisfaction in a world where clients increasingly expect immediate answers at any time of the day or night.

What is contact center AI?

An AI contact center is an automated solution that can answer incoming Tier One calls and resolve customer inquiries with zero wait time or human interaction. A solution such as Replicant uses natural language processing and machine learning in order to have a human-like conversation with the caller. McKinsey reports that such technologies can help organizations achieve impact at scale.

How does AI improve Tier One call resolution?

AI Contact centers can improve Tier One call resolution because calls can be answered simultaneously regardless of volume. That means that even during peak periods or call spikes, customers will not have to wait on hold when they call your business. In addition, Replicant is trained on millions of real customer service calls and can often immediately resolve the customer’s issue without the assistance of a live agent.

How does AI improve the customer experience?

AI can improve the customer experience at many levels. Customers don’t have to wait long to reach your organization since calls are answered immediately. Additionally, Replicant’s conversational AI solution is capable of quickly and efficiently resolving Tier One inquiries without human intervention. Callers with more complex questions will be transferred via call routing to the appropriate agent with a complete transcript. This means that callers do not need to repeat their name, contact information, or question when they speak to a live agent. 

Examples of AI contact centers in action

Let’s take a quick look at some common Tier One calls that businesses may be facing every day.

• Order Status. Customers are simply calling you to find out if their order has been shipped and when they can expect it to arrive. With automation, call resolution is immediate and accurate.
• Account Updates. Individuals have changed their primary phone number or moved to a new city and need to update their contact information with your business. With AI, this can be done automatically and precisely.
• Outages. A service organization such as a utility experiences a power outage. Customers are calling in to find out if the organization is aware of the outage and how long before service is restored.
• FAQs. It is common for companies to provide basic information about their products or services, such as their location, hours of operation, or contact information. These inquiries can be addressed by AI chatbots effectively.
• Appointments. Any professional service organization or healthcare provider can easily automate appointment requests, changes, or cancellations through automation.
• Bookings. In the travel and hospitality industry, most calls pertain to making, changing, or canceling reservations. 

Try Replicant’s Solution

If you’re ready to improve your Tier One call resolution with an AI contact center, look no further than Replicant’s Thinking Machine. Reach out today to learn how we can help you automate your contact center.

The post AI Contact Center: Improving Tier One Call Resolution appeared first on Replicant.

But despite the obstacles, there remains plenty to be optimistic about. CX leaders built momentum across operations, strategy and technology in 2022. This prevailing trend of innovation stands out as we look back on an up-and-down year in CX:

The Worst

Hostile customers
The Institute of Customer Service found that over a six month stretch in 2022, 45% of frontline service staff experienced hostility from customers, up 10% from the start of the year. At one point, almost all agents (96%) felt acutely stressed at least once a week with ‘too many calls’ being their biggest challenge. 

Air travel turbulence
Airlines were in the spotlight for the wrong reasons when a massive summer rebound in travel led to lost luggage and angry travelers. Rising fuel prices and staff shortages created long delays, high fares, and soaring customer expectations that proved difficult to meet. 

Hold times skyrocketed
In almost every industry, wait times skyrocketed as the economy opened back up and pandemic restrictions were lifted. Some customers were given the impression they were being turned away from service as contact centers saw unprecedented and unpredictable spikes in demand.

The Great Resignation
The Great Resignation squeezed contact centers around the world and compounded on the economic challenges of 2022. A record 4.5+ million people voluntarily left their jobs in late 2021, and the hiring pool never fully recovered. Contact centers had to get creative to make sure inbound calls were getting answered. 

“The biggest challenges tend to always be things we can’t plan for. Things like system outages, weather events, and most recently, the pandemic,” said Vanessa Hardy-Bowen, Director of Guest Care & Contact Centers at Spirit Airlines. “This will generally result in five to ten times the call volume you would have normally – you just can’t plan for that. Being able to flex up or down using technology allows a smooth experience for the customers and helps to mitigate the impacts of the unpredictable.” 

The Best

Agents were prioritized
Despite a rocky year for contact center agents, the long-term forecast looks promising. A big reason for that is due to the retention and hiring challenges CX leaders dealt with, which have made improving the agent experience a top priority heading into 2023.

“We really focused on how to provide more internal promotion opportunities and advance [agent] skill sets.” said Matt Woody, First Vice President, Contact Center, First Financial Bank. “That’s led to a really engaged workforce and a reduction in attrition rates and greater success attracting more talent to the organization and we feel like that’s a recipe for success going forward.” 

Customers took to AI
Replicant automated millions of customer service calls for some of the world’s most trusted brands in 2022. One of the most telling trends we saw was the rapid adoption of advanced conversational AI by customers.

“We never got positive comments about our bots with our previous solution in our NPS surveys,” said Tanya Weigelt Director, Club Operations at CAA. “I fell off my chair when I heard people leaving compliments on the Replicant Thinking Machine.” 

LISTEN: Hear real customer reactions to the Thinking Machine

Analytics drove business value
Contact center analytics vastly improved to allow contact center leaders to understand why their customers are contacting support and take action immediately to continuously improve the customer experience.

“A big part of what we do today involves using the business intelligence component of our conversational AI technology to understand, at a much deeper level, our callers’ behavior,” said  Mike Bowman, Senior Director of Operations, ECSI. “With things like predictive analytics we can know when we will have a busy day, why it’s going to be busy, which customers will be calling, and then decide what we need to do internally to prepare and handle it.”

Customers are still the focus
Customer expectations remain at all-time highs and their satisfaction has never been a higher priority for contact centers than it is now, according to the 2022 Benchmark Report. 

“What has not changed is the fact that customer service is just being a genuine human to people and helping them resolve whatever concerns they have,” said Michelle Deese, OCCC Learning and Development Manager at Orkin. “My perspective is that if you are kind to people and help them, no matter what changes happen within the industry you will be successful. 

The post CX Wrapped: The Best and Worst From 2022 appeared first on Replicant.

For starters, they take time. From healthcare to consumer services and every industry in between, contact center agents can spend hours a day on appointment scheduling alone. On top of that, spikes can occur at any moment and are impossible to staff for. 

Second, they’re complex. Not every appointment is as simple as picking a time. Customers may ask questions, certain appointments may require instructions and pre-qualification, and some can require long validation processes involving multiple data sources.

Third, they get missed. No-show appointments are a costly result of limited scheduling solutions. Performing appointment reminders can be a manual, time-consuming process and even automated solutions can limit customers’ ability to easily modify bookings which lead to more no-shows.

Lastly, digital solutions fall short. No amount of app-based or digital schedulers can fully eliminate customers’ preference for instantaneous phone service. Digital-only appointment solutions can frustrate customers and silo valuable customer data in a black box. 

That’s why Replicant has made the complex simple. With the Thinking Machine, contact centers can launch a comprehensive automation solution and start resolving calls in just weeks – without the headaches.

Here’s how businesses from healthcare to insurance automate appointments quickly and confidently with Replicant:

How the Thinking Machine Automates Appointments:

Proven automation. Replicant has resolved 90% of common call drivers across millions of customer service interactions. With battle-tested conversations designed for trusted enterprise businesses, the Thinking Machine brings out-of-the-box resolutions to appointment scheduling. 

Omnichannel made simple. Remove the guesswork from your automation implementation with exceptional experiences across channels powered by a single conversation engine. Customers receive consistent service across voice, chat and SMS, and can switch between channels for more efficient appointment scheduling. 

Seamless integrations. The Thinking Machine is a natural fit with any tech stack. Replicant’s Contact Center Automation platform works with your IVR, CCaaS, CRM, and telephony to enhance, rather than replace, your existing technology.

Deep analytics. Get visibility into all support conversations and analyze insights from conversation data, success rates, unsupported call flows, CSAT, self-serve script edits, and more. Gain real-time visibility into each conversation using out-of-the-box or custom dashboards to optimize performance over time.

Natural conversations. Instead of an endless IVR or keyword-driven call trees, the Thinking Machine is powered by cutting-edge NLU that allows customers to speak naturally when scheduling appointments. They can say things like “the Tuesday after next,” “sometime in the morning works great,” or even ask the Thinking Machine to list available times. 

Drive Business Value With the Thinking Machine:

Increase bookings and engagement without increasing costs

Replicant removes the barriers that prevent customers from booking with your business or cause them to miss appointments without setting a new time. Outbound messages remind customers of an appointment and make it easy to change or modify existing bookings. As a result, Replicant reduces no-shows while lowering cost per contact by 50% and delivering 55% in cost savings on average compared to a BPO.

Risk-free deployment ready to go live in weeks 

The Thinking Machine is powered by proven, pre-built components that allow your business to get up and running with end-to-end automation faster than ever before. Out-of-the-box Powers make it easy to automate use cases like Appointments without heavy development. The Thinking Machine can quickly authenticate customers, accurately collect information like insurance, provide available times, schedule appointments, and send reminders.

Unlimited scale tailored to your needs 

The Thinking Machine is designed to meet today’s hiring and retention challenges with an elastic scale and unlimited capacity. With Replicant, contact centers no longer have to rely on inaccurate forecasting to plan daily and seasonal headcounts. By automating appointments, agents are more available to focus on high-value calls.

Make end-to-end scheduling effortless

With a 90% first call resolution and CSAT scores that regularly outpace agents, the Thinking Machine delivers a premium appointment scheduling process for every customer. The Thinking Machine can speak hundreds of languages, pass-off escalations to agents with full context, and work with any tech stack to create appointments.

Convenient scheduling with zero wait times

The Thinking Machine allows contact centers to eliminate wait times for their customers and provide appointment support outside of normal business hours. Automatically generated conversation transcripts and built-in continuous learning make it easy for managers to improve customer experiences without manual, development-heavy processes.

The post Scheduled Success: How the Thinking Machine™️ Automates Appointments appeared first on Replicant.

For many businesses, Contact Center Automation has already stepped in to resolve unlimited customer requests where IVRs and chatbots could only deflect or re-route. 

But at a time where 49% of leaders say hiring enough agents is an immediate challenge, evaluating automation can still be a complicated, though important, endeavor:

• In-house builds require massive time and resource commitments
• Narrow solutions with limited AI can struggle to adapt to your customers
• Single-channel options can grow outdated quickly and end up costing more

That’s why Replicant has made the complex simple. With the Thinking Machine, contact centers can launch a comprehensive solution and start resolving calls in just weeks – without the headaches. 

Here’s how businesses from healthcare to insurance automate common call drivers like appointments, dispatch, and intake quickly and confidently with Replicant:

1. Industry-leading resolution rates backed by millions of conversations

Customer satisfaction remains the top contact center priority by a wide margin. Contact center leaders need to be sure their automation solution can deliver end-to-end resolution for every request. 

Replicant’s Thinking Machine is proven on years of conversations across a range of industries and use cases. 

The result: a 90% first call resolution rate without agent escalation. This means contact center leaders can be confident that their automation solution will deliver results that lead to positive customer outcomes. 

And, by resolving tier 1 requests using pre-trained models, shared intent libraries, and built-in continuous learning, the Thinking Machine is constantly improving.

2. Risk-free deployment ready to launch in weeks

Replicant leverages expertly architected components and pre-trained models that are ready to deliver natural conversations to your customers when you are. 

Component-driven design means end-to-end conversations can be designed quickly and around any business’ desired call flow. More importantly, it means you can launch a solution without heavy development resources or lengthy testing cycles. 

And when best-in-class voice automation isn’t enough, The Thinking Machine brings the same simplicity to every channel including voice, chat, and SMS as well as seamless channel-switching for more efficient conversations.

3. Infinite complexity simplified with battle-tested conversational design

For all its technological firepower, the Thinking Machine is just as much of an art as it is a science. Replicant brings thoughtful service to every use case, industry, and customer through elegant conversation design that thinks beyond the “happy path.” Contact centers can deploy automation without the guesswork involved in designing conversations from the ground up.

The Thinking Machine:

• Answers every request immediately, without wasting time on greetings or personification
• Drives adoption by communicating how it can assist the customer immediately
• Uses NLU to derive intents from colloquial speak, regardless of language, background noise, or accents
• Leverages knowledge-based matching to derive intents from context clues like customer history 
• Easily repairs conversations when customers need to correct themselves or ask a different question
  

4. Rapid time-to-value with measurable ROI 

A simple, risk-free deployment doesn’t just deliver automation in weeks, it delivers unprecedented value: the Thinking Machine has cut cost per contact across millions of calls by 50% without sacrificing CSAT.

Contact centers can choose to leverage the Thinking Machine across 100% of a single call type, solely for overflow support, or during after-hours or holidays. But you only pay for what you use. 

And with a user friendly dashboard, managers get valuable insights from auto-transcribed call scripts and advanced analytics.

With Replicant, contact center agents are freed from managing your most repetitive, high volume calls and can instead focus on high-value requests that require creativity and empathy.

For many businesses, agent efficiency, retention, and upskilling represent the most impactful benefits of the Thinking Machine.

5. Security, flexibility and scalability, right out of the box

Enterprise contact centers don’t compromise on security and neither do we. The Thinking Machine is SOCII, HIPAA, PCI and GDPR compliant with regular releases of new features to improve resiliency.

Contact centers can integrate the Thinking Machine with any combination of IVR, CCaaS, CRM, or telephony to enhance, rather than replace, existing systems.

And with built-in scalability and redundancies, the Thinking Machine is prepared to handle any amount of demand during even the most unpredictable call spikes. 

Every day, the Thinking Machine helps thousands of customers get the support they need on behalf of some of the world’s most trusted brands. 

With proven components designed to fit the needs of any contact center quickly and reliably, comprehensive automation has never been more in reach.

The post Resolution Guaranteed: How Replicant Removes the Risk from Contact Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

By using the Thinking Machine to resolve tier 1 requests, their organization has seen incredible results across average handle times, agent call volumes, containment rates and more. But getting there was a learning experience. Mike Bowman, Senior Director, Operations, shared with attendees some of the strategies that drove success and ultimately value throughout their automation implementation. 

Before getting started, a few core boxes should be checked:

• You’ve defined success and what you want to achieve
• You’ve confirmed automation makes sense for your specific business needs
• You’ve completed a cost analysis (our handy ROI calculator is a good starting point)
• You understand what type of AI to use

Tip #1: Do Your Research

CX leaders trying to get educated on AI will undoubtedly run into a lot of bold claims. The buzz around AI requires those in the consideration phase to cut through the noise. An effective way to do this is to go directly to other businesses already using automation to get their honest feedback. “By far, for us, talking to people who are actually involved in AI is invaluable to determine what’s fact or fiction,” Bowman said.

Tip #2: Start Small

Identify low hanging fruit in your processes. Small-scale processes like authenticating a customer are great candidates to test automation without making a large investment. These seconds not only turn into dollars saved, they help businesses learn about the potential of automation. 

Tip #3: Get Started Now

AI is evolving fast. For CX leaders, determining what’s possible and what’s not is a big step in harnessing the power of automation. Getting started early is the only way to quickly learn the applications of AI in your business. In addition, automation is accelerating the pace of business faster than anything we have ever seen. If you are not using it and your competitor is, you run the risk of falling behind. 

Tip #4: Understand Your Business Like a SME and a Customer

An automation deployment is a prime opportunity to get even smarter on your own organizaiton. A thorough business review should bring in SMEs from several departments in order to design a solution that provides the most value. In ECSI’s case, getting the feedback of high performing agents helped them get back what felt like 20 via a well designed Thinking Machine.

Tip #5: Engage Your Employees

Educate, don’t eliminate, your workforce. For most agents, AI can seem like a competitor. It’s important to include stakeholders in the process like employees, executives, and clients, from the start. Strategies like focus groups and feedback sessions can help educate employees on what’s in it for them. For example a future without hundreds of password reset requests a day opens up opportunities for agents to reimagine what they’d like to focus on more. 

Tip #6: Staff Appropriately

The challenges around finding employees don’t appear to be going anywhere soon. For contact centers looking to bring on staff to oversee new technologies, it can be helpful to look internally and invest in the education of their star performers instead of hiring externally. Close collaboration with an automation partner can also help staff learn new strategies in real-time. 

Tip #7: Capitalize On The Brains & The Brawn of Contact Center Automation

Contact Center Automation works relentlessly. It moves fast, makes very few mistakes and never misses a call. “It’s that great,” said Bowman. But on the other side is the brains – analytics. With automation, contact centers gain efficient insights into problems, issues that aren’t getting fixed, or flows that are broken across your customer experience. This saves hours of manual and anecdotal work while making it easy to improve scripts and augment CX.

The Impact of Automation

Using these tips and strategies, ECSI deployed and scaled the Thinking Machine to handle calls across three of their most common requests within a year. After looking at their contact center as a whole during their busiest season year over year, the results spoke for themselves. ECSI’s average speed of answer was 6x faster in summer 2022 than the year prior, despite an increase in total volume.

Meanwhile, all-in costs in total technology and labor cost decreased by nearly 14%. The Thinking Machine contained 25% of total inbound calls and shortened 65% of calls while providing additional business intelligence. Today, ECSI no longer has to hire seasonal staff while they’re able to upskill their service staff for analyst, CX, and paraprofessional positions.

Watch the full session of Getting Started with Automation plus dozens more on-demand with Resolve Rewind.

The post Resolve 2022: 7 Tips for Getting Started with Automation appeared first on Replicant.

But for all its technological firepower, Contact Center Automation is just as much of an art as it is a science. A thoughtful approach to automation takes into account factors like customer behaviors, industry standards, and brand guidelines.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine places an equal emphasis on conversation design as it does Conversational AI. It’s built for not only the “happy path” conversations but the edge cases that can lead to frustrating experiences. The result: frictionless experiences that don’t simply deflect customers but fully resolve requests to drive operational efficiency.

Here are a few ways Replicant’s gets the most out of Contact Center Automation by creating conversations that customers love. 

9 Game-Changing Conversation Design Tips:

1. Answer Immediately & Avoid Personification There are two things that can frustrate a customer in the first few seconds of a call. The first is long wait times. The second is the unnecessary personification of a machine. Replicant avoids both by answering every call immediately and being upfront with customers by stating “I’m a Thinking Machine on a recorded line,” and not masking automation with human names or pleasantries. Both factors help gain customers’ trust without wasting their time.

2. Think Like a Machine & What’s In It For Me? Decades of clunky call trees have conditioned customers to be skeptical of automation. That’s why Replicant designs each Thinking Machine to demonstrate value to customers as soon as possible. For example, if a customer attempts to zero-out to speak to an agent, the Thinking Machine can make a data dip into a call center system to pull a live wait time. From there, it can tell the customer their request can be resolved by the Thinking Machine before they’d get through to an agent.

3. Natural Language Intents & Colloquial Language The last ten years have seen massive technological advancements that allow for better automatic speech recognition than ever. The Thinking Machine is designed to match unstructured speech to intents where older solutions get lost in translation. It can understand that a customer saying “I’ve been squinting at the computer screen and getting headaches” suggests they are seeking an eye exam, or that a customer who says they’re in the “Big Apple” is talking about New York.

4. Probabilistic Funnels & Knowledge Based Matching Most contact centers have highly probable call paths. When this is the case, it makes sense to build them directly into the Thinking Machine. For example, if 70% of customers call to ask about contact lenses, it shave valuable seconds off of handle times to lead with “Are you looking for contact lenses?” Conversely, if the Thinking Machine sees that a customer recently inquired about glasses, it can lead with “are you calling about eyeglasses?” to begin making progress faster.

5. Conversation Repair Sometimes customers change their minds. A caller scheduling an eye exam may initially request an appointment at the Flatiron clinic before realizing that it’s more convenient for them to go to the West Village location. Replicant builds in a “back button” into every Thinking Machine to ensure that conversations don’t fall off the rails the second a customer makes a non-linear request.

6. Powers & Slot Filling & Contextual Carryover There are infinite ways for customers to say the same thing. This can be seen especially in the selection of specific appointment times. A customer may say “sometime around 10am works well for me,” but not offer a preferred day. The Thinking Machine can react off the time to say, “Okay, I can make a 10am appointment for you, which day do you prefer?” without forcing the customer to rephrase their request.

7. Reduce Customer Effort When designed with the customer in mind, Powers can go beyond intent detection to reduce customer effort by detecting contextual information. For example, instead of reading back an inbound caller’s phone number, Thinking Machine can log a new number and simply ask “is this the best phone number to reach you?” Maximizing simple answers further reduces handle times and creates a frictionless conversation.

8. Purpose-built Natural Language Understanding NLU models play a key role in the accuracy of the Thinking Machine. In a flow like email collection, things can get complicated quickly. Replicant has designed it’s NLU stack to go beyond simple transcription solutions that have long struggled to discern accurate information from alphanumeric strings. For example, it can accurately collect a unique email readout to know that “M as in Mary dot R I L E Y @gmail.com” is “m.riley@gmail.com.”

9. Omnichannel Experience & Conversational Continuation After designing these layers of complexity into a voice experience, the next step is filtering a great experience into every channel. The Thinking Machine is built to serve every customer in the channel they reached out over, or switch between channels when convenient. For example, a customer can be given the option to receive an appointment confirmation over SMS, while remaining on the phone to refill a prescription.

The post 9 Tips to Design Automated Conversations That Actually Work appeared first on Replicant.

Contact centers have been experiencing tremendous pressure following the pandemic and the Great Resignation. According to the 2022 Benchmark Report, the past two years have led 54% of leaders to cite high and increasing costs as an immediate challenge. Another 49% said hiring enough agents is an immediate challenge. And almost all, 91%, report that automation is a critical or important priority in the next year.

Replicant’s product team took some time at Resolve 2022 to dive deeper into what the future of Contact Center Automation looks like and how it will continue to be a leading solution for complex CX challenges.

Greater collaboration between humans and machines

Contact Center Automation is already shaping a hybrid environment to meet the needs of a changing workforce. Replicant is automating millions of common, repetitive requests, allowing agents to be more available for more high value calls. The future will see agents and automation work even better together to divide and conquer as automation adds more use cases that enable machines to fully resolve even more call drivers. CX leaders will see more savings and efficiency gains as machines take on more requests and give back more time to agents.

Seamless experiences across languages and channels

Quality voice conversations are a hallmark of Contact Center Automation. 87% of contact center leaders indicate that the voice channel has the highest perceived value of automation compared to any other channel they use. But in the future, the value of automation will gain greater consistency across channels with a single engine that powers even better conversations wherever customers choose to interact with a brand. A core conversation engine at the core of omnichannel automation means no more coordinating with multiple vendors and easier tweaks on a per-channel basis.

More control for contact centers

Automation doesn’t stop at implementation. In fact, Contact Center Automation is at its best when machines are continuously learning about customers and how to meet their needs. The future of automation will give managers even more visibility into the whole customer journey, in one place, without having to manually dig through data. And with A/B testing and script building, they’ll have even greater capabilities to test new flows and react quickly when new opportunities to improve CSAT arise.

Component-driven design built for speed

With Replicant, deploying Contact Center Automation has never been easier: deployments can take just weeks compared to the months to years-long process of building your own solution. In the future, speed-to-value will only increase as more features and configurations become reusable – from business logic to integrations to Natural Language Understanding (NLU). This will give a distinct advantage to leaders who begin automating earlier, as they’ll be able to quickly scale to new flows and cost-cutting opportunities. 

Reliability in overflow events

While contact centers will always wrestle with unpredictability, they can rest assured knowing that automation is there to relieve agents during unforeseen spikes in demand. Automation can take 100% of requests across channels, scale infinitely, or be used for after hours or overflow support. And with new languages constantly being added and improved, automation will be a boon for an even greater pool of customers.

For contact center leaders at Resolve 2022, it was clear that no feature adds as much value as dependability, and automation will ensure that innovative brands aren’t beholden to agent availability and customer demand in order to provide great service. 

The post Resolve 2022: What’s Next For Contact Center Automation? appeared first on Replicant.

Today’s contact center agents have never been under more pressure. According to one study, 96% feel acutely stressed at least once a week and almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge.

In response to this growing problem, contact center leaders have been presented with a wide range of technologies to help agents be more efficient. These solutions may include new Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems that route calls to appropriate agents, or agent assist tools that provide guidance to agents in real-time. 

But are these solutions addressing the root problem? After all, call volumes haven’t gotten any more predictable since the pandemic and hiring challenges seem like they are here to stay. 

For most contact centers struggling to find and retain enough talented representatives, agent assist tools are simply not a high priority. Here’s why:

Common challenges of agent productivity solutions

Upkeep of the solution gets deprioritized. Agent assist solutions can add incremental gains in efficiency to the contact center, like 5% lower Average Handle Times or one less escalation per 20 calls. But call volume spikes, hiring challenges, and unplanned events like economic instability can cause agent assist tools to quickly fall out of favor. In these cases, managers who are overwhelmed by demand don’t have the luxury of focusing on individual call flows and agents are left with a superfluous solution that doesn’t actually make their lives easier. 

High training and onboarding costs. Any new agent tool comes with its own learning curve. But given that 55% of call centers already spend 6-12 weeks training and onboarding new agents, time is often not a readily available resource. Contact centers that require rapid onboarding cycles in order to meet immediate demand should build in training time to the cost of any new agent assist tool. Once training time is factored in, they can then ask themselves if the benefit of an agent assist solution justifies the total cost. 

Redundencies when compared to holistic solutions. Agent assist tools – like predictive responses, auto-transcribers, and IVRs – are just one of many disparate solutions that contact centers can integrate into their tech stacks. One long-term problem with these approaches, however, is that more one-off solutions can lead to a long list of feature redundancies or incomplete data. For example, data from agent assist tools may show success for certain guided responses, but lack the deep insights to suggest flows that are ripe for automation – costing contact centers even more in the long run.

Agents want less repetitive tasks

Agent stress is due to high volumes, not a lack of assistance technology. The unprecedented stress that today’s agents are experiencing should tell leaders all they need to know: agents need to field fewer calls. At a time where every agent is being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day, offloading calls from their workloads is the number one way to reduce stress and improve agent productivity. On the other hand, adding guided assistance to their day-to-day can encourage greater productivity in the short-term, but lead to burnout over longer periods when outsized call volumes are not addressed.

Automation offloads all tier-1 conversations. Contact Center Automation is an alternative solution that not only provides intelligent routing and state-of-the-art agent assist tools during escalations, but also completely offloads tier 1 support requests from live agents. This creates a significant step change in which contact centers can focus less on forecasting headcounts and more on assisting agents where they truly need it: their day-to-day bandwidth and wellness. Contact Center Automation brings automation for tier 1 requests to every channel, with equal or greater efficacy and CSAT score than live agents. 

Contact Center Automation makes hiring and retaining easier. As a safeguard against unforeseen spikes, Contact Center Automation gives agents the ability to focus on calls that require creativity and empathy. It helps create an environment agents want to work in, and gives them time back which they can use to add skills and certifications – all while automation handles repetitive requests like account updates, order questions, and much more. When compared to disparate agent assist solutions, Contact Center Automation not only reaps a more immediate ROI, it creates more realistic expectations that translates to higher retention rates and shorter hiring cycles over the long haul.

The post The Problem With Pricey Agent Productivity Solutions? There Aren’t Enough Agents appeared first on Replicant.

These changes have created a cycle of unpredictable call volumes and unsustainable wait times. They have also pushed contact center leaders to think differently when it comes to the future of customer service. They’re thinking bigger.

At Resolve 2022, CX leaders and innovators from a wide range of industries joined Replicant in Nashville to explore how automation can be leveraged to create a better, more efficient contact center. 

From successful Contact Center Automation deployments at some of the world’s most trusted brands, to strategies for managing change across your organization, here are the top 10 takeaways from the conference.

1. Automation solves immediate problems

The 2022 Benchmark Report found that most contact center leaders (95%) have either already adopted, are implementing now, or are planning to implement automation within the next year. Resolve reinforced that trend with story after story from CX leaders inundated by unpredictable call spikes without possessing the necessary headcount to field each request. With agents hard to come by and demand hard to plan for, Contact Center Automation is an ideal solution due to its ability to fully resolve common issues – not just route or deflect them like previous solutions.

2. The future of contact centers is hybrid

Contact Center Automation places an emphasis on a multi-pronged approach to customer service – one where humans and machines work in tandem to assist customers. A hallmark of this model is the division of request types. Automation provides end-to-end support for common, high-volume requests that are prone to spikes and allows humans to be more available for urgent or complex requests that require human creativity.

3. Analytics drive customer experience

Contact center leaders are looking for solutions that don’t just relieve agents of demand, but also help them better understand their customers’ preferences. For example, an automation solution with rich insights and transcription can not just increase resolutions, but also help leaders find better ways to design conversations and respond to different kinds of unstructured speech.

4. Component-driven design makes AI easier

A key part of the discussion around today’s unpredictable contact center climate was the need for fast, frictionless automation projects. That’s why Replicant rolled out a roadmap of additional automation flows built on deployment-ready components. These flows make it easier than ever to achieve a live solution, while making integrations and continuous learning a breeze.

5. “Conversation Design” is top-of-mind

Conversation design plays a huge role in how effective an automation flow is. Resolve highlighted many of the best practices that contribute to a delightful conversation. For example, the ability to offer an eye exam when a customer cites blurry vision, or the ability to infer that a customer needs to make a policy change when they state they have a new car. 

READ: 9 Tips to Design Automated Conversations That Actually Work

6. Leaders are focusing on change management 

In a panel led by AAA and Canadian Auto Association, the importance of change management was stressed as a key driver behind the value they gained from Replicant. At both insurers, a strong collaboration between operational teams and frontline associates helped their agents understand the benefits of automation, while providing better experiences for members with every call.

“It’s not about replacing our team members’ jobs, it’s allowing them to use their analytical skills to the best of their abilities and automating some of the mundane tasks.” Lisa Rivier, Senior Director of Operations, AAA 

7. Start-and-scale is a preferred strategy

When leading financial services company ECSI began using Replicant to automate customer interactions, they didn’t try to boil the ocean. Like many innovative brands, they started small. Every contact center has a handful of straightforward call types that eat up large volumes of agent time. Starting with just one use case allows leaders to realize value faster and scale to more flow types based on data and need. 

8. Deflection is a poor outcome

Attendees from every industry were no longer interested in automated solutions that ultimately deflect the majority of callers to areas of self-service like apps or websites. In fact, they’ve found these types of solutions merely lower handle times by creating frustrated customers who feel as though their time was wasted with an ineffective call tree. Instead, first contact resolution (FCR) is a more important outcome for leaders seeking transformative automation solutions.

9. The “happy path” is only the beginning

Many contact center leaders have been a part of build-it-yourself automation projects. But a common roadblock they’ve faced is that the ideal conversation flow is usually not the most frequent result. In other words, effective automation requires AI with continuous improvement so that it can learn from every call automatically and be prepared for more diverse patterns of speech (one of the reasons Replicant comes pre-trained on millions of calls so you don’t need to wait years to achieve optimum results).

10. Containment isn’t everything

Just as deflection can have a negative effect on customer satisfaction, containment is no longer a leading indicator of good CX. Instead, leaders are choosing automation solutions that don’t trap customers in an automation loop. Customers who need an agent should get transferred to one as efficiently as possible, and Contact Center Automation is able to gather initial information and pass complex requests to agents with full context so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.

The post 10 Takeaways From Resolve 2022: Transforming the Customer Experience appeared first on Replicant.

Part of what makes Contact Center Automation such an impactful solution is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all software. Unlike IVRs or chatbots, Replicant’s Thinking Machine brings reliability where CX leaders need it – like security, Natural Language Understanding, and real-time analytics – and flexibility where it matters: conversation design, integrations, and personal, branded experiences.

Just as no two solutions are alike, businesses find value from Contact Center Automation in many different ways. Naya Mehta, Head of Customer Success at Replicant, gave an overview of value realization at Resolve 2022 and shed light on the many ROI levers of automation. 

While the below categories are certainly not the only examples of realized automation value, they’re top of mind priorities for most CX leaders and represent key focus areas for the foreseeable future.

Workforce Management

How do you optimize your agents, staff and supervisors in a complex and unpredictable environment? With Contact Center Automation, that answer can become a lot simpler:

• Seasonality & Spikes Planned and unplanned spikes can happen over the course of  weeks, months, or even a single day. Replicant allows contact centers to be nimble so they never miss orders, lose revenue, or get overwhelmed by demand.
  
• Headcount planning Replicant is not in the business of eliminating agents. Instead, contact centers gain the ability to plan for a mix of in-house, outsourced, and automated agents to lower their risk and increase the speed of service across the board. With out-of-the-box analytics, managers can even gain insights to better determine how to deploy their headcount. 
• Talent management  Your best agents should be on your most important calls and with Replicant they can be. “We’re now open 24/7,” said Mike Bowman, Senior Director, Operations, ECSI. “We used to operate on typical business day hours, and today we probably take about 30% of our overall contact traffic after normal business hours. It’s really taken a lot of the volume out from the normal day and flattened that curve so that agents have a lot less work to do and take their time to work on relationship building with the callers”

Customer Experience

• Immediate & consistent service It may sound counterintuitive to say that customer satisfaction increases when customers talk to a machine. But today’s customers are used to long wait times or even buried customer service numbers that aim to deflect inbound callers rather than serve them. Replicant has seen CSAT rise in every instance of automation because it’s consistent and reliable. 
• End-to-end resolution with self-service Customers feel comfortable when they receive simple outbound messages like “your tow truck is on the way,” or “your package is out for delivery.” From start to finish, Replicant helps customer support become an extension of a product or service so customers don’t feel like their transaction ended the moment they paid. The Thinking Machine achieves a 90% resolution rate without escalations on average to build a foundation of trust from the start. 
• Fast and natural experiences Contact centers are constantly looking for ways to be more accommodating to customer preferences. Replicant understands that if a customer is calling in, they probably don’t want to be directed to an app. Conversely, if they’re chatting with support in an app, they probably don’t want to be told to call a number. Replicant makes it easy to keep conversations natural and frictionless so customers are never inconvenienced. “Most of our callers are millennials,” said Bowman. “What really opened our eyes several years ago is we got a complaint from a college student that they didn’t want to have to talk to us. It reinforced the idea that self-service and automation is a good choice for that particular demographic.” Mike Bowman

Business Process Improvement

• Eliminate repetitive tasks Mehta’s presentation included an illuminating customer story. Prior to partnering with Replicant, ADP would call all mid-sized customers when they were in danger of missing payroll. As a legal requirement, this call was very important, but also very repetitive. By automating the call and integrating an RPA solution that also sent an email, they cut human work for the process by a staggering 90%. 
• Boost agent processes From more efficient agent handoffs to more time to improve the agent experience, automation adds value to agent production. “When you have contact centers that are hitting 90-something percent occupancy and it’s call after call after call, even our agents can get a bit salty or crusty,” said one Resolve attendee. “From and end customer perspective, when they do talk to an agent, if that agent is not as overwhelmingly tired because they haven’t had a chance to breathe between calls, I have to expect that the CX on those calls will be better as well.” 

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But as Replicant CTO and Co-founder Ben Gleitzman pointed out during Resolve 2022, the groundwork that was laid for AI decades ago didn’t necessarily mean its success would be linear. Here’s how decades of AI advancements have led us to today’s axis point in human-to-machine interaction:

The Deep Learning Revolution

In 2012, the deep learning revolution began. The classical knowledge that laid the foundation for AI gave way to automated image classification – using AI to identify what elements make up a given image. Initially, only one out of three graphic classifications worked. It wasn’t until 2015 that machines truly surpassed humans by identifying things most humans didn’t know, like an obscure dog breed or location. 

In 2017, the revolution had its sequel. AI had read and viewed such a large portion of the internet via powerful transformers like GPT-3 that it essentially had learned everything about what humans have produced. It was using one billion parameters to understand the world, and today uses 100x that to understand the context of a question or conversation. 

The bitter lesson

Even after the Deep Learning Revolution, AI still faced one big problem: GPT-3 understood nothing. It didn’t possess the foundational grounding to be exact in its responses to humans – to understand what a human was asking at its core, especially in complex situations. This is the reason why contact centers are unable to simply throw thousands of call recordings into a large language model and expect an effective solution.

Unlike customer service agents, who are always focused on a goal, AI will often talk just to talk – unconstrained without proper guardrails. The question became: How do we get the best of humans to combine with the best advancements in AI? There needed to be human and machine collaboration in order to harness the models of 2012 and 2017 into a focused solution that could make it useful for business.

The art and science of Thinking Machine

To harness the power of AI, Replicant focuses our technology on specific customer service applications. We harvest unstructured data to allow businesses to understand the voice of their customers at scale. This results in more accurate intent data whereas IVRs return incomplete data from customers pushing buttons to simply get to an agent. We focus our Thinking Machine to engage in shorter and results-oriented conversations that progress interactions at every turn. And, we provide a testable and consistent experience that can identify and combat bias quickly. All in, this allows agents to slow down, focus on calls that only humans can answer, and make the most of their time.

So, can machines really converse now?

Decades of AI innovation have led to one answer: a resounding yes. Machines can have creative, impressive, and oftentimes jaw-dropping conversations with humans today. But for businesses, the question that interests them most is can machines have effective conversations now? In this case, the answer requires both the art and science of AI. There is no magic cauldron that can create automated conversations businesses can confidently deploy to millions of customers. 

However, using the principles of effective conversation design, customer-ready AI has become economical, transformative and repeatable. Replicant’s Thinking Machine can talk to customers over any channel in any language, and even converse with other machines for fully automated two-way tasks. It can build trust, continuously improve, measure success, and deploy quickly in any environment. For CX leaders in search of a solution that addresses their most pressing challenges, this is the answer they’ve been waiting for. 

Watch the full session Can Machines Really Converse Now? and much more on-demand with Resolve Rewind.

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At Replicant, this manifests itself in a focused approach to accessibility, compliance and unbiased user experiences that build trust and cut down on unnecessary confusion. During Resolve 2022, Kevin Geck, Principal Solutions Manager at Replicant, highlighted a case study that embodied what it means to design conversations that are both compliant and easy to use for a population new to AI.

Background

• The customer Replicant partnered with a specialty health organization that provides older adults access to fitness programs as a benefit for certain plan members. They aim to improve the quality of life of senior members through exercise at home or through a network of fitness centers. 
• The challenge This organization’s business revolves around an annual enrollment period. Each year, tens of thousands of newly enrolled members call customer service to get more information on how to access their new fitness benefit. During this period, demand skyrockets. Historically, average wait times could reach 12 minutes. Agents were stretched thin and members often received a disjointed experience that made a poor first impression for their new benefit.
• The goal Replicant partnered with this organization to help handle fitness calls, especially during the enrollment period. We had to integrate with a proprietary CRM system to access member information and fitness locations, as well as Genesys to receive and pass calls. Our objective was to not only lower costs and provide better analytics, but to provide an incredible experience for seniors that could get them up and running with their fitness benefit in no time. Ultimately, it was about the members.

Our solution

• Persona mapping After reviewing this organization’s members and their past calls, Replicant’s conversation design team determined a few key must-haves for their automated experience. First, it was clear that despite the existence of online tools, most customers preferred to call. There would be no digital deflection in this conversation. Second, members were highly motivated and excited to use their fitness benefit. They want to activate as quickly as possible, but they don’t know where to start. Replicant had to meet customers where they were to authenticate them, get them the member ID they’d need to use a fitness center, help them find their most convenient location, and answer FAQs. 
• Member-focused conversation design Part of meeting members where they were meant making conversation design decisions that took into account contextual intent. Replicant created a workflow that gave callers what they needed without wasting time forcing the customer to say it. Notice how Option B cuts down gives replies that focus on a clear goal while providing members with more options for questions and resources.

• Smart scripting Replicant’s conversation design team understood from the start that the persona of this organization was largely new to a solution like the Thinking Machine. Given that fact, we provided extra support in the conversation script itself that could help members them complete their request more efficiently. In the below scenario, Option B highlights the added message of the Thinking Machine’s ability to repeat things. This small decision added greatly to the organization’s and customers’ value realization as customer frustration was kept to a minimum and agents spent less time forcing members to repeat themselves during escalations.

• HIPAA compliance It was clear from the start of this partnership that customer information could not be stored and all conversations would need to comply with HIPAA. This meant that rather than using a read-back to confirm information like names or alphanumeric strings, the Thinking Machine would need to leverage the best of our product ability to listen accurately and collect information, log it, and do so without storing it. 

Key Learnings

After deploying the Thinking Machine for the specialty health organization, a few decisions throughout the process proved integral to its success:

• Kick-off: The project got moving quickly and began with members. Our teams took the time to engage in live call listening sessions throughout the kick-off and planning phases in order to build personas faster and maintain the customer as the heart of the project.

• All Together Now: Replicant invited a cross-functional team from the health organization to join all conversation discovery and design sessions. This ensured that assumptions weren’t being made about customer habits or preferences, and instead used real data to inform what would make for the best Thinking Machine.

• Because We’re Happy: Understanding that this particular population of customers could be skeptical or nascent to Contact Center Automation, our team focused on the happy path experience during the initial design period.

• From On High: Replicant partnered with the health organization’s engineering leadership team to execute a thorough API discovery process spec new API development needed to connect a delightful conversation to one that leveraged existing systems. 

• Bringing Our Best: Replicant’s conversation design and machine learning was training delivered to the broader team as developers built the solution, cutting down on project cycles and increasing speed-to-value.

The result of Replicant’s partnership with this specialty health organization was massive. Most importantly, their members interested in using their fitness benefit were able to begin the process easier and faster than ever. And, no matter how many calls the organization received during a given period, they no longer had to dread longer hold times or consider spending more money on hiring or outsourcing. Agents were freed to focus on more high-value and engaging calls. Managers could slash costs while increasing CSAT. And, ultimately, fitness members were able to get moving faster with private conversations that delivered resolutions.

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Seasonal surges represent a “known outcome” for most service leaders. They come around every year, they include expected costs and challenges, and they are thought about well in advance. But they also share similarities to the kinds of unpredictable spikes that can cost even more. 

“Service leaders must now plan for the known outcomes, such as a seasonal surge or product launches, as well as the unknown outcomes — those events completely out of leader control,” says Jeffrey Schott, Director, Team Manager at Gartner. “By planning for these unexpected times, call centers can maintain the desired standard of service.”

CX leaders can use periods of expected demand to assess their readiness for unexpected spikes down the road. To start, ask your team to reflect on these questions throughout the holiday season:

What are your edge cases?

Holiday spikes can lead to increased amounts of complex calls from frustrated customers. From weather events to travel and supply chain disruptions, these calls require agents to be both available and equipped to handle them. CX leaders should analyze this subset of requests and measure response times and resolutions, and determine how they can reserve and upskill more agents to be prepared to resolve them quickly.

Which calls are the most repetitive? 

Of the calls that agents field, which are the most common? During the holidays, high-volume calls are often not your most complex. Auto insurance companies, for example, see an increase in standard policy questions during severe weather events. Repetitive calls that see seasonal or incident-related spikes are prime candidates to be resolved by automation so agents can focus more on customer queues. 

When does your IVR fail? 

Nothing exposes the weaknesses of IVR systems like a large spike in demand. They can be overloaded, receive public scrutiny, and give customers the impression they’re being ignored or deflected. Measure the containment of your IVR during the holidays and explore alternative solutions that can not just withstand thousands of simultaneous requests, but resolve them. 

How can your agents’ lives be improved? 

A recent study found that 74 percent of call-center agents are at risk of burnout. This risk is heightened during the holidays – as is the probability of high turnover. CX leaders should prioritize their agents’ time and input on how their lives can be made easier. What tasks take the most time? What do agents want to spend more time on? Can automation enable them to take on more engaging calls and less repetitive tasks? Starting this conversation early creates a dialogue for insights, improvement and ultimately trust when it comes to deploying AI. 

Where are customers reaching out? 

Conversations best suited for an SMS or chat experience – like personal information collection and form fills – can slow agents down with longer than necessary handle times. These use cases can be easily automated through multichannel experiences that seamlessly switch from voice to text and create fast, frictionless experiences that customers love – especially when hold times are long.

Bonus: What costs the most? 

Ultimately, CX leaders must analyze the costs of their busy seasons and apply them to scenarios where large spikes come out of the blue. In most cases, the cost of unpredictable demand is much higher when it’s unplanned for. Fortunately, these instances represent the biggest opportunity to return value. CX leaders should ultimately assess their holiday season with Contact Center Automation in mind as a key lever for increasing CSAT, cutting costs, and driving efficiencies.

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In order to deliver efficient and empathetic service, contact centers must be more adaptable and innovative than ever. That’s why forecasters point to composability as the most important attribute for CX organizations going forward. 

According to Gartner, the idea of composable business “means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.” It operates under four principles:

• More speed through discovery
• Greater agility through modularity
• Better leadership through orchestration 
• Resilience through autonomy

For contact centers currently exploring automation and business process transformation with AI, these principles are paramount to success. Here’s what contact center leaders need to know about composability and how a flexible approach can help businesses quickly differentiate their CX with Contact Center Automation.

Faster differentiation with more agility

CX and technical leaders alike benefit from composability. By updating a business’ architecture to be more modular, organizations can deploy modern experiences that customers love without heavy development resources. For IT leaders, this idea may sound familiar. “[Composability] exists in familiar technology, from APIs to containers,” says Gartner, “But, it is a new, or perhaps ignored, idea for a CIO’s business counterparts and board of directors.”

Greater marketplace options

Composability results in a greater capacity for creative thinking and a wider selection of innovative tools. The principles of modularity allow businesses to increase their readiness to integrate new technologies as they emerge. This allows contact centers to be early adopters for solutions like Contact Center Automation, which are dramatically lowering costs and improving CSAT for first movers. Composability also lowers the barrier of entry for tools like conversational AI, accelerating leadership buy-in with simpler and cheaper implementations. 

More value from existing systems

Composable contact center architecture improves the resiliency and performance of existing platforms. In the case of Contact Center Automation, the ability to seamlessly integrate into CRM, CCaaS, IVR and telephony systems is impactful. For example, an existing IVR system with low containment rates can be configured to pass off any number of call drivers to Replicant’s Thinking Machine. The Thinking Machine’s ability to resolve 90% of common requests narrows the scope of the IVR and increases successful outcomes in the IVR, while lowering hold times and abandonment rates. 

“Organizations that embraced — and continue to embrace — the building blocks and principles of composable business were able to successfully leverage existing digital investments and, the best-case scenario, accelerate investment,” said Gartner.

Better outcomes for customers

Ultimately, composable orchestration in contact centers delivers customer experiences that stand out and flex to new expectations. According to Gartner, “The modular setup enables a business to rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external (or internal) factors like a shift in customer values or sudden change in supply chain or materials.”

In the case of Contact Center Automation, this comes to life in personalized experiences, predictive conversations, and proactive service. Customers that talk to Replicant’s Thinking Machine receive faster service that uses contextual information from past purchases, pending orders and personal preferences to make calls, texts and chats more efficient. During incident-specific events like supply chain snags, weather events, or delays, customers receive automated outbound communication that keeps them informed and reduces inbound calls.

Contact center challenges are showing no signs of slowing down. But leaders who successfully implement composable thinking into their organizations will be first in line to orchestrate innovative solutions that don’t just maintain service, but transform it.  

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But while automation is top-of-mind for most customer service leaders, many are still wrapping their heads around it. Can automation really resolve tier 1 requests? Do customers actually want to use it? What’s the best way to choose a partner?

According to the 2022 Benchmark Report: Automation in the Contact Center, 80% of study participants are planning or evaluating automation and intend to invest in it within the next 12 months. 

For contact centers still in the discovery stage of their automation journey, developing an action plan is crucial to overcome the common barriers that can prevent a deployment from getting off the ground. Starting with these guidelines can help you understand the market, gain team-wide buy-in, and develop a scalable automation strategy:

Step 1: Understand the contact center market is quickly adopting automation

Contextualizing where automation currently stands in the market can enable leaders to understand the “why” behind a potential investment. According to the 2022 Benchmark Report, the adoption of contact center automation is past the tipping point: 16% of the study’s participants have already implemented automation and 91% report that automation is a critical or important priority in the next year.

More than half (54%) of contact centers in the study believe automation will have a disruptive or revolutionary impact in the next five years. This level of adoption positions contact center automation at the start of the Early Majority phase of maturity. This is the ideal time for organizations to adopt emerging technologies and solutions because the cost-benefit ratio is most favorable. The potential to gain a competitive advantage from contact center automation is very high.

Organizations should start positioning themselves now to leverage automation by gaining internal buy-in, becoming familiar with the solutions landscape, developing the business case, allocating budget, and educating customers and agents on the benefits.

Step 2: Prepare to leverage automation

The Benchmark Report identifies cost and IT resources as the biggest barriers to automation in the contact center. Fortunately, these barriers are some of the easiest to flatten. To build your business case, begin with clarifying a goal for automation. 

The top goal of the centers in the study is improving the customer experience (77%), a goal that favorably impacts customer retention, satisfaction, and profitability. Close behind are the goals of reducing costs (55%) and increasing agent productivity (49%).

Establishing a goal for automation should guide every phase of an automation project. Choosing a solution and determining an initial use case will allow teams to confirm how well the solution enables meeting the goal. Furthermore, this study provides cost reduction expectations for implementing automation: 72% of centers in the study expect reductions of 25% or more. 

Developing a business case should also include identifying benchmark metrics to help refine the range of savings automation will provide, allowing the creation of an expected ROI. These steps often are made alongside an existing solution provider, which can ease or even eliminate the burden on IT staff. 

Step 3: Ensure that voice is part of your automation plan

Two-thirds (67%) of contact centers in this study believe to a large or very large extent that voice automation is a means for solving common customer issues. These centers also rate voice as one of the most effective channels for resolving customer issues and first in terms of value for leveraging automation across the channels they use. Research has shown that 71% of people would rather speak to a machine than endure 15 minutes on hold. These findings affirm the need to include voice as part of the automation plan.

Other channels — email, webchat, social, text — enjoy the perception of greater structure and therefore seem to lend themselves more easily to automation. Until now, voice automation hasn’t shown the same effectiveness. But modern solutions can now offer the same seamless customer experience across channels – hence the outsized value of voice automation. One-third of study participants feel voice automation will be transformative. By prioritizing the phone channel in your automation plan, leaders can secure significant benefits to the organization and customers, while allowing agents to focus on calls that require human empathy and creativity.

You can read the full 2022 Benchmark Report here, or learn more about Contact Center Automation with our comprehensive guide.

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But the report – a survey of 300+ US-based enterprise contact center leaders – also found that automation is sometimes easier said than done. For many contact centers, the road to automation requires alignment across teams and unanimous enthusiasm within the organization. 

Even after determining that automation will benefit customers and agents, there’s still work to be done to navigate common obstacles. Here’s what respondents to the 2022 Benchmark Report cited as their biggest barriers to adopting automation, and key considerations that have allowed contact center leaders to overcome them.

Barrier #1: Cost/budget constraints (49%)

Key Consideration: The transformative impact of Contact Center Automation can quickly dispel budget concerns. By automating tier 1 requests, and reserving live agent time for only the most high-value and complex calls, contact centers can recoup their investment in under six months, according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study. In the study, Replicant was found to have eliminated a bottleneck with one food delivery app, which reduced order cancellations and led to an additional $360,000 in revenue over three years.

Barrier #2: Limited IT resources (40%) or desire to build in-house (24%)

Key Consideration: Unlike CCaaS overhauls and custom designed chatbots, Contact Center Automation requires minimal resources to implement when deploying a solution alongside a knowledgeable provider. On the other hand, building a solution in-house is a highly complex and time-intensive process that requires continual retraining and maintenance to be successful. Often, it requires entire teams of conversation designers, machine learning engineers, and CX experts. For most contact centers, the value of automation is much greater when it is pre-trained on millions of conversations, integration-ready, and able to be deployed in weeks – not months or years.

Barrier #3: Lack of leadership buy-in (32%)

Key Consideration: While a third of respondents cite a lack of corporate buy-in as a barrier to Contact Center Automation, 84% said they see the value and need of the technology. Automation is an effective solution for some of the most pressing contact center challenges today. It’s been shown to dramatically improve customer satisfaction, eliminate wait times, and provide a scalable infrastructure for handling spikes in inbound calls. As automation moves from early majority to late majority status in the next year, those who are able to deploy solutions first will have a distinct advantage over their competitors.

Barrier #4: Unsure how to get started or too complex (23%)

Key Consideration: Although 77% of leaders say they know how to get started and 90% believe automation works, a portion still feel it’s too complex or overwhelming to explore right now. It’s hard to blame them. Contact center transformations like cloud migrations have historically been convoluted, expensive, and slow. But it’s important to make the distinction between Contact Center Automation and wholesale platform changes. A common strategy when deploying automation is to begin with a testbed project. This might be automating a portion of a single contact driver over a single channel, such as 25% of Customer Authentications. Once comfortable, leaders can determine if improvements must be made before adding volume and expanding to more high ROI use cases.

Barrier #5: Don’t have the right skills/team (21%)

Key Consideration: While 79% of respondents feel they have the right skills and team to use automation, just over 20% don’t share that sentiment. When exploring automation solutions, the latter group should place an emphasis on partners who have experience guiding the deployment process from both a technology and business perspective. A solution design cycle should begin with a thorough discovery and documentation of metrics in order to calculate an expected ROI. From there, partners can provide expertise in performing a technology assessment alongside your IT, CCaaS and telephony stakeholders, before using their own conversation design experts to create an automation solution tailored to your brand. 

Barrier #6: Skepticism that customers are ready (21%)

Key Consideration: Even though 79% of leaders believe customers are ready for some capacity of automation, it’s reasonable to expect confidence to vary by industry, brand and customer type. However, recent data shows that 71% of people would rather speak to a machine than endure 15 minutes on hold. In addition, the leaps in capabilities that have been made in conversational AI over the past years have greatly expanded the effectiveness of automation across customer segments. Because, a marketplace for older adult wellness products, successfully resolves high-volume, tier 1 calls with a 90% resolution rate across their customer base and has already begun expanding their solution to more channels. 

You can read the full 2022 Benchmark Report here, or learn more about Contact Center Automation with our comprehensive guide.

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But despite all these changes, one priority has remained steadfast: Cost Per Call. 

Cost Per Call (CPC) can be defined as the total operational and capital expenditures needed, on average, for a contact center to complete a customer service call. Today, that formula has been expanded to include new channels like chat, email, and text in a total Cost Per Contact metric.

Both measures of CPC provide an indicator as to how much a brand spends on customer service, and how associated  costs rise and fall over time. An above-average CPC may suggest customer service is weighing down a brand’s bottom line, or that customers are experiencing too many unresolved requests. On the other hand, an abnormally low CPC may suggest a contact center is operating with outdated tools or resources, and needs greater investment. 

In either case, calculating and monitoring a contact center’s Cost Per Call can be a valuable exercise. But a nuanced approach to the metric can help further modernize how brands view the value of their contact center.

Calculating Cost Per Call

It’s easy to define CPC as simply the total cost of running a contact center divided by the total number of customer interactions over a given period. But the complexity of modern customer service requires a widened definition of “cost.” 

The all-up investment brands make in customer service starts with the cost of hiring, training and retaining agents. This may include recruitment campaigns, outsourcing premiums, and incentive-based compensation. To enable agents, brands also spend on hardware and software, management teams, training, and operational costs both for on-premise workers and remote employees.

According to CXToday, industry benchmarks suggest that an acceptable CPC could range anywhere between $2.70 – $5.60, including direct labor, indirect labor, and operational expenses.

However, the biggest pitfall of the CPC metric is that it runs the risk of oversimplifying the goal of contact centers. While benchmarks and averages can provide helpful guidelines as to what a “good” CPC is, the truth is there is no golden number. 

CPC metrics vary wildly across contact centers, depending on their industry, value proposition, size and even time of year. As such, contact center leaders shouldn’t spend too much time trying to find out what their magic number is or should be. 

Instead, they should divide the “cost” portion of the formula into specific investment buckets and define clear goals for each. In doing so, contact centers can gain a clearer picture of where their operating costs go, and whether or not they’re helping them find their sweet spot.

The Cost Per Call sweet spot

For an individual contact center, a healthy CPC is one that can demonstrate an improving return on investment – no matter what that number is. 

If that number is higher than in previous periods, it should be verifiable that your agents are better resourced with top-of-the line tools and that customers are receiving improved service. A higher CPC can also be backed up by improved revenue generation metrics for each call, or lower customer churn rates. 

Any additional CPC cost should target these priorities: 

• Improving service (and thus lowering churn or increasing revenue)
• Increasing agent retention/productivity
• Lowering a secondary or associated cost
• Improving operational efficiency 

These investments may include those that make it easier to offer customers upsells, or increase the speed at which you follow up with prospective customers. In competitive industries like insurance or travel & hospitality, missing these opportunities can add up to millions of dollars of unrealized revenue each year.

In industries like retail or subscription-based commerce, where customer experience is often a key differentiator for brands, a single poor service experience can be enough for customers to cancel an order or change brands. Any investment made into a contact center should first have a clear path to increasing or retaining customer spend. 

Additionally, any investment that increases employee retention or lowers hiring costs can lower the overall investment made in recruitment, thus balancing out a contact center’s total budget. 

Many of today’s modern solutions have the potential to decrease CPC by lowering long-term spend in several areas. Those solutions and strategies are discussed below.

How to lower Cost Per Call without sacrificing service:

1. Invest in automation. Contact Center Automation allows companies to automate their most common customer service calls while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. It has been proven to slash staffing costs up to 50% while returning CSAT scores on par with those of live agents.
2. Focus on omnichannel. Just as CPC should encompass more than just the voice channel, contact centers should invest in their omnichannel future holistically. When they do, they can avoid the costly pitfalls associated with a siloed approach to customer service channel improvement.
3. Personalize based on customer history. Personalized omnichannel experiences can delight customers, lower Average Handle Time, decrease abandonments, and improve upsells and renewals. Contact centers should ensure their systems can identify customers and interact with them based on their personal history with your product or service.
4. Gain real time analytics. Unlocking the black box of contact center interactions can pay huge dividends. Contact Center Automation collects CSAT in real-time for every conversation, as well as granular data based on conversation transcripts. Managers can map customer dispositions to automation outcomes and A/B test scripts to ensure constant improvement.
5. Plan for unpredictability. As the last few years have demonstrated, the contact center environment can be shaken by global challenges in an instant. Adding flexibility to your operations helps avoid costly events like outages, seasonality, or health crises, and can be accomplished in just weeks with pre-trained automation solutions. 

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Over the past several years, many contact centers have adopted technologies to help manage call volumes including interactive voice response (IVR) and AI chatbots. While these tools have helped businesses make significant strides toward call center automation, they have also had their drawbacks. Future customer service technologies go beyond simple tasks. They can fully and successfully resolve Tier One customer inquiries with zero wait time and no live agent interaction.

How can AI improve the customer experience in the future?

An automated contact center that utilizes conversational AI technology like Replicant’s Thinking Machine can completely eliminate hold times for many customers. According to HubSpot, roughly one-third of customers are frustrated by having to wait on hold. In addition, contact center automation will also help businesses route complex questions to the right live agents faster and more efficiently, eliminating the need for customers to repeat their questions or information.

What is the difference between traditional contact centers and ones that use AI?

Most traditional contact centers use only live agents or a combination of in-house representatives and offshore support. Other channels such as text and messaging may not exist or be properly integrated. However, AI contact centers that use the right AI customer service solution can offer omnichannel customer support that combines voice, text, and messaging into one integrated system.

What elements of a traditional contact center can be replaced by an AI contact center?

It’s important to remember that AI contact center technology, including AI customer service, is not designed to completely replace human agents. On the contrary, they are a way to support and improve the lives of live customer service representatives. For example, Replicant’s conversation AI system can replace a company’s IVR, routing, voice responder, and chatbot solutions. Note that it is not designed to reduce the number of human agents, but instead, designed to be a more effective automated solution.

Are AI contact centers future-proof?

We all know that the future of call centers can quickly become standard and then outdated in this fast-paced world of development. When looking for a new AI solution, it’s important to evaluate how the vendor will be able to keep up with the times.

For example, Replicant’s automated AI customer service solution is trained on millions of hours of real contact center calls, texts, and chats. In addition, once it’s implemented at your specific business, it will continue this learning to constantly improve over time based on calls that only your agents receive.

While automation, analytics, and omnichannel solutions are quickly becoming mainstream in contact centers, Replicant’s ability to continually learn as well as the company’s dedication to research and development will mean a steady stream of product feature and capability improvements.

What does an AI contact center look like in the real world?

Replicant has many customers that have successfully reduced costs and increased revenue as a result of using its AI customer service solution. For instance, one popular food delivery app outsourced its call center operations across two business process operations (BPO) providers in order to handle mealtime volumes.

Unfortunately, even with the addition of the BPOs, rapid spikes in mealtime demand created order backlogs and led to order cancellations. By using Replicant’s solution, this business eliminated this bottleneck, reduced order cancellations, and resulted in an additional $360,000 in revenue over three years. After deploying Replicant, the need for outsourcing was eliminated as well, reducing total costs by 55 percent.

Try Replicant

If you’re ready to step into the future of contact center automation today, request a live demo. Let us show you how we can help you implement an AI contact center. We have helped many businesses take advantage of AI technology to streamline and improve their customer service while offering an improved ROI.

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Across most industries, getting a resolution to an issue has never been harder for customers and wait times are at all-time highs. On the other hand, customers’ expectations have risen following the pandemic. Now, they’re much less likely to be sympathetic with brands navigating complicated regulations and hybrid workforces.

Today, customers expect service whenever and wherever they need it without having to repeat themselves or tailor their questions to rigid IVR menus or disjointed channel experiences.

Fortunately for them, contact centers are on the same page. As part of the 2022 Benchmark Report: Automation in the Contact Center, Replicant and global research firm Demand Metric asked 300+ US-based enterprise contact center leaders what’s top-of-mind for their teams.

Their answers show a renewed focus on customers’ biggest concerns, and a roadmap to how they’ll achieve their goals.

Priority #1: Improving customer satisfaction

The link between contact centers and customer satisfaction (CSAT) is well established. And contact centers in the Benchmark Report are unified around customer satisfaction as their top priority, with 77% listing it as their primary focus.

In fact, among all the consensus priorities of contact centers, many can be tied back to improving the elements that go into a great customer experience. According to PwC, nearly 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as the most important aspects of a positive customer experience. Adding to the importance of CSAT in customer service is the fact that one in three customers will leave a brand they are loyal to after just one bad experience.

Priority #2: Hiring enough agents

The second-most common priority for contact centers is overcoming the labor shortage. Following the Great Resignation, 49% of leaders are finding it challenging to bring on enough representatives to keep up with customer demand. Part of the reason for this may simply be that less and less agents “find the job fulfilling and enjoyable.” In addition, inflating costs across the US economy have driven many employees to seek higher paying work.

But strategies aimed at transforming what contact center work looks like are already underway. In a recent webinar titled “How to Recession-Proof Your Contact Center” leaders from some of the world’s most trusted brands shared a few of them:

“We’ve all learned that we can have [our] meetings virtually, and we don’t have to spend as much on airfare. So we’ll take things from those places and make sure that then we can reinvest into our workforce and have the staff there to support our members,” said Lisa Rivier, Senior Director, Operations and Strategy, AAA Mountain West Group.

Rivier also touched on the benefits of rolling out Contact Center Automation, and how their team has communicated the positives of the technology to agents:

Priority #3: Automating customer service processes

It’s no secret that Contact Center Automation is moving into the mainstream, and 52% list it as an immediate priority, with a striking 95% having either already adopted, implementing now, or planning to implement automation within the next year.

Automation is the ability to resolve customer support issues across voice, text, and web channels with natural-sounding, machine-driven conversations that understand complex customer requests.

“Automation has the power to transform the industry, as evidenced by the accelerated adoption of the technology,” said Gadi Shamia, CEO and co-founder at Replicant.

“More and more companies are using automation to address chronic agent shortages and lower costs, while allowing their live agents to focus on more challenging and interesting customer issues. This survey confirms what we’ve seen in the market, that automation, especially natural sounding voice automation that resolves customer challenges, will soon be standard in every contact center.”

Priority #4 Reducing costs

52% of Benchmark Report respondents list cost reduction as a top priority. In the face of consecutive down quarters in the US economy, many are bracing for a prolonged recession that could lead to lower budgets.

But following the playbook of many brands who found success during the 2009 recession, some leaders are taking the invest-and-save approach to cost reduction. “Self-funding” automation projects, for example, can foster customer loyalty while increasing profits.

And while hiring more agents may seem counterintuitive to cost reduction – with people often representing the highest cost of a contact center – a robust in-house workforce doesn’t have to mean inflated budgets.

Contact centers who leverage automation, for example, are able to eliminate expensive BPOs that often come with expensive premiums and overflow charges. They’re also able to decrease attrition and lower the rate of redundant training due to high turnover. In addition, deeper analytics can lead to a 59% reduction in operational costs and a 59.9% increase in productivity.

Priority #5: Upgrading technology

Just behind cost reduction is the priority of upgrading legacy contact center technology, with 51% citing the latter as top of mind.

Today, digital transformation in the contact center revolves largely around composability. Contact centers need solutions that can deploy easily, integrate across systems like CCaaS platforms and CRMs, and impact every channel. Respondents in the Benchmark Report feel that the voice channel has the highest value for automation and is also the highest priority target for implementing an automation solution. Additionally, results found that the usage of each channel does not mirror effectiveness.

It’s imperative that contact centers partner with automation solutions that deliver an omnichannel experience; one that connects and seamlessly switches customers between channels across touchpoints. 80% of leaders from contact centers with 1,000 or more agents, according to the report, believe delivering an omnichannel experience is important or very important.

You can read the full 2022 Benchmark Report here, or learn more about Contact Center Automation with our comprehensive guide.

The post The 5 Top Priorities for Contact Center Leaders (and How They Plan To Achieve Them) appeared first on Replicant.

According to the 2022 Benchmark Report: Automation in the Contact Center, Contact Center Automation has reached “Early Majority” status. The report – a survey of 300+ US-based contact center leaders by global research firm Demand Metric – found that 16% of leaders are already leveraging automation solutions. 

When weighed against the Diffusion of Innovations theory, that measure easily exceeds the 13.5% “early adopters” watermark. So what’s driving the rapid rise of Contact Center Automation? Here’s what contact center leaders say is pushing automation onto their roadmaps.

There is considerable enthusiasm at the prospect of using automation

Two-thirds (66%) of study participants report they are excited about the prospect of using automation, while 17% feel overwhelmed by it, and another 17% are still apprehensive. 

For the majority expressing enthusiasm about automation, it’s easy to see why. Automation boasts features that simply didn’t exist even two years ago. Contact Center Automation can resolve common requests and tasks like “where is my order?”, appointment scheduling, and authentication, with equal or greater effectiveness than agents. It gives contact centers the ability to provide consistent automated experiences across channels, including voice, and execute seamless handoffs to agents with full context.

Still, contact centers represent the front door of brands, so it’s understandable that a small segment of leaders still express apprehension about automation. But the effectiveness of the solution is best seen by leaders who have already deployed automation: feelings of excitement about automation are strongest (80%) among those already using it in some form.

Most contact centers believe the impact of automation is disruptive or revolutionary

More than half (54%) of all contact centers in the Benchmark Report believe that automation will have a disruptive or revolutionary impact in the next five years. And the perception of automation grows beyond excitement between those considering an implementation and those already using it. In fact, 71% of respondents believe Contact Center Automation holds a disruptive or revolutionary potential for customer service. And for leaders still evaluating automation, over a third (39%) feel the same way. 

For most leaders, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Following a multi-year pandemic that saw customer demand skyrocket – and agent availability plummet – contact centers have never been under more pressure than they are today.

Contact Center Automation possesses the ability to dramatically reduce or eliminate hold times. On the hiring side, it’s already fundamentally changing what it means to be an agent. By automating the vast majority of repetitive tier 1 requests, contact centers are able to focus their agents on more engaging calls that require human empathy and creativity. In turn, they’re able to raise retention rates by offering greater professional development opportunities and higher wages.

Automation is a short-term, high priority

Almost all study participants (91%) say that automation is either a critical or important priority in the next year and just 1% assert it’s not a priority at all. This renewed focus on automation is being accelerated by recent economic uncertainty, which has exacerbated both the customer and employee challenges brought on by the pandemic. 

Among leaders who cite automation as a “critical priority” in the next year, over two-thirds cite added efficiencies and improved CSAT as primary drivers. For those who see automation as an “important” priority, addressing workforce management issues and reducing costs are higher focuses, just behind CSAT improvement. Beyond the sheer excitement around automation, the challenges leaders plan to solve with the technology paint an optimistic picture.

Contact centers have long been viewed as “cost centers.” But the ability for Contact Center Automation to impact the bottom line, while also markedly improving customer experience and adding deep analytics and unlimited scale, will propel the technology into majority status quickly, while giving first-movers a distinct advantage over their competitors. 

You can read the full 2022 Benchmark Report here, or learn more about Contact Center Automation with our comprehensive guide.

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But as we enter the final stretch of 2022, it’s clear that customer service has undergone some fundamental changes. Stability is no longer something contact centers can expect to come from the outside world. Instead, it’s a priority they must actively strive toward with customer and agent-first strategies. 

Here are the most important contact center trends so far in 2022 – and what they mean for the future of customer service.

1. 2021 was a hard year, with almost 90% of leaders reporting that customer expectations have increased to an all-time high. (Hubspot)

According to Demand Metric, customer satisfaction remains the most important priority for almost 75% of contact center leaders. But with expectations at unprecedented heights, maintaining a high level of satisfaction has never been harder. 

On top of that, many customer service leaders are now being tasked with customer experience and customer success priorities on top of contact center duties. Without substantial resource increases to match rising expectations, contact center leaders are focused on finding new ways to transform their operations without adding costs. 

2. Retaining customers is a top priority, while cost reduction has dropped 10% from 2020. (Hubspot)

Along the same lines of customer experience priorities, contact centers have a renewed focus on retaining current buyers. As such, they’re less concerned than they were two years ago with reducing their spend given their growing role in revenue generation. 

While this is a challenge in itself, the trend is a clear indication that contact centers are shedding their reputation as mere cost centers for brands. Recent data reveals that 76% of consumers say a poor customer experience negatively impacts their perception of a brand and one in three say it affects loyalty. On the other hand, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% and grow revenues even faster. 

3. Most companies prioritize the “ability to predict customer preferences/behaviors/needs” with new technologies. (Harvard Business Review)

New contact center technologies are emerging and improving every day. But contact center leaders are no longer focused solely on solutions that improve agent efficiencies or lower average handle times. Instead, they’re looking to technology that transforms customer experiences. Priorities include a single, unified view of the customer across all channels as well as customized customer experiences that are enabled by personalization capabilities based on customer history.

4. By 2027, automation will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations. (Gartner)

But, Gartner points out, “Benchmarking chatbot performance metrics at one organization against that of its peers is not effective and can be misleading because chatbot type, design and complexity vary widely by organization.”

As Contact Center Automation reaches mainstream adoption, contact centers are entering a new era where effective solution evaluation is crucial. Leaders are taking a careful approach to automation strategies to ensure they’re set up long-term for the voice channel, omnichannel scale, machine learning, and data-rich analytics. 

5. In 2022, inflation climbed to 8%, the highest in 40 years. GDP contracted in consecutive quarters and was predicted to be just 2.3% for the year. (US Gov)

The past six months have seen one of the largest periods of economic uncertainty in the history of customer service-driven companies. In light of the economic downturn, contact center leaders have been forced to choose between cutbacks and resource reallocation. While customer service departments have historically been seen as costly necessities – and are accustomed to the pressures of tight budgets – modern technology has changed how they’re approaching the current recession. 

Customer service leaders from some of the world’s most trusted brands are turning to automation to alleviate agents from repetitive requests, and provide customers with added service capabilities that eliminate wait times while driving down costs. 

Learn more about recession-proofing your contact center by downloading our free guide, “Definitive Guide: How Customer Service Can Thrive During an Economic Downturn” or watching our latest webinar.

The post The 5 Most Important Contact Center Stats in 2022 (So Far)  appeared first on Replicant.

To understand how enterprise contact centers are dealing with added budgetary and hiring pressures, we spoke with leaders of customer service organizations from three of the most trusted brands in their industries: 

• Lisa Rivier, Senior Director, Operations and Strategy, AAA Mountain West Group
• Chris Purpura, Vice President, Customer Service, Neiman Marcus Group
• Matt Woody, First Vice President, Contact Center, First Financial Bank. 

Our discussion ranged from their highest priorities to their strategies for overcoming multi-layered challenges, and how they’re focused on improving customer experience while adding value to agents’ jobs. 

Below are highlights from the forum. The full webinar can be viewed here.

What is your biggest recession-related challenge?

What strategies are you deploying to protect your contact center?

How is this recession different from past economic drawbacks?

Any agent-focused strategies that have been successful to combat hiring challenges?

How has Contact Center Automation helped you combat contact center challenges?

How do you manage an automation deployment with your agents?

Watch the full webinar here, or learn more about recession-proofing your contact center by downloading our free guide, “Definitive Guide: How Customer Service Can Thrive During an Economic Downturn.”

The post Webinar Recap: How to Recession-Proof Your Contact Center appeared first on Replicant.

According to Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, and loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.

For contact center leaders, it’s often wasted energy to try to nail down if and when a recession will happen, how long it will last, and when things might rebound. Instead, contact center leaders can focus on protecting against uncertainty while securing future success with these 10 best practices in mind.

The full checklist can be downloaded here.

1. Identify long-term priorities in a vacuum

Recessions don’t last forever. Contact center leaders who remain focused on customer-centric priorities, regardless of the economic environment, will help protect their brands’ competitiveness for the long haul. Digital transformation, for example, is one priority experts say that can “help management better understand their business, how the recession is affecting it, and where there’s potential for operational improvements.”

2. Analyze gaps in the customer journey

Before forming a holistic recession strategy, unpack your customer journey and identify actionable weak spots. What are your least effective channels? How do your customers place orders, submit claims, or update information? What call flows lead to the highest abandonment rates? Take specific note of customer touchpoints that lead to the weakest results. These will be your most valuable focus areas.

3. Drive loyalty by improving CX

76% of consumers say a poor customer experience negatively impacts their perception of a brand and one in three say it affects loyalty. On the other hand, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% and grow revenues even faster. After identifying gaps in a customer journey, contact centers should look to improve existing experiences for even the most loyal customers. This step can help create brand evangelists and boost loyalty even if customers become more selective with their spending.

4. Increase reach with omnichannel

9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication channels and 89% of customers are retained when they receive it. Consistent omnichannel experiences not only make it more convenient for customers to get their issues resolved, but also drive greater efficiency with features like SMS forms, which can capture information faster and drive down average handle times.

5. Increase agent retention

Following the pandemic, 96% of agents felt acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cited ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. Contact center managers know how hard it is to hire and retain talented agents today, but increasing agent engagement is a proven method of retention. Look to invest in solutions that can offload the repetitive, tier-1 calls that flood agents, and enable them to focus on requests that require empathy and creativity.

6. Scale service with flexibility

Unexpected surges in call volumes can lead to extended hold times and overwhelmed queues. While in past years, contact centers could simply hire more agents or leverage Business Process Outsourcing during busy seasons, the high cost of these approaches make them unrealistic in a recession. Contact centers should instead invest in flexible solutions that can scale to provide support during overflow events, after-hours or  seasonal holidays.

7. Invest in technology with compounding ROI

Just like contact centers themselves should scale with customer demand, their technology should also be scalable with their own long-term growth plans. Contact centers should look to solutions that can make an immediate impact, but also offer compounded ROI as adoption increases over time. Contact Center Automation, for example, is a future-friendly solution that starts offering relief by automating resolutions to common customer service questions like “where is my order?” and can expand to more complex call flows like payment and billing issues over time.

8. Become more composable

Gartner summarizes composability as “creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.” They also note that composable thinking enables a business to “survive, and even flourish, in times of great disruption.” For contact centers, composability means leveraging APIs and containers in order to enable separate systems like CCaaS, CRM and automation to work in harmony. It also means partnering with solutions that can integrate with any combination of common platforms, as well as self-built systems.

9. Increase efficiency sooner

During the 2009 recession, studies have shown that the most resilient companies reduced costs and increased operating efficiencies earlier than their competitors. Contact centers can adopt a similar strategy with “self-funding” transformation projects that pay off quickly, such as automating common customer service interactions. These technologies bring transformation beyond the incremental improvements of traditional solutions like IVRs and agent assist tools. Eventually, they can replace legacy technologies and impact the bottom line even further.

10. Deploy Contact Center Automation

Contact Center Automation is a modern solution built for modern challenges. Powered by conversational AI, Contact Center Automation can achieve every step of a recession-proof roadmap while providing customers with exceptional service. Companies can automate their most common customer service requests while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. Adopting Contact Center Automation can help reduce costs, while increasing CSAT, customer loyalty, agent engagement, and contact center flexibility.

The post Checklist: 10 Steps To Recession-Proofing A Contact Center  appeared first on Replicant.

The Great Recession of 2009 saw one of the largest drawbacks in the past century hit the global market. 

Many companies were forced to make drastic changes just to survive. However, others were able to maintain their growth, and even accelerate their plans, through proactive customer-focused strategies.

According to a Harvard Business Review study analyzing companies with exceptionally high returns in 2009, resilient organizations were found to have done two things. First: they cut costs earlier than others; by the first quarter of 2008, resilient companies had already cut operating costs by 1% compared to the prior year, even as costs grew.

Second: resilient companies focused on maintaining loyalty among high-value customers who proved to be central to the company’s long-term growth.

When planning for a recession, here are 5 priorities that drive sustainable growth. 

Key focus areas to protect against a recession 

Customer experience is your biggest differentiator

Just how much do customers value exceptional experiences? According to Salesforce, customers base 70% of their buying experience simply on how they feel they are being treated. 62% of customers say they share their bad experiences with others, while 72% of customers will share their good experiences with others. During a bearish market where consumers are expected to be more selective in how they spend, the value of great CX is exponential. 

Loyalty is a lifeboat 

Great customer experiences don’t just increase the likelihood that a company will recover from a recession, they also help secure recurring revenue throughout. According to the Replicant 2021 Customer Service Survey, 76% of consumers say a poor customer service experience negatively impacts their perception of a brand and one in three say it affects loyalty. 

Conversely, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%; loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers. If you’re a contact center leader, this should come as no surprise. Customer loyalty doesn’t just create more revenue. It manifests itself in invaluable customer relationships that motivate buyers to not only stay with a product or service, but become evangelists on behalf of reputable brands.

Data drives growth

Modern customer experiences benefit brands, too. According to Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the first reason to prioritize digital transformation ahead of a downturn is that “improved analytics can help management better understand the business, how the recession is affecting it, and where there’s potential for operational improvements.”

The second reason is that digital technology can help cut costs. Companies should prioritize “self-funding” transformation projects that pay off quickly, George says, such as automating tasks or adopting data-driven decision making. 

Competitors may de-prioritize transformation, but you shouldn’t

It’s easy to point to the benefits of prioritizing customer experiences and innovation during economic drawbacks, but it can be much harder to get an entire organization on board. At the end of any period of prolonged economic instability, only a few companies are found to have actually implemented solutions that position them for growth. The majority of companies are instead left revisiting digital transformation projects they put on hold at the start of a downturn once it’s too late.

An analysis by Bain using data from the Great Recession found that just the top 10% of companies saw their earnings climb steadily throughout the period and continue to rise afterward. The difference maker was proactive preparation. Among the companies that stagnated in the aftermath of the Great Recession, “few made contingency plans or thought through alternative scenarios,” according to the Bain report, “when the downturn hit, they switched to survival mode, making deep cuts and reacting defensively.” 

Automation is built for unpredictability

Given the recent climate defined by hiring challenges and unpredictable customer demand, a modern customer experience must include a level of automation. Customers’ primary desire in their support experiences is instantaneous service, over whatever channel is most convenient to them. Contact Center Automation is built for just this. Having only been available at large to CX leaders for less than a decade, Contact Center Automation offers flexibility and agility built for today’s world.

One study found that customer sentiment ratings increased 57.3% among companies using AI in their customer experience initiatives. Most customers believe that companies need to provide cutting-edge digital experiences to keep their business.

Schedule a demo to learn how customer service leaders are approaching economic instability with Contact Center Automation. Or, download the definitive guide to learn more about the solution.

The post 5 Keys To A Recession-Proof Brand appeared first on Replicant.

Over the past three years, contact centers have been faced with unprecedented challenges. From the pandemic, to agent shortages, to rising unpredictability in call volumes, there’s never been a more difficult time to manage a customer service organization. 

Now, many leaders are preparing for yet another potential risk on the horizon: a recession. But whether or not the economic turmoil predicted by many experts ever comes to fruition, one thing is clear: the value of future-proofing your contact center is priceless.

For contact center leaders, becoming future-proof means being prepared for dramatic swings in customer demand, agent capacities, and global challenges like inflation – all without compromising costs, productivity or customer satisfaction. 

Being future-proof goes beyond digital transformation. The latter is often a years-long process that involves several implementation cycles and sometimes hiring entire teams to build new solutions in-house. Instead, leaders are turning to Contact Center Automation, an emerging category in which companies automate their most common customer service calls while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. 

It quickly establishes modern processes that make it as simple as possible to achieve a few steadfast priorities associated with being future-proof, including customer loyalty, agent retention, customer satisfaction, and scale. 

Here’s how Contact Center Automation strengthens brands’ position against economic challenges, technology challenges, and above all, the future:

Priorities for contact centers during the prospect of a recession

1. Decrease customer churn and increase loyalty

Consumer spending in 2022 may have already peaked following a strong streak of growth. But contact centers shouldn’t write off the value of customer relationships just because buyers may become more selective. 

Even though a company’s first instinct in a downturn is often to cut contact center spending, doing so at the expense of excellent service decreases your chances of maintaining customer loyalty through the duration of a recession. According to Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, and loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers. 

With Contact Center Automation, customer loyalty can be increased quicker than you might think. In one case, DoorDash partnered with Replicant to deploy a Thinking Machine to fulfill customer orders and prevent cancellations. In just three months, the Thinking Machine was 94% as effective as their previous offshore agents at fulfilling customer orders.

2. Increase agent retention

For contact centers, delivering loyalty-worthy service requires that human agents are in the loop for complex customer requests, or calls that require high empathy. However, despite a tightening economy, there is still a surplus of open jobs in the wake of the Great Resignation. 

To prevent the attrition of even more talented agents, contact centers should focus on creating more engaged employees, which are 87% less likely to leave their organizations (it also costs $9,000 a year to keep a disengaged worker and up to $100,000 to replace them).

Contact Center Automation offers a hybrid approach to workforce management, where intelligent machines immediately resolve tier 1 issues, while handing off complex issues to agents. This can have a massive impact on employee retention rates by removing the need for agents to handle hundreds of repetitive calls a day, and empowering them to focus on calls that require creativity and critical thinking. 

Checklist: 10 Steps To Recession-Proofing A Contact Center 

3. Improve CSAT while slashing costs

When contact centers prioritize customers and employees while preparing for an uncertain future, they can lower immediate and long-term costs without sacrificing customer satisfaction. 

ECSI, the leading provider of accounts receivable management and campus-based student loan servicing, deployed Replicant for the two types of calls that caused the biggest seasonal spikes in call volume: Tax Information Questions and Payment Questions.

Replicant launched in ten weeks, and within three weeks scaled to handle 100% of the target volume of calls all while achieving a CSAT of 4.5 out of 5.0.

ECSI was able to handle call spikes during tax season seamlessly and without having to hire costly temporary workers. They also avoided requiring their agents to work overtime to manage increases in calls, which would have almost certainly led to more overworked and disengaged employees.

Read more about how ECSI ​​scaled for seasonal spikes to achieve deeper visibility into customer behavior with Replicant.

4. Surface new efficiency opportunities

It can be difficult to prioritize analytics in a non-stop contact center environment, let alone during a recession where costs and productivity are priorities 1A and 1B. But with Replicant, contact centers get access to real-time data and analytics for every customer interaction in a user-friendly dashboard. 

In a contact center, the benefits of analytics include:

• 59.0% Reduction in operational costs
• 59.9% Increase in productivity
• 36.2% Better decision-making

By gaining access to automatically generated transcripts with auto-tagged customer dispositions and CSAT scores, contact center leaders can quickly edit automated scripts, perform A/B testing, and surface insights like unsupported flows through easy-to-read reports. 

Learn more about Replicant’s Contact Center Automation analytics.

5. Scale service with demand and add flexibility

Recessions are inherently unpredictable, from beginning to middle to end. According to McKinsey, “Previous recessions aren’t necessarily a guide to future ones,” but “flexibility can make a notable difference by allowing managers to take advantage of the opportunities that the next recession might provide.” 

For contact centers, the biggest key to being future-proof is having a high level of agility. Contact Center Automation provides a proven method for diversifying customer service methods. Replicant’s Thinking Machine can scale up or down instantly, which adds an unlimited capacity to tier 1 service never previously available and sets contact centers up for success, no matter what the future holds. 

Learn more with our free guide: How Customer Service Can Thrive During an Economic Downturn

The post 5 Ways Automation Can Future-Proof Your Contact Center appeared first on Replicant.

Depending on who you ask, the US economy may be on the edge of a prolonged drawback. 

Inflation is currently at 8%, the highest in 40 years. GDP contracted by -1.4% in Q1, and is currently expected to be only 2.3% for the year. Meanwhile, a Bloomberg survey estimates a 30% chance of a recession in the next 12 months, up from 15% in March.

In our corner of the world, many are wondering what a recession would mean for contact centers. On the heels of the pandemic and its ensuing challenges (the Great Resignation, supply chain snags, etc.) the last thing contact centers need is further instability.

But fortunately, economic challenges offer something that the pandemic did not: precedent. Using learnings from past markets and consumer behaviors, contact centers can better navigate a potential downturn and come away stronger than before.

Here’s what a prolonged economic drawback would mean for contact centers, and how they can still position themselves for growth.

Consumer Spending Will Slow
With rising interest rates and new home buying expected to fall, some economists think consumer spending has peaked following a long streak of growth. On the business side, capital investment is down, as well as spending on R&D. 

In the event that customer dollars become harder to earn throughout the summer and into the fall, contact centers will have an outsized impact on company revenues in 2022. Customers have always been quicker to leave brands that offer subpar support and service. One in three customers will leave a brand they are loyal to after one bad experience. On the other hand, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%, part of the reason why customer loyalty will be contact centers’ biggest asset. 

But Customer Loyalty Will Drive Resilience
During the Great Recession of 2009, companies deemed “CX leaders” saw a 6.1% rise in cumulative returns despite the S&P 500 tumbling over 15%. On the other hand, brands deemed “CX laggards” fell close to 60%. This striking difference is a testament to the value of strong customer experiences in driving loyalty. 

When customers have immediate access to resolve issues when it’s most convenient to them, they’re less likely to cancel an order, pause a subscription, or abandon brands as a whole. And when customers receive a consistent, personalized experience across channels and can speak to an agent faster, they’re more likely to stick with a product or service – even through a recession.

Investments Will Be Met With Scrutiny
In a constrained market, it’s not just consumers who reevaluate their spending habits. Many, if not all, companies also cut budgets, often slashing innovation and technology investments in favor of a “wait and see” approach. Additionally, recent hiring challenges in call center agents may push companies to reduce overall investment in their contact centers.

Evidence from past recession cycles shows that companies who identify savings opportunities earlier in a declining market are more resilient. A Harvard Business Review study found that in the first quarter of 2008, resilient companies had already cut operating costs 1%, even as their sector’s year-on-year costs were growing. 

A potential recession will mean that contact center leaders must be prepared to justify investments with strong ROI models that show clear paths to savings. Luckily, there’s plenty of proof that supports continued innovation investment in a recession. 

But Leaders Won’t Pause Innovation
While investments will be under the microscope, savvy companies will continue – if not increase – their innovation plans through the duration of a recession. For contact centers, this is motivated by evidence that customer loyalty leads to more recession-proof balance sheets. According to HBR, loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers. Conversely, 76% of consumers say a poor customer service experience negatively impacts their perception of a brand and one in three says it affects loyalty. 

After decades of stagnant contact center solutions like IVRs, standalone chatbots, and agent assist tools, leaders will use an economic downturn as an opportunity to reevaluate their current tech stacks. By investing earlier in innovation, these companies will not only be more resilient, but more competitive when the market comes back.  

Contact Center Automation Will Become Mainstream
Contact Center Automation – the most rapidly growing contact center solution – is a modern technology that addresses every customer service obstacle associated with a recession. Companies who leverage Contact Center Automation regularly return over 50% in cost savings when compared to a highly optimized BPO, and over half of companies have already accelerated their AI adoption because of Covid. 

Contact Center Automation’s future-proof benefits include:

• Lower costs and better ROI. Decrease your cost per contact by automating all tier 1 requests.
• Scales up or down instantly. Minimize wait times with automation that scales with demand
• Resolve, don’t deflect customer issues. Resolve requests on first contact up to 50% faster than agents
• Automate engagement across channels. Consistent customer experience across voice, chat or SMS
• Better data. Analyze every conversation and surface insights automatically with no manual data entry
• Improved agent productivity. Relieve agents from repetitive, high volume requests
• Faster escalations. More efficient hand-offs with full context to assist agents

Even in an economic downturn, certain industries such as travel and hospitality will see a surge in demand in 2022 and struggle to provide great service for customers. Others will need to combat lower budgets and higher customer attrition with loyalty initiatives. In either case, leaders from every industry will deploy Contact Center Automation to provide a safeguard against an unpredictable economic future, without having to hire a single additional agent. 

Schedule a demo to learn how customer service leaders are approaching economic instability with Contact Center Automation. Or, download the definitive guide to learn more about the solution.

The post How A Recession Would Impact Contact Centers appeared first on Replicant.

According to e-Marketer, Direct-to-consumer (DTC) eCommerce sales are set to explode from $76.6 billion in 2019 to $175 billion by 2023 in the U.S. alone, a 128% increase in just five years.

In addition, sales of digitally native DTC ecommerce should increase to $44.7 billion, up from $19 billion last year. 

And it’s not just ecommerce. DTC models present a multi-trillion opportunity among all industries, from insurance to finance to consumer services, bolstered by consumer shifts brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

According to data compiled by McKinsey, 75% of U.S. consumers have changed their shopping habits following the pandemic. Online-first, frictionless businesses can offer lower prices to consumers and more flexible experiences. 

As the internet increasingly becomes the preferred channel for brands across every industry, Contact Center Automation has become a preferred method for creating more modern customer experiences.

Contact Center Automation augments DTC contact centers

Expanded Support Hours With More Available Agents
Replicant offers 24/7, automated resolution for customers’ most common requests. Our Thinking Machine boasts a 96%+ accurate inference classification, which allows customers to ask complex, multi-intent questions for more natural conversations. For DTC brands, this translates to a comprehensive method for offering no-wait service, or after-hours and holiday support. The more a contact center uses Replicant to automate common customer requests, the more available their agents are to provide high-touch service for complex requests. In the latter case, the Thinking Machine intelligently transfers customers to agents to save up to 50% of average handle time per escalation.

Common contact drivers automated by the Thinking Machine include:

• Authentication
• Account & Order Management
• Scheduling & Reservations
• Troubleshooting
• Call Routing
• Outbound Calling & Reminders

Frictionless Experiences Built for Innovative Brands
Contact Center Automation offers modern experiences fit for customers’ expectations of innovative DTC brands. With Replicant, customers are able to engage in the most effective human-to-machine conversations ever to get their issues resolved, without having to deal with clunky IVRs or ineffective chatbots. Replicant’s Thinking Machine was designed to rise to the level of humans, not force humans to revert to robotic patterns of speech. 

With Replicant, contact center leaders can use a single conversation engine to resolve issues across voice, messaging, and other digital channels. Customers get a consistent experience, with seamless channel switching across every touchpoint. Contact center leaders get visibility into omnichannel transcripts in one dashboard. And agents get seamless handoffs for sensitive issues without losing customer context.

Branded Service with Automatic Personalization
Replicant easily integrates with any CRM and contact center software to offer personalized experiences based off of past interactions and purchases. This includes the ability to upsell, offer discounts, and optimize orders and subscriptions. With Replicant, customer experiences are fully customizable without the need for heavy development. The Thinking Machine can also collect information and update customer records via fully brandable Flex Forms that can be sent over SMS or chat. Throughout every conversation, transcripts are automatically provided with out-of-the-box analytics to identify key trends in buyer requests and behaviors – allowing DTC to constantly improve their CX.

Case Study: Leading telehealth company lowers call center costs without sacrificing CSAT 

The Problem
During the pandemic, the rapid growth of a telehealth company required it to hire more than 1,000 agents to deliver great service – but scaling this way was expensive and difficult to manage. They wanted to automate without sacrificing their high CSAT scores.

The Solution
After hearing the conversation quality of Replicant, they knew the speed and accuracy would provide high-quality CX. They deployed Replicant to resolve common contact drivers like billing, order updates, and updating payment methods and addresses.

The Outcome
Within four months of launching, Replicant scaled to handle all inbound calls and successfully resolved or routed requests for over 90% of calls. Replicant eliminated wait times, reduced agent handle times, and achieved an 88% CSAT score.

“Replicant offers a truly intelligent thinking machine that allows our company to remove the “busy work” type calls from our team members and open them up for true problem solving and building customer relationships.” – Manager @ Leading DTC Telehealth Company

Learn more about Replicant’s success with some of the world’s most innovative DTC brands. Schedule a demo to see how Replicant can help transform your customer service and contact center today.  

The post DTC Brands Drive CX With Contact Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

Think solutions like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), standalone chatbots, and agent assist technology. While these strategies have helped deflect callers, or enabled agents to resolve issues faster, they’re no longer enough for today’s environment.

In the modern customer service climate, frustrating and disjointed customer experiences result in business losses. And deflection-oriented solutions still require agents to resolve a high volume of repetitive requests, while contact centers face rising costs and customers are left on hold.

Persistent hiring challenges and unpredictable call volumes have shown that contact centers need true relief. Here’s how AI-powered Contact Center Automation delivers just that across every channel:

Resolve, don’t deflect, requests – wherever customers are

To optimize a contact center in today’s climate, leaders require solutions that can fully resolve common, high-volume customer requests. They need strategies that enable agents to focus on more engaging work, and provide automated customer experiences that are consistent across each channel.

With Replicant, contact centers can now automate customer issues across voice, messaging, and other digital channels with a single, integrated conversation engine. Customers get a premium experience, with seamless channel switching across every touchpoint. Contact center leaders get visibility into omnichannel transcripts in one dashboard. And agents get seamless handoffs for sensitive issues without losing customer context.

Contact Center Automation doesn’t force customers to learn a new set of practices for each channel – it simply listens, collects and resolves requests end-to-end over any channel. 

Speak to customers naturally across channels

What does it mean to power your voice and messaging channels with a single conversation engine? It starts with a shared intent library that deploys and scales conversational AI faster across languages and channels for every conversation flow. In other words, it means you can fully automate your most common customer requests with the most natural human-to-machine conversations ever crafted.

Replicant has automated millions of customer requests for some of the world’s most beloved brands, and eliminated the need for contact centers to use disparate vendors for each channel. The Thinking Machine reduces latency to under one second between turns in a conversation, and does so with an over 96% inference accuracy. 

Give customers a consistent experience

Replicant gives contact centers the ability to automate issues naturally when and where their customers need it most with seamless channel switching across voice, messaging, and other digital channels. Contact Center Automation can share conversational context across channels, so that customers don’t need to repeat themselves when they switch from SMS, to voice, or vice versa.

With features like customizable FlexForms, it’s easy to switch from voice to SMS and collect information faster and more privately. And with channel-specific NLU, customers get accuracy for understanding communication like emojis and misspellings in text.

Visualize conversations in a single dashboard

Contact center managers don’t just need holistic automation options – they need a solution for analyzing data from different channels. Replicant’s omnichannel features allow leaders to view conversation transcripts for every customer interaction, across all channels, in a single dashboard.

With every conversation, the Thinking Machine automatically generates transcripts and makes them available for live monitoring within a single dashboard. Managers can quickly find actionable insights into omnichannel conversations with advanced analytics, and take action to optimize customer experiences without searching through multiple data sources.  

Handoff escalations seamlessly to live agents

Contact Center Automation and omnichannel experiences are only as good as their ability to relieve agents from repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Replicant integrates seamlessly with live agent platforms to handoff complex issues that require human empathy without losing customer context.

This benefits both agents and customers: agents get full context into every escalation using their existing platforms, no matter the channel, and customers receive a unified experience. And with API integrations to all existing data systems, Replicant can leverage customer data stores for a personalized experience across channels.

Get started with Contact Center Automation
As a leader in Contact Center Automation, Replicant helps companies automate their most common customer service calls while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. Replicant’s AI platform allows consumers to engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues, without the wait, 24/7. Replicant scales up or down instantly, can be implemented in weeks and handles millions of customer support interactions a month.

Learn how Contact Center Automation is helping customer service leaders unify their channels.

The post Adding Automation to Every Customer Service Channel appeared first on Replicant.

Contact Center Automation is ushering in a new era of customer service. It is a quickly emerging category that leverages AI-powered technology to automate tier-1 customer service conversations, while simultaneously empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges.

Instead of displacing agents or deflecting customers, Contact Center Automation uses a hybrid approach to resolve as many customer service requests as needed through automation, by whatever channel the customer prefers. In doing so, agent time is maximized, customers are offered self-service options they actually enjoy using, and contact centers receive never-before-seen efficiency.

Here’s how Contact Center Automation benefits each party:

Customer Benefits

What drives spikes in contact center demand? Traditionally, isolated events like seasonality, holidays, service outages, and product recalls result in outsized customer requests. But when we look at the data of the last two years, we see a new culture-based customer service driver entering the fray. 

Consumers have grown accustomed to a new marketplace where meals are delivered at the touch of a finger and refunds are issued with no questions asked. They expect tremendous service from every brand they interact with and they’ll quickly hit “unsubscribe” until they get it.

At the heart of contact center automation is the new customer persona. Customers win with automation because it eliminates the causes that put “A Nation on Hold” in 2021. Wait times become a thing of the past no matter what channel customers choose, including the phone.

Simple requests are resolved immediately by intelligent machines that can achieve the same – or better – customer satisfaction scores as human agents. Meanwhile, agents become more accessible for customers who truly need human assistance. 

1. 24/7 Service Contact Center Automation is always on, so customers can get their issues resolved whenever it’s most convenient.
2. First Contact Resolution Full resolution to unlimited tier-1 requests, with no wait times and 30-50% faster average handle times than agents.
3. Consistent Experiences A branded, personalized experience that can start in any channel, and move seamlessly between several.
4. Faster Escalations Full conversation summaries, logged and generated in real-time, eliminate the need for customers to repeat their problem multiple times if transferred to an agent.
5. Happier Agent Interactions Escalated calls are met with live agents who aren’t bogged down by repetitive calls and instead focused on providing high-touch service.

Agent Benefits

The pandemic led customer service agents to rethink what they want out of a job. It drove a mass exodus of talent away from contact centers as they sought more engaging work and less monotony. 

Whereas agent assist solutions and support tools help service reps execute their roles more efficiently, contact center automation transforms their job responsibilities entirely by automating tier-1 requests. It represents the next generation of customer service operations where human time is maximized to focus on conversations that require high empathy and creativity. 

With automation, agents rely on machines to fully resolve high-volume requests like order updates and account authentication, as well as back-office and after-call work like data entry and conversation analysis. 

Contact center automation opens the door for customer service agents to learn new skills, earn higher wages, and find long-term engagement in their jobs. 

1. Increased Engagement Less time spent on monotonous requests, more time spent on enriching customer conversations that require creativity, empathy, and human connection.
2. Intelligent Routing Highly effective conversational AI results in more accurate virtual routing and delivers happier customers to agents during escalations.
3. Contextual Pass-off Transcripts, call intelligence, and automatically generated summaries at agents’ fingertips for even less time spent on repetitive tasks.
4. Better Data More accurate, actionable customer information that requires zero manual data entry and zero after-call work.
5. Improved Productivity Happier agents who value their responsibilities more and have the bandwidth to pursue professional development.

Contact Center Benefits

Unpredictability in the contact center isn’t going anywhere, and will likely increase further.

There’s no better way to address it – not agent assist tools, not expanded self-service resources, not Business Process Outsourcing – than to automate every single inbound or outbound tier-1 customer interaction, 24/7/365, at unlimited scale.

Contact center automation solutions can be deployed and answering phone calls and chat messages in weeks with integrations into virtually any CMS, CCaaS, or telephony system. Once implemented, it can provide accurate data and intelligent insights into what additional call flows it can automate. 

Contact centers essentially get a cost-effective, infinite supply of 5-star agents for tier-1 customer requests. Downstream, they can slash training and hiring costs, promise greater productivity and engagement to their agents, and focus on true long-term agent retention. 

And for the next decade-plus, as data becomes the ultimate resource, contact centers can lean on a library of auto-transcribed customer interactions that help surface insights and improve their automation via machine learning.

It is a complete transformation wherein customers, agents, and operations receive permanent relief to the demand, labor, and forecasting challenges long associated with contact centers. 

1. Lower Costs Short and long-term ROI that can save millions of dollars while improving customer retention rates and upselling/cross-selling opportunities, and reducing hiring and training costs.
2. Unlimited Scale A true first line of defense for contact centers that provides an unlimited capacity and fail-safe redundancies to guard against spikes and outages.
3. Consistent Branding Automated engagement across both traditional and emerging channels that offers a consistent, personalized experience for your brand.
4. Immediate WFM Reliable staffing solutions for contact centers who struggle with temporary hiring, seasonal hiring, and expensive BPOs.
5. Actionable Analytics Advanced analytics delivered in simple dashboards that include customer engagement metrics and actionable insights.

The post 15 Biggest Benefits of Contact Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

Picture contact centers as a house. They must be maintained, adapt to their users, and, every so often, undergo some remodeling. For years, contact centers have been trying to accomplish all of these tasks by implementing automation to save customers time and modernize experiences. But up until now, they’ve had to lay a foundation brick by brick, and channel-by-channel. 

Unfortunately, contact centers provide a service that can’t be shut down for construction – they must remain open 24/7, no matter what’s being built or replaced. This means that an ad-hoc approach to automation – piecing together standalone solutions offered by several disparate vendors – often results in customers receiving disjointed experiences.

Where they may expect one process over the phone – say, stating their zip code to verify their identity – they may find an entirely different process over text, like having to hunt down an account number they’ve never used just to receive service. Customers have gotten used to hearing “please listen closely as our menu options have changed” for years on end. 

For contact centers, laying the foundation for an automation strategy has created a never-ending game of cat and mouse, where managers are constantly evaluating separate vendors and taking on expensive, time-consuming projects in an attempt to automate common customer service requests across each channel. In the end, they only see marginal productivity gains, if any. 

The pitfalls of using disparate automation vendors can disrupt everything – from customer experiences to years of technology roadmapping. Here’s how:

Problem #1: Customers get frustrated

Customers deal with hundreds of different contact centers every year. Within a single brand, however, they expect a consistent experience that doesn’t waver in its usability. When they don’t receive it, they’re quick to question the value of a brand, and the stats show it.

• 49% of consumers, on average, use three to five different communication channels to contact customer service. (Microsoft Dynamics 365, 2020) Source
• 89% of customers are retained by companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement. (Invesp, 2019) 
• 75% of consumers look forward to a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels–social media, mobile, online, in-person, or through the phone. 73% will likely change brands if they don’t get it. (Salesforce) Source

READ: Omnichannel Contact Center Automation Makes it Easier Then Ever to Transform Customer Service

Problem #2: Chatbots are merely familiar

For the last few years, contact centers have had dozens of vendors to choose from when it comes to chatbots, but none for voice solutions that’s truly been reliable and enhanced the customer experience. On the contrary, Replicant focused on building Contact Center Automation that’s purpose-built for voice first to address the fact that while 76% of customers prefer placing a phone call to contact customer service, it remains the most frustrating automated customer experience out of all the channels. 

Over the past few years, we have perfected our AI platform to offer the most natural human-to-machine  conversations ever crafted. In the last few years alone, Replicant’s Thinking Machine has automated over 30 million calls for some of the world’s largest and most beloved brands.

Now, the same conversation engine that finally cracked the code on voice powers a full Contact Center Automation platform – one that can resolve issues across voice, messaging, and other digital channels. This gives contact centers the brand-new ability to partner with a solution that finally prioritizes Voice. Leaders can now rely on a single, integrated solution to automate across all channels in any language regardless if it’s voice or messaging.

Problem #3: Data gets lost 

One of the most damaging impacts of a standalone, channel-by-channel automation strategy is the risk of data loss. Without a unified protocol for retrieving and viewing data, contact centers are unable to understand their total customer experience by means of data. Replicant allows contact center managers to visualize conversations across channels in a single dashboard. They can view conversation transcripts for every customer interaction, across all channels in an end-to-end dashboard that lets contact center managers monitor conversations, analyze insights from conversation data, and take action immediately by updating conversation scripts to create an optimal customer experience.

READ: Introducing Omnichannel Contact Center Automation

Problem #4: Timelines are off sync 

Standalone, channel-by-channel automation strategies can take years, without ever fully being implemented or showing a return on investment. This creates enormous risk when partnering with a new vendor, as project timelines get reshuffled as new market challenges arise, like that of the past two years with the pandemic and great resignation. It can also destabilize siloed channels, as customers deal with new rollouts and more software bugs. With Replicant, contact centers can scale the best of conversational design across every conversation flow with Replicant Powers – pre-built components that make it easy to design optimal conversations without heavy development. They can also seamlessly integrate with existing agent workflows and contact center and CRM software to automatically handle escalations, create cases, log summary notes, and resolve tickets.

Problem #5: Agents suffer 

Piecemeal automation approaches lead to tool fragmentation for agents requiring them to learn new, disjointed technologies and high operational overhead for call center and IT teams who bring the implementations together. But more importantly, they don’t solve agents’ biggest problem: there’s not enough of them to answer every call, chat and text. With Contact Center Automation, agents team up with a solution that can fully resolve repetitive, tier 1 requests that make up the bulk of their workload. 

Conclusion

It’s easy to see why so many contact centers have struggled to achieve true digital transformation with automation at the forefront given the lack of options they’ve had access to. With Replicant, contact centers can finally break out of the insurmountable challenge that is piecemeal, standalone automation. 

Replicant’s AI platform allows consumers to engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues. It provides an out-of-the-box foundation that scales up or down instantly, can be implemented in weeks and handles millions of customer support interactions a month. 

Most importantly, it safeguards against channel-by-channel automation deployments that can end up costing businesses millions of dollars. 

With Replicant, contact centers finally have the ability to holistically transform their customer service experience, while avoiding the common pitfalls of standalone, disparate automation solutions:

Read the full press release or download the guide for more information on our omnichannel features.

The post Why Siloed Automation Strategies Fail appeared first on Replicant.

Today’s customers put up with a lot. As more support has moved away from brick-and-mortar settings and into digital environments, customers have had to learn how to get what they need in the most efficient way possible when it comes to customer service.

Oftentimes, this means navigating disjointed channels and antiquated technology to get a resolution only to have to re-route to an agent. Customers have grown accustomed to being passed from the automated menus of IVRs, to the self-service sections of websites, to threads of timed out messaging sessions.

According to Microsoft, 49% of consumers, on average, use three to five different communication channels to contact customer service (Source). But all this complexity has come at a cost. 

While 75% of consumers look forward to a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels–social media, mobile, online, in-person, or through the phone–73% will likely change brands if they don’t get it (Source).

In order to achieve true omnichannel excellence while relieving agents from spikes in demand, contact centers need consistent automation tools. Replicant’s Contact Center Automation solution finally delivers the kind of powerful simplicity that allows contact centers to unify their automation experience across every channel. For customers, it’s making service more intuitive than ever before, by evolving from siloed technologies to a comprehensive one:

Standalone Automation Solutions vs. Omnichannel Contact Center Automation 

Why Contact Centers Should Care

Gartner predicts that through 2022, 50% of large organizations will fail to unify engagement channels, resulting in continued disjointed and siloed customer experience that lacks context and one or more of the following customer expectations:

• Channel consistency: Customers want their interactions handled effectively, regardless of the channel they choose.
• Service continuity: Customers want their service interactions to be consistent and continuous, even if they switch channels midstream, or start, stop and restart a request.
• Customer recognition: Customers expect service reps to have easy access to basic information about them, but also want adequate security around their accounts.
• Relationship history: Customers expect service reps to recognize them, know their current relationship, purchases and acknowledge past interactions, length of relationship and loyalty.
  

With Replicant’s omnichannel Contact Center Automation, leaders can avoid the limitations of narrow solutions like chatbots and IVRs. They can finally promise fewer escalations and more user-friendly customer experiences and bring relief to agents amid hiring shortages and rising spikes in contact volumes.

Download the guide for more information on our omnichannel features.

The post Consistency: The Key to Omnichannel Customer Service appeared first on Replicant.

Customers expect great service no matter what their request is, or how they reach out.

According to Salesforce, 75% of consumers look forward to a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels – social media, mobile, online, in-person, or through the phone. 73% will likely change brands if they don’t get it.

For contact centers who are exploring automation solutions, this means omnichannel capabilities and consistent experiences must be leading priorities for their short and long-term customer service strategies. With Replicant, contact center leaders can leverage a single conversation engine to resolve customer issues across every channel without compromising the customer or agent experience. 

This means they can deploy and scale automation faster, while giving their customers a consistent experience, across languages and channels. For contact centers who have spent years using disparate vendors to automate each standalone channel, this is significant. 

How this benefits contact centers

Resolve customer issues naturally across channels

Power your voice and messaging channels with a single conversation engine that leverages a shared intent library to deploy and scale conversational AI faster across languages and channels for every conversation flow. In other words, start fully automating your most common customer service requests, with a single vendor. 

Give customers a consistent experience across channels

With Replicant, contact centers can resolve issues naturally when and where your customers need it most with seamless channel switching across voice, messaging, and other digital channels. Contact Center Automation can share conversational context across channels, so that customers don’t need to repeat themselves when they switch from SMS, to voice, or vice versa. Contact centers can use customizable FlexForms to easily switch from voice to SMS and collect information faster. And with channel-specific NLU, customers get accuracy for understanding communication like emojis and misspellings in text.

Visualize conversations across channels in a single dashboard 

Contact center managers don’t just need holistic automation options – they need a solution for disparate data sources per channel. Replicant omnichannel automation allows leaders to view conversation transcripts for every customer interaction, across all channels, in a single dashboard. With every conversation, our Thinking Machine automatically generates transcripts and makes them available for live monitoring within a single dashboard. Managers can quickly find actionable insights into omnichannel conversations with advanced analytics, and take action to optimize customer experiences.  

Handoff escalations seamlessly to live agents 

Omnichannel automation is only as good as its ability to relieve agents from repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Replicant integrates seamlessly with live agent platforms to handoff complex issues that require human empathy without losing customer context. This benefits both agents and customers: agents get full context into every escalation using their existing platforms, no matter the channel, and customers receive a unified experience. And with API integrations to all existing data systems, Replicant can leverage customer data stores for a personalized experience across channels.

Experience Contact Center Automation

As a leader in Contact Center Automation, Replicant helps companies automate their most common customer service calls while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. 

Our omnichannel platform allows consumers to engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues. Contact centers can scale up or down instantly and handle millions of customer support interactions a month. Replicant can be implemented in weeks and seamlessly integrates with existing agent workflows and contact center and CRM software to automatically escalate issues, create cases, log summary notes, and resolve tickets. 

Read the full press release or download the guide for more information on our omnichannel features.

The post Talk, Text or Type: Transform Your Contact Center With Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

When people think of Artificial Intelligence and automation, one of the first questions they ask is ‘will this replace human jobs?’

Contact centers are no different. And in an era where it’s harder than ever to hire and retain great agents, it’s a valid question. 

But Contact Center Automation was built for this exact reason: agents have never been more stressed and disenchanted with their jobs. 96% feel acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day. 

However, there’s still plenty of room for hesitation when it comes to automation. Here are some of the most common myths about Contact Center Automation and agents, and how Replicant is proving them untrue. 

Myth #1: Automation will replace human agents

As mentioned above – today’s contact center agents have far too much on their plate. The Great Resignation has seen talented agents leave to seek more engaging and higher paying work. Meanwhile, those who are still serving customers have been asked to pick up the slack in order to keep wait times at a minimum. But their workloads are unsustainable, and customers are waiting historically long times to speak with an agent. With Contact Center Automation, Replicant’s Thinking Machine offloads repetitive, tier 1 requests like order updates and account maintenance from agents, so they can focus more on engaging customer interactions. 

And when agents are more engaged, everyone wins. Not only agents and employers, but customers too. McKinsey & Company found engaged and satisfied call center employees are:

• 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year
• 16x more likely to refer friends to their company
• 3.3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues

Myth #2: Automation relieves contact centers, not agents

While it’s true that certain kinds of automation only offer marginal process improvements for things like data entry and ticket creation, Contact Center Automation does much more.

Replicant resolves common tier 1 requests, from question to answer, within a single interaction. Using conversational AI, it allows customers to talk, type, or text as they would with an agent, providing an automation experience that they actually want to use.

In doing so, Contact Center Automation transforms what automation can mean in customer service. By serving customers more fully and decreasing the amount of customers in queue, Replicant’s Thinking Machine provides true relief to agents. It’s why agents love Replicant: the Thinking Machine acts as a partner to customer service representatives by helping them solve requests – not simply offering tools that encourage them to take on even more requests. 

Myth #3: Automation leads to more escalations

Automation is not new. In fact, customers have been dealing with it for years in the form of Interactive Voice Response menus (IVR) and rudimentary chatbots. These traditional forms of automation have given the term “automation” a reputation of customer frustration. Think of how many times you’ve been told “Listen closely, our menu options have changed,” or “Sorry, can you repeat that?”

But Contact Center Automation and the conversational AI that powers it are purpose-built for customer service. Because of this, Replicant’s Thinking Machine is able to create customer experiences that significantly decrease escalations. It does not aim to deflect customers to websites for self-service, or prevent customers from speaking with an agent. Instead, it aims to resolve every tier 1 request that it was designed to tackle, and does so with an over 85% success rate, making more agents available for customers who truly need them. 

Myth #4: Wages and agents won’t grow

One of the biggest concerns around automation isn’t just that it will replace agent jobs, but will deprioritize them as managers focus investing in technology over people. 

But Contact Center Automation is not a zero sum technology. It is designed to deploy in weeks, and quickly begin tackling thousands of high-volume requests across every channel – a stark departure from the months-to-years-long cycles contact centers are used to when implementing a new technology. By prioritizing simplicity over complexity, Replicant ensures that contact centers won’t lose focus from their core objective of serving customers and empowering agents. 

And while wages are already rising to attract more talented contact center agents, automation aims to provide agents a greater capacity to earn certifications and develop professionally as they focus on handling more sensitive and complex customer issues. 

Learn more about the benefits of Contact Center Automation by downloading the complete guide.

The post Myth: Automation is Bad for Customer Service Agents. Here’s Why. appeared first on Replicant.

A 2021 McKinsey survey indicated that AI adoption is experiencing a rapid rise, with 56% of all respondents reporting AI solutions in at least one function last year, up from 50% in 2020. The second-most common application of AI in 2021? Contact Center Automation.

Contact centers have traditionally had narrow options of software tools available, forcing them to patch together disjointed systems that never truly satisfy customers and relieve agents.

Contact Center Automation has changed that, however, with a unified, omnichannel platform that uses conversational AI to fully resolve hundreds of the most common customer service requests. As Contact Center Automation continues to earn widespread adoption, learning how to evaluate a solution will be critical

Here’s what to look for:

Core Features of Contact Center Automation

Contact Center Automation leverages a suite of technologies that are tailored to customer service and designed specifically for contact center use cases.

While individual Contact Center Automation solutions may take varied approaches to underlying components like conversational AI, integrations, multi-channel support, and analytics, a comprehensive solution should have a number a few core pillars: 

Natural Conversations. A Natural Language Understanding (NLU) brain that can quickly and accurately comprehend and converse in natural language to resolve customer issues in any language.

Omnichannel Support. Multichannel support for voice, SMS, VIVR, webchat, social, email, in-app, and business messaging to resolve customer issues anywhere with seamless context switching.

Conversation Design. A user-friendly conversation design studio to design, deploy, and update autonomous conversation scripts across use-cases with pre-built conversation components.

Conversation Analytics. Out-of-the-box, customizable analytics that provide insights into conversation performance, A/B testing outcomes, and KPIs like call volume, average handle time, and trending support issues.

Conversation Interface. Full visibility into conversation transcripts for reviewing, monitoring, and searching live and past conversations; auto-tagged metrics including disposition, sentiment, and timestamps.

Agent Collaboration. Built-in workflow capabilities including smart agent handoff, automated after-call work, intelligent routing, and agent assist for increased productivity and hybrid-working models.

Comprehensive Integrations. Out-of-the-box platform-agnostic integrations to deploy autonomous conversations across existing contact center, CRM, and internal system workflows

Secure Infrastructure. Scalable and redundant infrastructure that can handle millions of autonomous conversations concurrently with enterprise-grade security that is SOCII, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI compliant.

Why they matter

As a unified solution, Contact Center Automation is a sum of its parts. Without strong horizontal features, the ability of the platform to effectively serve and scale with customers is hampered.

Without artfully crafted conversations, customers will get frustrated. Without omnichannel support, customer experiences will be disjointed. Without a clear interface and strong pass-off tools, agents are left disadvantaged. And without a strong infrastructure and out-of-the-box integrations, it may take months to years to fully deploy a solution.

Learn more about how Contact Center Automation differs from traditional solutions and what a roadmap to automation looks like.

Or, download the comprehensive guide to learn everything you need to know about Contact Center Automation.

The post 8 Key Features: How to Identify Contact Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

Companies often take a step-by-step approach to unlocking the transformative benefits of Contact Center Automation.

Thankfully, comprehensive Contact Center Automation solutions come 80% ready to deploy out-of-the-box meaning the path to full implementation can happen in just weeks. From there, contact centers can scale their solution to begin handling millions of live customer conversations in just weeks. 

Contact Center Automation allows contact centers to think critically about their customer patterns and maximum ROI opportunities, rather than focusing on the intricacies of building a solution in-house – a process that can take months to years to accomplish, and often never is completed.  

Long term, it gives organizations a whole new way to treat contact centers. They will no longer be a cost center but instead shift to centers of excellence able to gain new insights on the customer and their priorities. Ultimately contact centers are able to illuminate gaps in other areas of their business with Contact Center Automation, resulting in a 360-degree view of the customer and operating model at large. 

Here’s a high-level roadmap for getting started:

Pre-Implementation

Identify Use Cases
Contact Center Automation is not an all-or-nothing solution. Many contact centers deploy the solution in one-to-few use cases to start, like caller authentication or account management. Identify automation opportunities with use cases that are one or more of the following: high volume, often uncontained by IVR, prone to spikes, low-emotion, low-to-mid complexity.

Calculate Expected ROI
Partner with a solution provider onin a thorough discovery and documentation of metrics and goals to determine an accurate ROI model. Leverage existing customer data to recommend future use cases and build a business case for deployment. This is best achieved alongside an experienced partner with case studies for forecasting results against KPIs and initial costs.

Perform Technology Assessment
Bring together IT, CCaaS, and telephony stakeholders to generate a comprehensive assessment of your technology stack. Goals at this stage include aligning integrations, connecting with accurate data systems, and complying with your security and privacy standards.

Conversation Design
Conversation design defines the structure of communication, both functionally and technically, at all possible turns between a human and machine. This includes words said, situations, contexts, responses, entities, prompts, and more. Work with your partner to ensure every conversation is designed to resolve customer issues quickly and naturally over every channel.

Go-Live and Testing
Once deployed, Contact Center Automation can begin resolving customer conversations with minimal training. At this stage, your solution partner should work with you to test conversations in a low-code conversational design studio. The more conversations automated, the smarter the technology will get as it begins to gather data. 

Post-implementation:

Measure Results
Identify the rate at which your chosen use cases are fully automated versus escalated to an agent. By starting with the percentage of issues that are automated and thus saving customer and agent time, you’ll begin realizing your ROI and building a business case for further automation.

Measure Performance
Contact Center Automation collects CSAT in real-time for every conversation, as well as granular data based on conversation transcripts. Map customer dispositions to automation outcomes and A/B test scripts to ensure constant improvement.

Start Scaling
Contact Center Automation scales to handle millions of autonomous calls concurrently. Use data-based improvement opportunities to offload more customer requests. As you automate more use cases and create efficiencies in your service flow, your ROI compounds while agents and customers thrive. 

Ready for a deeper look into getting started with Contact Center Automation? Download the guide for more.

The post The 5-Minute Roadmap to Contact Center Automation appeared first on Replicant.

Contact centers represent an extremely large market with several important needs. Traditionally, contact center solutions have aimed to solve small pieces of the broader customer service challenges outlined above. 

Contact Center Automation offers a logical solution that eliminates the need for buyers to take on multiple vendors to solve individual challenges. So what makes contact center automation different from other solutions?

• Not a “rip and replace” solution. Contact Center Automation solutions are designed to be immediately impactful, regardless of a contact center’s current technology stack. 
• Not an IVR. Contact Center Automation uses conversational AI to allow customers to speak naturally, resolve multiple issues at once, and never be unwillingly deflected.
• Not an agent assistant tool. Contact Center Automation’s core value comes from its ability to fully automate tier-1 requests – not help agents resolve more of them faster.  
• Not a rigid plug-in. Contact Center Automation is customizable to any contact center model. It can sit in front of, behind, or completely replace an IVR and automate any number of use cases.
• Not a CCaaS replacement. Contact Center Automation integrates into every existing CCaaS and UCaaS platform so agents can keep using their everyday tools while automation takes care of tier-1 requests. 
• Not a chatbot. Contact Center Automation leverages a single AI brain to facilitate natural conversations across all channels, including voice, chat and SMS. Customers can seamlessly switch channels with context and receive resolution every time.

What are the benefits of Contact Center Automation?

A 2021 McKinsey survey indicated that AI adoption is experiencing a rapid rise, with 56% of all respondents reporting AI solutions in at least one function last year, up from 50% in 2020. 

The most popular AI use cases span a range of functional activities with Contact Center Automation ranking as the third most-common application in 2021. 

And, customers are more willing than ever to get resolutions through automation. According to the Replicant 2021 Contact Center Survey, 71% of customers would rather speak to a machine than endure 15 minutes on hold.

Contact centers have traditionally taken a step-by-step approach to automating their customer service channels. They’ve had to engage multiple vendors, take on time-intensive projects, and sometimes even hire teams of AI experts to build custom solutions.

Contact Center Automation offers a transformative solution to contact center challenges, where leaders can implement a single solution that instantly unlocks automation benefits across every channel.

Solutions come almost entirely ready to deploy out-of-the-box meaning the path to full implementation can happen with just  few weeks of customizing and integrating into whatever platforms you currently use. 

From there, contact centers can scale their solution to begin handling millions of live customer conversations, and collecting data from every channel in a single dashboard. 

A unified Contact Center Automation solution allows customer service leaders to think critically about their customer patterns and maximum ROI opportunities, rather than focusing on the intricacies of constantly evaluating and maintaining several solutions – from IVRs to chatbots.

Customers quickly notice when a brand has elevated their automation experiences from disjointed to best-in-class, allowing contact centers to focus on data, customer retention, and growth rather than acting as pure cost centers. 

Get everything you need to know about Contact Center Automation with our comprehensive guide.

The post How Contact Center Automation is Different From Other Solutions appeared first on Replicant.

Contact Center Automation is the new way customer service gets done. It is a quickly emerging category that uses technology to automate tier-1 customer service conversations while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. 

Rather than aiming to displace agents or deflect customers, Contact Center Automation uses a hybrid approach to resolve as many customer service requests as needed through automation, by whatever channel the customer prefers. By doing so, agent time is maximized on customer support conversations that require creativity and empathy. 

Contact Center Automation: Why Now?

Contact Center Automation provides a solution for contact centers to achieve their most important goals: satisfying customers, supporting agents, and reducing costs. 

This is especially important in today’s environment, where three major factors have made customer service harder than ever. 

1. The Great Resignation. The ongoing employee shortage has magnified a crisis that has been building in contact centers for years. As a pure cost center, the economics of contact centers have always been built on a delicate balance of having just enough agents on hand to service customers, without so many that costs skyrocket. Turnover in contact centers has spiked amid a greater labor shortage, resulting in unpredictable agent forecasting, long wait times and frustrated consumers.  
2. The Global Pandemic. According to the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times. Excess stress on agents impairs their ability to provide good service, while on the other hand, the pandemic has increased both customer demand and expectations.
3. Unpredictable External Forces. Catastrophic weather events, cybersecurity threats, supply chain disruptions and other unpredictable events create massive customer service challenges. Contact centers can’t scale up and down fast enough to meet customer demand in the face of these events. As a result, forecasting immediate and future staffing needs has become unreliable at best.

Core Features

Contact Center Automation leverages a suite of technologies that are tailored to customer service and designed specifically for contact center use cases.

While individual Contact Center Automation solutions may take varied approaches to features like conversational AI, integrations, multi-channel support, and analytics, a comprehensive solution should have a number a few core pillars: 

Natural Conversations
A Natural Language Understanding (NLU) brain that can quickly and accurately comprehend and converse in natural language to resolve customer issues in any language.

Omnichannel Support
Multichannel support for voice, SMS, VIVR, webchat, social, email, in-app, and business messaging to resolve customer issues anywhere with seamless context switching.

Conversation Design
A user-friendly conversation design studio to design, deploy, and update autonomous conversation scripts across use-cases with pre-built conversation components.

Conversation Analytics
Out-of-the-box, customizable analytics that provide insights into conversation performance, A/B testing outcomes, and KPIs like call volume, average handle time, and trending support issues.

Conversation Interface
Full visibility into conversation transcripts for reviewing, monitoring, and searching live and past conversations; auto-tagged metrics including disposition, sentiment, and timestamps.

Agent Collaboration
Built-in workflow capabilities including smart agent handoff, automated after-call work, intelligent routing, and agent assist for increased productivity and hybrid-working models.

Comprehensive Integrations
Out-of-the-box platform-agnostic integrations to deploy autonomous conversations across existing contact center, CRM, and internal system workflows

Secure Infrastructure
Scalable and redundant infrastructure that can handle millions of autonomous conversations concurrently with enterprise-grade security that is SOCII, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI compliant.

Current Applications

The flexibility and forecastable ROI of Contact Center Automation have made it an essential part of the greater digital transformation taking place in contact centers.

Findings from a 2021 McKinsey survey indicate that AI adoption is experiencing a rapid rise, with 56% of all respondents reporting AI solutions in at least one function last year, up from 50% in 2020. 

The most popular AI use cases span a range of functional activities with Contact Center Automation ranking as the third most-common application in 2021. And, customers are more willing than ever to get resolutions through automation. According to the Replicant 2021 Contact Center Survey, 71% of customers would rather speak to a machine than endure 15 minutes on hold.

What’s Next

The longer labor shortages persist, the more choices leaders in contact center operations and CX will have to approach the problem. 

Brands will need to think long-term to decide whether incremental improvements in internal communications, agent workflows, and customer self service options are enough to get them back to stability, or if true transformation is needed in order to increase their competitiveness in a customer-first world where agents are hard to come by. 

In either case, Contact Center Automation has the potential to usher in a new era of customer service. It represents the next generation of contact center solutions with state-of-the-art technology tailored to the glaring needs of the industry. For the first time, it brings true innovation to a department that has traditionally been neglected as a sunk cost. 

Brands who embrace Contact Center Automation first will be in the best position to capture the agents and customers who have long demanded it.

Try Replicant

If you are ready to automate your call center, reach out to Replicant today. Our team of experts has years of experience helping contact centers implement and integrate conversational AI platforms to improve their call center efficiency as well as customer and agent experience.

The post What is Contact Center Automation? appeared first on Replicant.

Inflation is applying pressure to nearly every business regardless of size, industry, or location. 

It’s affecting fuel prices, food costs, and nearly every step of the supply chain. For contact centers, it’s leading to lower application rates and contributing to higher turnover among agents as the labor pool seeks higher paying work. 

Customers, on the other hand, are expecting their dollar to go further.

As a result, brands are doing everything they can to keep agents in seats. Recently, Southwest announced pay raises are on the way for customer service representatives. 

After two years of pandemic-related challenges and unprecedented labor shortages, inflation is yet another wrench in contact centers’ plans to keep customers happy and employees engaged. 

It’s also another reason why Contact Center Automation has never been more needed. Contact Center Automation enables customer service departments to completely automate tier 1 support requests. 

Powered by conversational AI, it’s a state-of-the-art solution that provides human-to-machine interactions that customers actually want to talk to. 

It can execute an unlimited number of concurrent conversations and provide stellar, consistent experiences across every channel in any language.

When paired with the below strategies, it’s a failsafe solution for contact centers to improve their workforce management and empower their agents without sacrificing customer service. 

Agent Retention Is Crucial

Customer service agents have had a challenging two years. 96% feel acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day.

Thousands of agents have been a part of the ongoing Great Resignation – which has seen millions leave unengaging jobs after the pandemic led them to reevaluate what meaningful work is. 

Throw in inflation, and the risk of agents leaving to seek greater fulfillment only increases. 

Unlike piecemeal contact center solutions like IVRs and agent assist, Contact Center Automation completely offloads the most repetitive, monotonous requests from agents’ plates, while providing rich AI-driven tools that make agents better at their jobs. 

Contact centers using automation are able to free their agents to focus on more engaging conversations that require human creativity and empathy. 

Agents Must Add Skills

Automation has a cascading effect on agents. When tier 1 requests are completely automated, agents gain more time to focus on complex requests. This makes it all the more important they’re armed with the skills and resources to execute multifaceted support issues.

With less time spent on repetitive tasks and after-call work, contact centers should use automation as an opportunity to focus on professionally developing agents. 

Whether that means earning certifications or taking analytics courses, contact centers who place an emphasis on development give their agents greater fulfillment. They also add more opportunities for employees to earn higher wages while providing customers with improved service no matter how complicated their requests are.

Hiring Is Even More Competitive

As staff shortages persist, contact centers are faced with the reality that their biggest demand spikes will be met with longer wait times and more stressed out agents. Automation can help. Contact Center Automation acts as a first line of defense for contact centers.

It can take every call, text, or chat with zero wait times and begin collecting issues and resolving requests at first touch. Automation is available 24/7 and can scale up or down instantly according to your demand.

With Replicant, contact centers only play for the minutes where our Thinking Machine is online. When spikes happen and agents are stretched thin, or simply unhirable, automation provides contact centers with a plan that doesn’t tie service capacity to headcount. 

Customers Will Continue to Demand More

When costs rise, customers expect their dollar to stretch further. And that’s on top of recent trends indicating an increasingly cutthroat retention environment. According to Salesforce and Bain & Company, a customer is four times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related rather than price or product related.

For a brand to make up for one negative experience, it takes 12 positive customer experiences. The longtail cost? It costs 6-7 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer.

Customer experiences are the arena where brand loyalty is won or lost. A single day of long wait times, or an individual conversation with misunderstandings and a quick abandonment, are no longer an option. Contact Center Automation brings an unprecedented defense to customers’ most common issues with support, and ensures your brand is positioned to build trust – not lose it. 

ROI For Every Decision

On the other side of the coin is the bottom line of your contact center. Investments get even more heavily scrutinized in an inflationary environment. Purchased solutions must be forecastable, quick to deploy, and easy to capture a return on. 

More than anything, Contact Center Automation offers short and long-term ROI that can save millions of dollars while boosting customer retention rates and capitalizing on upselling/cross-selling opportunities, all while reducing hiring and training costs.

Contact Center Automation allows contact centers to think critically about their customer patterns and maximum ROI opportunities, rather than focusing on the intricacies of building a solution in-house – a process that can take months to years to accomplish, and often never is completed.  

Long term, it gives organizations a whole new way to treat contact centers. They will no longer be a cost center but instead shift to centers of excellence able to gain new insights on the customer and their priorities.

Ultimately contact centers are able to illuminate gaps in other areas of their business with Contact Center Automation, resulting in a 360-degree view of the customer and operating model at large.

The post What Inflation Means for Contact Centers appeared first on Replicant.

Customer service agents have never needed help more than they do now. 96% feel acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day.

That’s a big part of why Contact Center Automation has seen a rapid rise in adoption among customer service departments in the past few years. Contact Center Automation uses state-of-the-art conversational AI to completely automate tier 1 support conversations across every channel, with more efficacy than any solution before. 

It helps contact centers – who have been rocked by global labor shortages – provide stellar, no-wait service no matter how many requests they get, or agents they have on hand. 

But it can also help agents be better, and more engaged, at their jobs. 

Contact Center Automation provides unprecedented analytics that can help managers innovate quickly, improve efficiencies, and most importantly improve their existing agents. Here’s how:

Capture Accurate CSAT Reporting For Common Use Cases

Contact Center Automation collects a higher volume, and more accurate measurements, of customer satisfaction for every conversation. This means agents get a better view into what customers respond well to and what they don’t.

With Replicant, a single dashboard tracks customer satisfaction alongside full transcripts of every conversation over every channel. Agents can use the auto-tagged data to dig into turn-by-turn analysis of conversations and gain a greater understanding of why customers call. Trends in conversation results and CSAT for each conversation flow help to understand the best paths for positive outcomes. 

Gain Rich Context for Escalated Conversations

Contact Center Automation focuses on achieving resolutions, not vanity metrics like containment which doesn’t tell managers whether customers actually got to where they needed to go. The Thinking Machine can detect when customers are frustrated, or when it’s faced with a request it’s not intended to resolve. 

In these cases, the Thinking Machine focuses on getting customers where they need to go as efficiently as possible. We make sure that live agents who pick up a conversation are equipped with every piece of information, data, and context they need via an automated screen pop so that customers get the most seamless experience possible.

Surface Dispositions for Every Escalation

With Replicant, contact center leaders can automatically capture dispositions based on what customers are saying to understand the breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative conversation outcomes and identify areas for improvement by drilling into negative dispositions.

The Thinking Machine has automated millions of calls and chats, but they don’t always include requests that are able to take the “happy path.” Replicant surfaces sentiment analysis and for every turn and accurately auto-tags the transcripts it creates. From a single dashboard, agents can see what led to an escalation or what may have led to a zero-out. With this real-time data, agents don’t go into calls blind and don’t need to repeat questions a customer may have already answered.

Create Effortless Automation Roadmapping

Strengthened contact center data doesn’t just help agents today, it allows contact centers to surface new ways to help them in the future. 

In Replicant’s dashboard, support flows that are ripe for automation get surfaced automatically. If your contact center is experiencing heightened volumes for a particular tier 1 issue, or finding that escalations are occurring for an issue that can be automated, you’ll know about it. 

Contact center automation can start small with just one use case and scale periodically. Automating even simple requests like customer authentication and account updates will unveil new ways to offload repetitive tasks from stretched-thin agents. 

Maximize Live Agents’ Time

Contact Center Automation doesn’t aim to displace human agents. Rather, it takes a hybrid approach to team up with agents and divide and conquer support requests, while also automating back-office and after-call work. The Thinking Machine excels at taking care of repetitive and mundane work and letting human agents respond to calls that require more empathy and creativity.

For the agent, this means more of their time can be spent on high-value customer interactions that allow them to establish relationships with creativity and empathy. It also frees up time for upskilling, certifications, and professional development that can help them earn higher wages and find new ways to leverage automation data to improve efficiencies.

Contact Center Automation is transforming the way customer service gets done – from agent productivity to customer satisfaction. Learn more with our free guide.

The post How to Use Contact Center Data to Improve Agents appeared first on Replicant.

A few years ago, 76% of contact centers were planning to invest in artificial intelligence in the next two years. 

By now, many of them have begun their automation transformations, and even more have made plans to join the wave following the pandemic and ensuing Great Resignation.

And six months from now? Contact centers who haven’t moved to adopt an automation solution will likely be regretting it. That’s because first-movers in Contact Center Automation have a distinct advantage over their competitors – for a few key reasons. 

Contact Center Automation is an emerging category in which companies automate tier 1 customer service while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges. 

It helps augment customer service and allows brands to stand out among consumers by providing always-on, rapid service for everyday questions over any channel. 

It frees up agents to be more engaged and more available for customers who truly need human assistance. 

And, it allows contact centers to begin reaping the compounding benefits of automation faster than their competition.

Here’s why contact centers who start using automation now will benefit most, and why those who wait will be kicking themselves six months down the road:

Your Competition Is Already Automating

According to Harvard Business Review, 52% percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the Covid crisis. 86% say that AI became a “mainstream technology” at their company in 2021.

Contact centers who adopt automation are making a transformational decision. They’re not simply adding another tool that adds incremental efficiency gains to agent workflows, routing trees, or channel-specific interactions. 

They’re getting a rapidly deployable platform that completely offloads tier 1 requests from their agents and adds unprecedented analytics that allow managers to make smarter decisions. They’re able to completely eliminate wait times in an era where many brands are losing customers due to a nationwide agent shortage. 

According to TechTarget, customer sentiment ratings increased 57.3% among companies using AI in their customer experience initiatives.

Implementation Can Take Just Weeks

Replicant’s Contact Center Automation solution comes 80% ready to deploy right out of the box, because it’s purpose-built for customer service. This means that contact centers who begin implementing now don’t need to wait months to go live. They simply have to focus on customizing their solution for their brand’s support conversations. 

The only work needed to deploy Replicant’s Thinking Machine is integrating the solution into your systems and personalizing the solution for your business. A weeks-long deployment means that you can start seeing a return on your investment as soon as the Thinking Machine is taking calls. 

Agent Wellness Improves Instantly

Contact Center Automation can remove all repetitive, tier 1 requests from your representatives’ plates. This is an unprecedented value-add for a group of employees that is seen as one of the most stressed in the world. 

83% of agents in one study cited a lack of data and/or appropriate tech tools as the largest barrier to resolving customer issues. 96% feel acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day. 

Imagine you’re a contact center agent who has spent years taking wall-to-wall requests every day, with the majority of them being the same question over and over. All of a sudden, you’re completely liberated from these conversations and tasked with only focusing on engaging, creativity-driven requests. That’s the power of Contact Center Automation. 

Your Busy Season Becomes Manageable

Both the Great Resignation and pandemic-related spikes in call volumes have made forecasting staff requirements a difficult task. Throw in seasonality for industries like ecommerce, insurance, healthcare, etc., and planning for high demand becomes downright impossible. 

Traditional solutions like temporary employees and Business Process Outsourcing (BPOs) no longer deliver the value they used to. They’re expensive, come with long training tails, and often lead to scoping and cultural challenges.

Contact Center Automation helps managers plan for seasonality by providing a catch-all solution for repetitive use cases – order updates, requests for documents, account management – that make up the majority of inbound requests. 

Valuable Datasets Get Built Faster

Arguably the most important benefit of beginning automation sooner rather than later is the data you’ll begin to build. One reason for this is that automation solutions utilize conversational AI to power interactions. Conversational AI relies on continuous learning models that allow it to get better at conversing with every interaction it has. 

Another reason is that Contact Center Automation provides user-friendly insights to managers that surface new automation opportunities, unseen customer patterns, and KPIs for every call or chat it takes. Contact centers who are already accruing this data will be able to scale quicker and smarter than their competitors. 

Costs Are Never Out of Your Control

Replicant’s Contact Center Automation platform is elastic, meaning it can scale up infinitely, or be completely offline and cost you nothing while not in use. Contact centers with Replicant in place gain the peace of mind that no spike in requests or shortage of agents will hinder their ability to provide stellar service.

They also gain a forecastable ROI that builds a business case to automate further flows, or even replace their IVR as a whole. With every automated flow, ROI builds and contact centers essentially gain a greater pool of cost-effective, predictable tier 1 agents. 

Learn more about how Contact Center Automation is helping customers and contact centers adapt to the new normal by serving the customer, the agent, and the contact center with equal effectiveness.

The post Contact Center Automation: 6 Months From Now, You’ll Wish You Started Today  appeared first on Replicant.

Digital transformation was already well underway in contact centers before the onset of the pandemic in early 2020. 

But in the two years since, a lot has changed. The pandemic has lasted longer than anyone could have imagined. Its effects led to a “Great Resignation” of employees across every industry, distributed hard-to-manage workforces, and impossible-to-predict call volumes from demanding customers. 

What’s come out of it is an unsurprising race to adopt automation among contact centers. Contact Center Automation can completely offload repetitive, tier-1 requests from customer service agents by fully resolving them over any channel, 24/7. 

It’s a big reason why automation adoption is a chief priority of most contact centers. It’s cost effective, provides service on-par with or better than live agents, and can be deployed in weeks. Overall, it gives businesses a competitive edge in a market where brands must stand out to retain customers and earn loyal new ones.  

Here’s a holistic look at why AI and Contact Center Automation solutions are seeing rapid adoption by contact centers in 2022:

1. 52% percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the Covid crisis. 86% say that AI is becoming a “mainstream technology” at their company in 2021.

2. 72% of business leaders feel positive about the role that AI will play in the future. 

3. Most executives (74%) not only anticipate AI will deliver more efficient business processes, but also help to create new business models (55%) and enable the creation of new products and services (54%).

4. Technologies call centers plan to use in the future are lead by AI (56%) and robotics and process automation (33%).

5. 76% of contact centers are planning to invest in artificial intelligence in the next two years. 

6. “Call center employees worry that virtual assistants, chatbots, and AI will take over their jobs. That is a scenario that is not about to happen overnight, even if companies are already taking the automation route.” 

7. Benefits of Big Data Analytics in Customer Service:

• 59.0% Reduction in operational costs
• 59.9% Increase in productivity
• 36.2% Better decision-making

8. “CX leaders who have become overwhelmed managing short-staffed contact centers have accelerated plans to implement AI since the pandemic began.”

9. Customer sentiment ratings increased 57.3% among companies using AI in their customer experience initiatives.

10. AI will increase contact center productivity by 35% in the US alone by 2040. 

11. In 2021, 59.1% of all research participants planned to increase their AI spending by an average of 26.7%. 

12. Organizations trying to reduce operational costs in the contact center have been implementing real-time voice transcription.

Learn more about how Contact Center Automation is helping customers and contact centers adapt to the new normal.

The post The Rise of Contact Center Automation in 12 Stats appeared first on Replicant.

A report found that half of America’s customers spend 10-20 minutes per week – and up to 43 days over the course of their lifetime – waiting to speak to a customer service representative. 

While many analysts would have expected this number to decrease over the last half-decade based on technology improvements alone, customer service has only gotten worse. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times. Contact centers are struggling to hire enough agents fast enough to meet unpredictable spikes in call volumes.

To further complicate things, a majority of customers still prefer using the phone when contacting customer service. And despite the rise of digital channels like chat and SMS, they can still include long wait times when trying to speak to a live agent.

Many innovative contact centers have already taken action by implementing Contact Center Automation. Contact Center Automation leverages conversational AI to offload high-volume, tier-1 requests from their live agents and free them to connect with customers who need high-touch service. These contact centers are seeing reduced or no wait times as a result.

But the majority of contact centers are still using ineffective IVRs, costly BPOs, or chatbots that can’t truly automate tier-1 customer requests and come with their own customer frustration points. In other words, 43 days will continue to be the lifetime sacrifice for many customers stuck waiting to get their issues resolved. 

To put that into perspective, here are seven things you could accomplish in that time:

1. Watch every episode of “Friends”… ten times

With 236 total episodes averaging about 22 minutes each, it would take a person approximately 88 hours to watch every episode of Friends. With minimal breaks, that’s 10 binges-worth over 43 days.

2. Learn elementary-level Spanish

15 hours per week is an intensive study schedule for a student learning Spanish. If you’re highly motivated, you could realistically gain around 60 hours of Spanish instruction in one month. That’s the equivalent to one year of formal Spanish education and plenty of time to learn more than “where’s the library.” 

3. Pick up an instrument

There are approximately 1000 hours in 43 days, and according to Hub Guitar, it takes 625 hours of practice to move beyond “Basic” to “Beginner”-level guitar playing. That’s plenty of time to learn some of your favorite “hold music” tracks.

4. Train for and run a half marathon

It’s probably not recommended, but it is possible to “crash train” for a half-marathon in around a month.

5. Travel around the world

It would take about three months to travel around the world if you want to visit several destinations along the way. If you want to travel the world as fast as possible, a trip could be accomplished in about 40 days.

6. Go to the moon (and back) 7 times

Historically, most lunar missions have taken about three days to reach the moon, or six days for a quick round trip. 

7. Walk from San Diego to Maine

According to Google maps, a walking route from San Diego to Maine is about 3,100 miles, or roughly 1,000 hours. 

The alternative? Contact Center Automation could save your customers and agents enough time to simply get more done every day. Long wait times don’t just affect customers. They burn out agents, they risk data loss, and they lead to disrupted technology roadmaps.

The post 7 Things You Could Accomplish in the Time You’ll Spend Waiting for Customer Service appeared first on Replicant.

This month, we’ve taken a look at the ways in which the pandemic has changed customer behaviors, and how resulting challenges have pushed contact centers to accelerate their automation plans. 

But what’s missing is the perspective of the customer service representative. Arguably no job has been more affected by the events of the past two years than that of the contact center agent. 

After all, contact center agents already had one of the most high-stress, demanding jobs in existence prior to the pandemic. Once you mix in a hybrid work environment, rising call volumes, and workforce shortages in the industry, it’s easy to see why employees in customer service can use support from solutions like Contact Center Automation. 

Here are eight statistics that show how contact center agents have changed, and why their job has never been harder:

1️⃣ 69% of employees say they have been experiencing burnout symptoms while working from home. 

2️⃣ Despite the challenges of working from home, 81% of employed adults say they either don’t want to return to a traditional workplace or would prefer a hybrid schedule.

3️⃣ A record 4.5+ million people voluntarily left their jobs in November of last year,  up from 4.2 million in October.

4️⃣ 96% of agents feel acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day.

5️⃣ It costs $9,000 a year to keep a disengaged worker and between $25,000 and $100,000 to replace them. For a company of 10,000 employees with an average salary of $50,000 each, disengagement costs $60.3 million a year. 

7️⃣ Call center outsourcing vendors have disclosed that training class show rates are down to 40%-50%, some as low as 20%.

8️⃣ 66% of unemployed adults are seriously considering changing their field of work. One-third say they have already taken steps to do so.

9️⃣ 83% of agents cited a lack of data and/or appropriate tech tools as the largest barrier to resolving customer issues.

BONUS QUOTE: “Delivering a great employee experience will be the leading indicator of business success in 2022.” 

Learn more about how Contact Center Automation is helping customers and contact centers adapt to the new normal by serving the customer, the agent, and the contact center with equal effectiveness.

The post 8 Stats That Show How Customer Service Agents Have Changed appeared first on Replicant.

When done right, customer service can be your brand’s biggest differentiator. But for many of today’s contact centers, there’s simply too many other challenges in play to focus on standing out. 

That’s because modern customer service is built on a delicate balance of having just enough agents to service customers, without so many, that costs skyrocket. And recent challenges are persisting: high agent turnover, call volume spikes, and other unpredictable factors severely disrupt this balance, resulting in long wait times, frustrated customers, and overwhelmed agents.

But for contact centers adopting AI Contact Center Automation as a solution, the game has changed. As a pioneer in Contact Center Automation, Replicant helps companies automate tier-1 customer service conversations with equal or higher CSAT as live agents, while empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced challenges. 

With Replicant’s Thinking Machine, consumers can engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging, and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues. Replicant is not another plug-in or widget meant to make agents incrementally faster at performing tasks. It’s a transformative solution that completely changes how businesses look at their contact center.

Here’s what changes when a contact center uses Replicant. 

Before: Spikes in customer demand with long wait times and low agent availability

After: 24/7 automated tier-1 resolution, no wait times, and increased agent availability

Contact centers are experiencing unpredictability at every turn. Without automation, customers run into lengthy wait times when they need support most, and agents are stretched thin with one call after another. 

Contact Center Automation changes that. It completely automates high-volume, repetitive requests like order updates, appointment changes, and requests for information with zero wait times. Agents are freed to connect with customers who truly need it and given the breathing room to learn new skills and earn higher wages.

Before: Distributed workforces with solutions that don’t decrease agent workloads

After: Side-by-side collaboration that optimizes agents’ time 

Today, customer service agents bear as much – or more – of the burden of the contact center crisis as customers. They’re the ones stuck with more work, more demanding customers, and more juggling in a hybrid environment.

For these agents, most of today’s solutions don’t go far enough to help them. They can allow them to serve customers faster or perform less manual data entry, but they can’t actually augment their day-to-day tasks. Replicant’s solution can. It completely changes agent responsibilities, from taking repetitive calls from sun-up to sun-down to focusing on only a handful of important, high-value conversations and making their jobs more engaging. 

Before: Expensive solutions like outsourcing and answering services that drive higher costs

After: 55% average return in cost savings and rapid deployment in weeks, not months

Contact centers have plenty of traditional options to choose from when they want additional staff or incrementally better answering systems. But few, if any, can show true ROI that lowers costs and increases in value over time. 

With Replicant, contact centers get a solution that begins executing thousands of customer conversations in weeks. That’s because Replicant’s Contact Center Automation solution is purpose-built for customer service and 80% ready to deploy right out of the box. 

After a few short weeks of implementing integrations and customizing conversation scripts for your business, Replicant’s Thinking Machine begins returning massive value when compared to the cost and time of BPOs or deflection tools like IVRs. 

Before: Outdated planning models that lead to inaccurate agent forecasting

After: Elastic scale and unlimited capacity so contact centers are never stretched thin

Workforce Management (WFM) is the biggest challenge today’s contact centers face. How do you increase your labor pool in the face of record turnover rates? How do you predict how many representatives you’ll need when call volumes can spike at a moment’s notice?

Replicant renders those questions, and more, as completely unnecessary. That’s because it’s elastically scalable. Imagine having a reliable, unlimited source of five-star tier-1 agents who can resolve repetitive requests at any time of day or night. That’s the value Replicant delivers, and the key reason why contact centers who use Replicant are able to completely transform their priorities and WFM strategies. 

Before: Declining CSAT with higher average handle times and unpredictable customer experiences

After: Improved CSAT, error rate reduction, and half the average handle time of human agents

Contact Center Automation is only as good as its ability to delight customers and protect your brand. Many automation solutions are able to resolve tier-1 requests, but can’t do so without lengthy handle times and frustrating customer experiences. 

With Replicant, brands can rest assured that they’re receiving state-of-the-art conversation designs. Customers can state their requests using any language, dialect, or style of speech and expect the same accurate responses in one second or less, no matter the channel they use. Replicant regularly returns lower AHT’s and higher CSAT scores than those of human agents. 

Learn more about Replicant’s best-in-class conversational AI or how Contact Center Automation is helping customers and contact centers adapt to the new normal.

The post Contact Centers Before and After Deploying Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

Between the pandemic, the “Great Resignation,” and rising unpredictability in supply chains and customer demand, almost every aspect of running a contact center has been affected by the events of the past two years.

But the same can be said for customers. As the world has changed, the expectations of the modern consumer have, too. Brands who can offer frictionless experiences like 24/7 service and easy order management are succeeding, while those who are forced keep customers waiting or searching for answers on their own have seen downturns in customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

There isn’t a contact center leader left who isn’t acutely aware of these changes. But in order to create a customer service strategy built for the modern age, contact center leaders must first gain an accurate understanding of the “new” consumer. 

Here are 11 stats that reveal what matters most to the modern customer, and what happens when those needs aren’t met. 

$75 billion are lost by businesses annually due to poor customer service.

At least 72% of customers are likely to share their positive experiences with six other customers.

Nearly 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience. 

61% of customers would leave for a competitor after just one negative experience.

86% of buyers say they’re willing to pay more for a great customer experience. 

63% of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations, while 76% of B2B buyers expect the same thing.

72% of customers say that explaining their problems to multiple people is poor customer service.

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. 

Nearly three out of five consumers report that good customer service is key for them to feel loyalty toward a brand.

80% of customers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services. 

59% of customers believe that companies need to provide cutting-edge digital experiences to keep their business. 

BONUS: AI will increase contact center productivity by 35% in the US alone by 2040. 

Solutions like Replicant’s Contact Center Automation represent the next generation of customer service. Replicant takes a hybrid approach to contact center operations by using conversational AI to team up with agents and fully automate repetitive, tier-1 requests.

This means when a customer has a simple question, they get fast resolution at any time of day, over any channel. When they have a complex question, they’re connected to an engaged live agent quickly, and aren’t deflected or met with a representative who is stressed from non-stop inbound requests.  

Learn more about how Contact Center Automation is helping customers and contact centers adapt to the new normal.

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Many of the causes for today’s contact center crisis are sitting in plain sight: empty customer service seats, unpredictable spikes in call volumes, persisting pandemic-related challenges.

For the customer, this leads to understandable frustration. But for the contact center, the costs are innumerable, and they aren’t always obvious. 

As leaders in the industry focus on staffing and self-service initiatives in order to overcome workforce shortages, it’s important they also make time to address the long-term effects of recent challenges. 

Here are 5 of the hidden costs of the contact center crisis. 

Customer Loyalty

According to the national American Customer Satisfaction Index, CSAT continues to decline across all industries and customer service centers. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the national index slipped 0.5% to 73.3 (out of 100). This is the lowest level for the index since 2005. 

Contact centers have traditionally been viewed as cost centers, but when they’re unable to perform basic tasks for customers in a timely manner they can do more harm than good. On the flip side of this, contact centers who can quickly pivot their systems to provide automation for tier-1 requests get an instant leg up on their competition. Customers are less likely to cancel, unsubscribe, or tell others about poor customer experiences when they know they can reach a brand immediately, 24/7. 

Training Quality

According to ProcedureFlow, “COVID-19 has significantly and possibly permanently altered the way contact centers train their agents.” Over 73% of contact centers say their training protocols will continue to be remote even after the pandemic has settled down. 

Conversely, when contact centers use automation to resolve tier-1 requests without agent intervention they allow their agents to focus on training for only the most high-value customer interactions. The longer workforce challenges persist, the more turnover contact centers will experience. Contact Center Automation ensures managers get the most out of their training time, and don’t spend it on inefficient priorities that automation can handle. 

Staffing Costs

These days, when an IVR system repeats to a customer, “We are experiencing unusually high call volumes, all our representatives are busy,” they mean it. But the costs of staffing shortages go beyond just scheduling headaches and customer dissatisfaction. 

55% of contact centers spend 6-12 weeks training and onboarding new agents. Combined with with an average annual turnover rates of 30-45% in the space, the costs add up quickly. Replacing exiting workers costs one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. Assuming an average salary of $50,000 that replacement cost translates to between $25,000 and $100,000 per employee. 

Agent Wellness

96% of agents feel acute stress on a weekly basis — and significantly more say they’re stressed multiple times per week. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day (and a similar amount in other channels). This is the human cost of the contact center crisis.

Employees in every industry have had to sacrifice work-life balance as remote environments blur the lines between the two priorities. But for contact center agents, the stress is even greater. From a business perspective, it’s hard to expect your agents to provide delightful customer service when they themselves aren’t satisfied.

Stale Technology

Companies stuck with legacy technology will end up losing ground to their competitors if they don’t add automation to their roadmaps. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for AI in contact centers – estimated at $1.1 billion in the year 2020 – is projected to reach a revised size of $3.5 billion by 2026.

By the nature of Contact Center Automation, first-movers will have a significant advantage as the technology accrues data earlier and improves over time. Contact Center Automation will also help organizations alleviate staffing issues, retain more agents, and eliminate wait times as the technology resolves tier-1 issues and allows agents to focus on more engaging customer interactions.

The post The Hidden Costs of the Contact Center Crisis appeared first on Replicant.

Every contact center is different. But no matter the size, scope, or industry, every contact center has been affected by the sweeping changes our world has undergone over the past two years. Customers have new demands, brands have new challenges, and contact centers are being relied on to develop new strategies that satisfy both consumers and agents. Under this “perfect storm” of conditions, what does the future look like for leaders charged with overcoming the storm clouds and breathing new life into the contact center?

Short-Term Forecast

Contact centers are experiencing challenges from three major fronts. 

The Great Resignation. Contact center leaders can’t build their teams quickly enough to meet customer demand. The problem has affected BPOs and staffing agencies as well. Traditional strategies like seasonal hiring and temporary hiring are met with higher training costs and less engagement in workers. At the heart of this problem is the fact that employees simply no longer want to do repetitive, mundane work for hours on end. On the whole, this has led to exhorbitant wait times and frustrated customers.  

The Global Pandemic. According to the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times. A survey by Calabrio found that 96% of contact center agents feel acutely stressed at least once a week. Almost half cite ‘too many calls’ as their biggest challenge. They’re being asked to manage 7.2 more calls per day. Customer service representatives are bearing the brunt of the contact center crisis – they need relief quickly. Read more stats.

Unpredictable External Forces. Changing weather patterns, cybersecurity attacks, supply chain disruptions and other unpredictable events all lead to unforecastable customer service challenges. When spikes occur at a more common clip, contact centers can’t scale up and down fast enough to service the resulting customer demand. The accuracy of predicting staffing needs in both and long-term has become unreliable, leaving managers playing a costly guessing game.

Long-Term Forecast

Brighter days are on the horizon – and many contact centers are already seeing the sun. 

Automation for Tier-1 Conversations. Contact centers intent on climbing out of crisis mode are leveraging Contact Center Automation to offload high-volume requests from their live agents. Contact Center Automation uses conversational AI to carry out natural, lifelike conversations that resolve customer issues with zero queue times and none of the frustration included with legacy solutions like IVRs. Customers can use the channel of their choice, speak in the language of their choice, ask multiple questions at once, and never have to repeat themselves. 

Scale + Availability = Relief. Contact Center Automation solutions like Replicant are unlimitedly scalable and available 24/7. It can handle millions of conversations concurrently, and flex up or down based on a contact center’s real-time needs. Contact Center Automation slashes costs by essentially adding an unlimited virtual staff that achieves equal or better CSAT scores and lower AHTs than human agets. As an out-of-the box solution, Contact Center Automation can be customized, integrated and deployed into contact centers in just weeks. This offers immediate relief to staffing issues and unpredictable call volumes.

Happier Agents, Satisfied Customers. Customer service agents love Contact Center Automation because unlike other solutions, it doesn’t simply make them faster at solving tier-1 issues, it does it for them entirely. Contact Center Automation collaborates with human employees to automate repetitive conversations and allows agents to focus on more engaging work. It’s a first line of defense that can also intelligently escalate customers to agents with full summaries of notes. Customers no longer have to wait on hold before getting resolution, and agents can earn higher wages by using talents that automation doesn’t have, like empathy and creativity.

The post The Perfect Storm: Why Contact Centers are in Crisis (and How They’ll Recover) appeared first on Replicant.

Catastrophic weather events. Cybersecurity threats. Supply chain disruptions. Service outages. Modern-day forces have never been more prevalent and unpredictable. For contact centers, this creates massive customer service challenges. 

And that’s not to mention the biggest driver of call spikes over the last two years: the pandemic. According to the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times. 

From ecommerce to insurance to finance, every contact center in every industry has felt the strain. Contact centers simply can’t scale up and down fast enough to meet customer demand. 

As a result, forecasting immediate and future staffing needs has become unreliable at best. Contact centers must take a good hard look at the consequences of rising call volumes in their business in order to understand the potential solutions.

Agents get overwhelmed 

Excess stress on agents impairs their ability to provide good service, while on the other hand, the pandemic has increased both customer demand and expectations. These conditions have fueled the Great Resignation in contact centers, and made it harder than ever to retain talent.

What to do about it: Contact center automation acts as a first line of defense for tier-1 requests. Less time is spent on monotonous requests, and more time on enriching customer conversations that require creativity, empathy, and human connection.

Scheduling becomes a guessing game

It has become unfeasible to try and forecast staffing needs, let alone find enough agents to address sudden spikes in call volumes. For the customer, this means they can’t expect consistent wait times or predict how much time they’ll need to make a call.

What to do about it: Unlike seasonal hiring or BPOs, contact center automation provides  unlimited scale to contact centers at a fraction of the cost. Automation is like having an infinite supply of your best tier-1 agents, and is available 24/7, 365. 

Customers grow more frustrated

Unsurprisingly, when contact centers get overwhelmed customer satisfaction plummets. Strategies like self-service, deflection-oriented IVRs, and chatbots usually end up frustrating customers who just want to speak to an agent or ask a simple question. 

What to do about it: By automating more calls, agents are freed up to spend more time with customers who need it while automation quickly resolves simple requests. For the customer, this means they no longer have to wait on hold to start resolving any issue. 

Data gets lost

When contact centers are burdened with staffing challenges and unmanageable spikes in call volumes, data analysis suffers. Customers who are turned away by IVRs or long wait times become unaccounted for, and low CSAT calls get missed by managers focused on simply getting their phones answered.

What to do about it: Without an effective analytics solution, calls during high-volume periods can get locked in black boxes of data. Automation can take care of after-call work like transcribing and tagging, and make data-driven recommendations via a simple dashboard.

Automation gets kicked down the road

Another consequence contact centers experience on a macro level is the opportunity cost of remaining stagnant. The status quo of workforce management means managers must stay focused on increasing agent productivity, instead of transforming agents entirely by eliminating routine calls from their workloads.

What to do about it: Contact center automation can start small and scale as your organization needs it to. By automating even the most simple flows like customer authentication and account updates, contact centers begin the process of building customer data that can scale to further automation use cases. 

The post The Consequences of Rising Call Volumes (and What To Do About It) appeared first on Replicant.

As a result, workforce management (WFM) has never been more difficult. The available pool of qualified agents is shrinking and the risk of training new employees comes with the possibility they will quickly churn.  

As WFM challenges persist in 2022, most contact centers are accelerating their plans for automation – but knowing where to begin can be the hardest part. This checklist will help you navigate the contact center labor crisis and come out stronger than before. 

Download the checklist.

Utilize agent capacity wisely

High utilization rates can lead to burnout and further exacerbate turnover issues. Many organizations have seen this affect their most talented employees, as they’re often given the largest workloads. Create a culture that encourages breaks between conversations, and predictable shifts that minimize overtime. 

Plan for seasonality

Forecasting in today’s customer service climate is nearly impossible. But you probably have a sense of your organization’s “busy season.” Now is the time to prepare for it. Use your next high-volume cycle as a goalpost to have an automation solution in place for at least one use case to minimize the impact of call spikes on your live agents. 

Prepare for unpredictable demand

If you had asked yourself if you were prepared for the future in 2019, what would you have said? How would your answer be different today? Unpredictability is inherent to contact centers. Plan for it now by exploring technologies that can automate customer service requests to alleviate unpredictable spikes in volume, and begin to add them to your contact center automation strategy.

Collaborate with your agents

AI and automation solutions lead to obvious concerns from agents. When you evaluate solutions, focus on those that relieve agents by automating the requests they dislike. Communicate clearly the agent-side benefits of automation and get their input on which parts of their day-to-day responsibilities take up the most time to better serve them. 

Upskill your agents

One of the biggest benefits agents see from automation is greater career satisfaction. It’s never too early to start thinking about the upskill opportunities and development plans you will be able to offer agents once tier-1 automation is achieved, including certifications and downstream call analysis responsibilities.

Create a scheduling plan

These days, there are infinite factors that can make scheduling your contact center staff an impossible task. Forecast your call volumes, taking into account seasonality, and plan your staffing around projected spikes. Begin to also explore contact center automation solutions that can scale with call volumes 24/7 or act as overflow redundancy. 

Analyze why your customers contact support

Conversations can tell you a lot about your efficiency. Analyze your most common customer requests and identify gaps in how they’re addressed with contact center analytics. Trends like volume spikes and calls that commonly get stuck or misrouted  in your IVR are great candidates for automation to cut down on AHTs, abandonment, and misutilized agent time. 

Identify use cases that can be automated

It’s never too early to start identifying conversations that can be automated. Look for conversations that are low-emotion, low-to-mid complexity, and high-volume. Conversational AI-based automation uses CRM information and other points of connection to authenticate, personalize, and completely resolve these requests with the same speed and quality as human agents. 

Don’t forget your customer

Throughout it all, don’t forget your customer when addressing WFM challenges. Hold times are high, expectations are higher, and today’s customers can only remain empathetic to staffing shortages for so long. There are plenty of agent assist tools and self-service options out there – but make sure to find a solution that benefits your customer as much as it does your agents.

Choose the right technology partner

Contact centers have plenty of options when it comes to automation solutions. Make sure you work with a partner who is experienced in a range of unique contact center use cases and customer personas, and can help you identify the right roadmap with forecastable ROI.

The post Your Checklist to Survive the Contact Center Labor Crisis appeared first on Replicant.

The “Great Resignation,” spiking call volumes, and market unpredictability have forced agents to pick up extra slack – whether it’s overtime hours, additional shifts, or even multiple customer conversations at once. 

But for agents working alongside Replicant’s contact center automation solution, their day-to-day has never been more efficient. 

That’s because Replicant is unlike anything else. It’s not just a routing solution, or an agent assist tool, or a chatbot – it’s a comprehensive automation platform built to serve customers and collaborate with employees without sacrificing CSAT. 

The result is a transformative solution that contact centers and customer service agents love. Five reasons why:

1. It takes care of the repetitive calls

Replicant’s Thinking Machine acts as a first line of defense for contact centers by completely resolving tier-1 customer requests with the most natural sounding human-to-machine conversations ever crafted. 

Replicant doesn’t aim to displace your existing contact center or human agents, rather we do what machines are good at: taking care of repetitive and mundane work and letting human agents respond to calls that require more empathy and creativity.

For the agent, this means more of their time is used on engaging customer interactions and conversations that allow them to establish relationships with creativity and empathy. 

2. It automates the back office work

Replicant doesn’t just automate customer requests, it automatically transcribes conversations, tags channels and intents, and compiles data for easy, non-manual reporting. Agents working in a multi-channel environment no longer have to search through calls, texts, and chats to investigate request histories – they can see entire interactions in one single thread. 

Replicant also seamlessly integrates with the most common contact centers, e-commerce platforms, CRMs, and custom-built proprietary technologies and platforms. These integrations allow the Thinking Machine to make record updates, open support tickets, authenticate customers, and more – all on its own. Agents are able to spend more time with the customer and less time watching administrative duties pile up.

3. It sets customers up for success

Replicant’s Thinking Machine never aims to prevent a customer from speaking to an agent. Our contact center integrations make it possible to seamlessly escalate and transfer calls to a live agent. In these instances, relevant context is sent to the agent’s console, including caller information, the reason for transfer, and auto-generated, detailed call summary notes. Agents can now understand what steps were taken prior to call escalations, so they don’t waste time repeating the same prompts and inadvertently frustrating customers.

It also more accurately routes customers to the correct lines of business, eliminating downstream issues caused by inaccurate IVRs and bringing agents happier customers who have already made progress in getting their requests addressed. This is even more important in an environment where up to 81% of customers have recently abandoned a call due to a frustrating IVR experience. 

4. It’s always getting smarter

Replicant’s solution isn’t built to require constant maintenance and attention in order to remain state-of-the-art. The Thinking Machine collects knowledge from every call in a central neural network that becomes smarter over time so that customer conversations improve without needing to deploy new call scripts. When you work with Replicant, you also acquire an experienced team regularly optimizing and testing new scripts or call flows requiring little effort from your team. 

This means agents don’t have to worry about an automation solution that slips or loses efficacy over time, which would cause more escalations for tier-1 requests. It also means Replicant’s analytics dashboard can automatically surface unsupported call flows that are ripe for automation. The sooner Replicant’s Thinking Machine is online, the sooner it can begin optimizing how your contact center makes the most of agent time. 

5. Less stress, more time

It’s hard to offer agents growth opportunities and professional development time when every shift is a non-stop barrage of calls, texts, and chats for up to 10 hours at a time. But with Replicant, contact centers get the breathing room to offer agents time to upskill, earn certifications, and even learn the ins and outs of conversation analysis through Replicant’s end-to-end dashboard.

Since Replicant’s Thinking Machine can scale to handle an infinite amount of requests at once, 24/7, contact centers can begin to schedule smarter with an always-on, infinitely scalable solution. Managers using Replicant rely less on forecasting models that attempt to predict call volumes and instead optimize their workforce management around agents while the Thinking Machine stays ready to take overflow calls or unpredictable spikes.

The post 5 Reasons Contact Center Agents Love Replicant appeared first on Replicant.

Meanwhile, in contact centers, leaders strategize how they can make their customers fall even more in love with them. (We said unique, didn’t we?).  

In 2023, a strong CX strategy is more important than ever: staffing shortages aren’t going anywhere, call volumes are more unpredictable than before, and customer expectations are on the rise. 

Contact center leaders are under immense pressure to think outside the box and transform how their customers get support. Not just today, but for every Valentine’s season to come. 

Here are six reasons you should start by taking a good look at your relationship with your IVR system – and why it might be time for a breakup. 

1. Communication is key

As in any relationship, communication is key during a machine-to-human interaction. Unfortunately, most IVRs struggle with listening. 56% of consumers cite automated telephone systems as the most frustrating aspect of poor customer service. That’s because IVRs usually lead to customers feeling misunderstood, requests needing to be repeated, and keywords being missed due to accents, background noise, or unique speech patterns. 

The Replicant Difference: Replicant’s Thinking Machine can both replace your IVR, and completely resolve customer requests with the most natural human-to-machine conversations ever created. It features a less-than-1 second latency between conversation turns and uses advanced AI models to accurately understand customer intents over 94% of the time, without relying on keywords.

2. It’s complicated 

A healthy customer-to-brand relationship should feel simple and effortless. But IVRs almost always lead to unnecessary complexity. The most common misstep customers experience are IVRs with far too many menu options, which leave them lost by the fifth item. This can lead callers to spam the ‘zero’ button to reach an agent for an issue that likely could have been automated from the start. A better option is Contact Center Automation which allows customers to simply respond to “how can I help you?” in their own words.

The Replicant Difference: Replicant’s Thinking Machine boasts multi-intent recognition, that doesn’t restrict customers to asking just one question at a time in one specific way. Replicant Powers give contact centers out-of-the-box components to scale conversations fast. This includes access to an extensive library of pre-built conversation components that already incorporate conversational design best practices and cover a variety of use-cases, so conversations are simple, straightforward, and effective. 

3. Relationships are a two-way street 

IVRs aim to assist agents by cutting down on the number of transfers that need to take place in a given interaction. They also attempt to route customers to self-service options, preventing an agent from ever having to step in. But they aren’t intended to truly serve the customer within the interaction itself. This is the number one reason customers have an overall negative perception of IVRs, viewing them as a waste of time rather than a helpful tool. 

The Replicant Difference: Replicant knows that, above all, benefiting the customer benefits the brand. That’s why our contact center automation solution was crafted to completely resolve tier-1 customer requests. When automation isn’t suitable for a request, customers are intelligently transferred to an agent with a full summary of the request and all the necessary information to make the agent’s job easier. 

4. Personal time is important

Technology in the contact center should hinge on one truth: connect customers to answers. IVRs too often serve as barriers to connection rather than bridges. And when agents spend the majority of their days addressing simple, monotonous calls, they’re prevented from conversations that require creativity and empathy. They also have less time to improve their own skills, take a break, or address their other responsibilities. 

The Replicant Difference: By automating all tier-1 calls, Replicant’s Thinking Machine is an agent’s best friend. It’s infinitely scalable, and available 24/7, which means agents can forget about the monotonous conversations and focus on connecting with customers in need, creatively solving problems, and upskilling their certifications. 

5. Abandonment is too common

CallCentreHelper found that up to 81% of customers abandoned a call due to an IVR. Moreover, IVR metrics usually oversimplify conversations into the categories of containment, abandonment, or escalation. Today’s contact centers must strive to get more out of their systems. A frustrated customer who hangs up before getting their issue resolved can lead to massive losses for your brand, and the data behind why calls are abandoned must be accessible. 

The Replicant Difference: With Replicant, contact center leaders get visibility into all customer support conversations through an end-to-end dashboard. Contact center managers can monitor conversations, analyze insights from conversation data, and take action immediately by updating conversation scripts to create an optimal customer experience.

The post 5 Reasons to Break Up with Your Dated IVR appeared first on Replicant.

The most immediate factor, though, is the the “Great Resignation.”

Contact centers are seeing their agents leave in droves and their hiring rates grind to a halt.

Coupled with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and continued unpredictability from logistic and weather-related events, staffing a call center has become more of an uphill battle than ever.

Contact centers regardless of size, industry, or location, are looking for answers. 

The Great Resignation
The Great Resignation has caused stress on contact centers as employees reevaluate what meaningful work is. Many who would once have been prospective employees now don’t want boring, monotonous and repetitive jobs.

The labor pool is shrinking, taking even more of a toll on organizations and their customer support. This has caused new, unforeseen and unplanned workforce management issues and made retention that much harder.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than 4.5 million people voluntarily left their jobs in November of last year. That was up from 4.2 million in October and was the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track.

The Global Pandemic
The pandemic is upending every aspect of business. It has taxed organizations greatly, leading to agent shortages, higher stress for employees who are still working, and unhappy customers (which negatively impacts customer loyalty).

According to the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times.

Unpredictable External Forces
Third, catastrophic weather events, cybersecurity threats, supply chain disruptions and other unpredictable crises are creating massive customer service challenges.

Companies can’t scale up and down quickly enough to meet customer demand in the face of these events. 

No longer do the operations models of the past predict future forecasting needs as it relates to hiring and surges in customer service volumes.

With each passing storm, service outage, and supply chain disruption, contact centers are experiencing heightened call volumes and customers are becoming more on-edge about the status of their services and security of their information. 

Why BPOs aren’t Enough 

“Modern problems require modern solutions.” The old adage, cliche as it may be, could not be any truer than it is for today’s contact centers. 

The WFM challenges of 2021 were unprecedented and have accelerated the need for innovation in the contact center. It’s imperative that every stakeholder in your organization’s customer service operation takes a step back in 2022 to reassess how they traditionally addressed WFM, and evaluate the limitations of those solutions. 

Drawbacks of seasonal or temporary hiring
Record-setting resignation rates have increased the need for labor. But where seasonal or temporary hires would step in to fill the gaps in years past, today’s unprecedented resignation rates are exposing the risks of quick hires.

The drawbacks of seasonal or temporary hiring include:

• Relying on past KPIs that no longer hold to forecast future and immediate hiring needs
• Sunk training costs from hires that have joined in the last year and attrited
• No guarantee of lower AHTs, higher CSAT scores, or lower queue times
• Cost overruns, sometimes paying for agents to not be online
• Harm to your brand promise from lack of control and unpredictability 

“Right now, our biggest concern within the call center space – specifically on reservations – is the lack of manpower. After the Great Resignation, we hired 2,500 people since May 1st of 2021. Of those, we have already lost 1,300. So all of that work just to end up with 1,200 people. Now we are facing a need to hire an additional 2,500 people before the start of the summer. Our biggest concern right now is how to get people through the pipeline as fast as possible and make them as productive as possible as soon as they start.” – CX Managing Director, Fortune 500 Airline

Legacy technologies can’t do enough
Traditional technologies like agent assist, IVRs, and self-service aim to ease the burden of agents and make them more productive.

They deflect callers to self-service, knowledge base resources, and FAQs. Or, they route callers to departments to cut down on agents’ need to make transfers. 

But given the current strain on agents, and the hiring challenges in the market, squeezing every ounce of productivity from your agents is not a long term solution. In fact, it can lead to further employee burnout. 

Additionally, IVRs and self-service voice and chat that doesn’t fully resolve issues often does more harm than good for the customer experience.

They can force customers to sit through rigid menus, stay on calls for minutes to hours only to be deflected elsewhere, and have to repeat themselves once transferred to an agent.

56% of consumers cite automated telephone systems as the most frustrating aspect of poor customer service. 

BPOs are a linear solution to a dynamic problem

When the first two solutions aren’t enough, traditionally contact centers turn to third-party help. This often comes in the form of seasonal employees or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to solve staffing and technology gaps.

These solutions are typically the most expensive methods for adding talent. While they add staff, they don’t have unlimited capacities and often come with premiums once a certain number of live agents are on calls.

They require exorbitant training cycles that can take weeks to months, and they can require rigid contracts that don’t take into account seasonality or agent off-time.

A/B testing in a BPO environment is often not feasible and the ability to pivot when key metrics are lagging is extremely slow when compared to point-and-click AI solutions.

In addition, BPOs are experiencing resignation challenges, too, as employees flock to gig economy jobs. 

Why Automation is Succeeding

The limits of traditional contact center WFM strategies become clearer when compared to the latest technology.

Contact centers need a solution that can scale up or down according to customer demand, while delivering effective customer service and keeping costs low.

The answer to this is contact center automation, beginning with the tier-1 level of customer service interactions. 

Whereas temporary employees, agent assist solutions, and BPOs can excel in performing “damage control” in times of need, modern automation offers a long-term foundation that can completely transform the workforce optimization of a contact center. 

Contact center automation comes in many forms. The most comprehensive solutions leverage conversational AI which has received rapid adoption rates in contact centers due to its proven ability to solve the problems of 2022.

It is the primary automation solution that directly partners with humans to create a seamless experience that benefits both customers and agents. 

#1: It directly addresses pandemic-related challenges
Conversational AI can carry out natural, lifelike conversations that resolve customer issues with zero queue times and none of the frustration included with legacy solutions like IVRs.

Customers can use the channel of their choice, speak in the language of their choice, ask multiple questions at once, and  never have to repeat themselves. 

Since conversational AI makes automation available 24/7 – and scales when needed based on call volumes and customer interactions – it’s a cost effective way of adding a virtual staff that does the work of unlimited agents without sacrificing CSAT.

#2: It immediately eases staffing and WFM strain
Conversational AI only needs to be trained once. With out-of-the box solutions, conversational AI can be customized, integrated and deployed into contact centers in just weeks. This offers immediate relief to staffing issues and unpredictable call volumes.

Agents love the technology because it collaborates with human employees to automate repetitive conversations, resolve tier-1 cases, and allows agents to focus on more engaging work, while acting as a first line of defense and overflow safety net.

#3: It creates a safeguard against future unpredictability
Conversational AI provides a consistent customer experience that represents your brand the same way every time. It provides insights into unstructured caller data, which helps you easily enrich the customer experience and identify opportunities. 

With deep analytics that go beyond traditional metrics, contact center leaders are able to discover new call flows to automate and find more information about their call types and call patterns.

From a customer’s perspective, this means they get what they need with zero wait, no matter how many calls or agents you have – in other words, it provides unlimited scale. 

The post Why BPOs Are Falling Short and Can’t Solve the Contact Center Staffing Shortage appeared first on Replicant.

The Great Resignation has upended the entire customer service world.

Traditional Workforce Management (WFM) strategies are falling short, agents are becoming scarce, and call volumes continue to spike unpredictably in every industry.

Statistics show that the mass exodus of employees is not just a growing trend, but one that is forcing contact centers to change how they support both their employees and their customers.

Here’s the data behind the departures in 10 statistics:

Download the full infographic.

The post Infographic: How the Great Resignation is Impacting Contact Centers in 10 Data Points appeared first on Replicant.

Which means if you’re ever placed on hold by a business, chances are you’ll be listening to Cisco’s stock hold music.

You probably recognize it:

But what you probably don’t know is the peculiar history of one of the most-played songs to ever grace the world’s airwaves. 

It was composed in 1989 by the duo of Tim Carleton and and Darrick Deel and recorded on a 4-track.

The former of the duo was a 16-year-old “Yanni-loving computer nerd, messing around with a drum machine and a synthesizer in his parents’ garage in California,” according with an interview with him in 2014 on “This American Life.”

The song went forgotten for almost a decade until some time in the ’90s. A that time, Deel, it turned out, had gone on to work for the then-startup Cisco.

While in the process of designing their initial phone systems, Deel offered the music to the team.

“I’ve got this piece of music that I know sounds really good on the phone,” he recalled saying in an NBC Bay Area feature. “Next thing I know it was going into the product.”

The “product” turned out to be hundreds of millions of phones, all with the familiar jingle. The song went on to be known endearingly as “Opus No. 1.”

In 2023, Anheuser-Busch’s featured the song in a Super Bowl commercial that had many people wondering, “why do I know this song?”

But what you probably don’t know is the peculiar history of one of the most-played songs to ever grace the world’s airwaves. 

The tale leads to some obvious questions.

Where is Carleton now?
As of 2014, Tim Carleton was an IT professional in the Bay Area spending minimal time on music. 

Did he make any royalties off the track?
“Not a penny. So I think that’s probably my most legit claim as a music artist. I didn’t make any money from my music,” he said.

Why hasn’t the hold music ever been changed?
While IT admins who are so inclined can customize their system’s hold music, most don’t bother. And, as it turns out, the out-of-the-box music actually has a legion of fans.

There are hundreds of comments about the song on YouTube videos, parodies, and remixes. Though some people can’t stand it, most of the comments sing its praises:

‘Best hold music ever made. I love this song.’

‘So addictively pleasant. Please, put me back on hold so I can listen to it some more.’

‘I work in a call center, and this music is the best to listen to after dealing with rude customers.’

‘I’ve been looking for this song for almost three years.’

How does Carleton feel when he’s put on hold to his own music?
“It’s really embarrassing when you’re not expecting to hear that and then, all of a sudden, you have that memory pop up,” he said. “I just start blushing immediately.”

But the most poignant answer given by either of the pair when prompted about Opus No. 1 came from Deel:
“If you’re frustrated with a company and you’re on hold trying to get something fixed?”

“For me, that’s not a pleasant experience regardless of the music.”

The post The Surprising Roots of the Most Common Hold Music appeared first on Replicant.

Our latest guide, “The Great Resignation: Why Your Contact Center Won’t Survive without Automation,” provides answers to some of today’s most pressing challenges:

What’s Impacting Contact Centers Today

The Great Resignation
According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than 4.5 million people voluntarily left their jobs in November of last year. That was up from 4.2 million in October and was the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track.

The Great Resignation has caused stress on contact centers as employees reevaluate what meaningful work is. This has caused new, unforeseen and unplanned workforce management issues and made retention that much harder.

The Global Pandemic
According to the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times. The pandemic is upending every aspect of business. It has taxed organizations greatly, leading to agent shortages, higher stress for employees who are still working, and unhappy customers (which negatively impacts customer loyalty). 

Unpredictable External Forces
Catastrophic weather events, cybersecurity threats, supply chain disruptions and other unpredictable crises are creating massive customer service challenges. Companies can’t scale up and down quickly enough to meet customer demand in the face of these events. No longer do the operations models of the past predict future forecasting needs as it relates to hiring and surges in customer service volumes. 

Why Traditional Solutions are Failing 

“Modern problems require modern solutions.” The old adage, cliche as it may be, could not be any truer that it is for today’s contact centers. 

“The Great Resignation: Why Your Contact Center Won’t Survive without Automation” digs into the strategies long used by contact centers in times of crisis. Are they still fit for today’s challenges?

Seasonal hiring and BPOs don’t guarantee lower AHTs, higher CSAT scores, or lower queue times. And they can lead to cost overruns, inefficient training, and harm to your brand promise.

Legacy technologies like agent assist solutions, IVRs and self-service can force customers to sit through rigid menus, stay on calls for minutes to hours only to be deflected elsewhere, and have to repeat themselves once transferred to an agent. 

56% of consumers cite automated telephone systems as the most frustrating aspect of poor customer service. 

Why automation is succeeding

Contact center automation comes in many forms. The most comprehensive solutions leverage conversational AI which has received rapid adoption rates in contact centers due to its proven ability to solve the problems outlined in this guide. It is the only automation solution that directly partners with humans to create a seamless experience that benefits both customers and agents. 

This guide explores the foundation of the technology as well as its ability to directly address today’s challenges:

• It solves pandemic-related challenges
• It immediately eases staffing and WFM strain
• It creates a safeguard against future unpredictability 

How to Get Started with Automation

There’s a lot to consider before getting started with automation in your contact center. This guide outlines some of the most important considerations to make before adopting conversational AI, as well as what to expect after an implementation. 

Should you build or buy a conversational AI automation solution? How do you choose the right use cases to start automating? How do you determine the ROI of an implementation? How do you assess your technology stack? 

These questions and much more are answered in this guide to get your contact thinking proactively about the challenges you will face throughout 2022, and how you can come out of the year more effective than ever before. 

Download the full ebook:

The post How Automation is Rescuing Contact Centers from the Great Resignation appeared first on Replicant.

They included low effectiveness, poor design, unreachable analytics, and poor redundancy. But there’s even more to consider before embarking on a long, arduous build process.

Conversational AI is rapidly advancing every day, and the following unforeseen costs of building focus on features that make it compatible with more platforms, channels, languages, and compliance orders.

Here they are: 

Incomplete integrations

Integrations play a key role in the effectiveness of conversational AI automation, both for the customer and agent. Your CRM integrations should allow conversational AI to automatically create tasks or tickets, update customer records, and provide intelligent call summary notes for follow-up or agent escalations. 

Effective integrations should also allow your solution to resolve customer issues end-to-end without human assistance, like issuing refunds, initiating order updates, and changing account information while on the phone with customers.

The Cost: Without seamless integrations, conversational AI won’t be able to communicate with your CRM to authenticate callers, greet your customers by name, and offer the most accurate and relevant resolution based on historical interactions.

The Replicant Difference: Replicant’s conversational AI automation comes standard with out of the box integrations to every CRM, call center software, and telephony provider. It can also be custom integrated to proprietary CRM systems or data lakes to retrieve customer information quickly and accurately. 

Lack of omnichannel and multi-language capabilities

Conversational AI automation can also fall short without the properly built omni-channel and multi-language capabilities. More and more, customer service is taking place across multiple channels, and the ability to switch seamlessly between them with the same conversational AI is imperative. 

If you’re building conversational AI in-house, ensure it can process requests across SMS, VIVR, and chat and, on top of that, handle tough conversations in any language. The latter can require experts in linguistics and dialects to ensure not only every language is covered, but the colloquialisms associated with different regions. 

The Cost: When planning an in-house build, understand that these capabilities can require additional in-house AI engineers to manage every channel and multi-language conversation designs – both a time and resource cost. 

The Replicant Difference: Replicant’s conversational AI uses a single brain that supports multi-channel voice, chat, SMS, meaning your automation is always on-brand and always effective no matter what channel it’s using. It also supports hundreds of languages and dialects so nothing gets lost in translation. 

Poor security and compliance 

It goes without saying that incomplete security and compliance protocols can cost an in-house conversational AI build greatly. Be sure you’re aware of the requirements of building a high availability infrastructure that runs 24/7 with efficient load balancing across thousands of concurrent calls so that you can scale effortlessly and securely. 

Your platform should also be fully compliant with current data protection regulations at the state and federal level, and have the HIPAA and PCI compliance in place to collect payments and protect customer information. 

The Cost: Without proper compliance, your conversational AI may not be able to automate payment flows or collect sensitive customer information, meaning live agents will still be called on to escalate these requests. From a cybersecurity standpoint, poor compliance can lead to devastating data breaches. 

The Replicant Difference: Replicant customers leverage features that give them the control to customize how their data is accessed, used, and retained. Replicant’s platform security standards satisfy industry-specific regulations as well as state, federal, and international regulatory requirements for data privacy and protection, including HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI, and GDPR compliance.

Static improvement

If you’re thinking about building your own conversational AI for contact center automation, make sure you have the engineers and development hours available to build and maintain your models well beyond deployment. 

Your conversational AI should be able to extract multiple intents and a full and accurate transcription from every conversation, and get better at doing so over time. Customers change fast, and conversational AI should quickly and automatically adapt to new forms of speech, as well as new ways of responding to non-binary questions. 

The Cost: A full conversational AI build should include an easy to manage testing rig that provides both automatic testing and A/B testing for long-term improvement. Without these features, your investment may find itself dated within years as conversational AI improves. 

The Replicant Difference: A continuous learning platform that measures and enhances performance over time (>96% inference accuracy) and an enterprise-grade software platform which will constantly improve with regular releases of new features and improvements to resilience, performance, and scale. 

The post Part 2: The Unforeseen Costs of Building a Conversational AI Solution appeared first on Replicant.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than 4.5 million people voluntarily left their jobs in November of last year. That was up from 4.2 million in October and was the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track.

Workforce management (WFM) has never been more difficult for contact centers as the available pool of qualified agents shrinks and the risk of training new employees comes with the possibility they will quickly become dissatisfied with monotonous work and eventually resign.  

“Right now, our biggest concern within the call center space – specifically on reservations – is the lack of manpower. After the Great Resignation, we hired 2,500 people since May 1st of 2021. Of those, we have already lost 1,300.

So all of that work just to end up with 1,200 people. Now we are facing a need to hire an additional 2,500 people before the start of the summer. Our biggest concern right now is how to get people through the pipeline as fast as possible and make them as productive as possible as soon as they start.”

– CX Managing Director, Fortune 500 Airline

The WFM challenges of 2022 are accelerating the need for innovation in the contact center. It’s imperative that every stakeholder in your organization’s customer service operation takes a step back to reassess how they traditionally addressed WFM. 

Start with these five new truths:

Truth #1: Training is more expensive than ever 

According to Call Centre Helper, over half (55%) of contact centers take 6-12 weeks to fully train and onboard new agents. For these contact centers, nesting costs range from $115,200 – $345,600, without factoring in costs such as trainer’s salary, HR, costs, or IT costs. 

What’s worse is the risk of deploying under-trained agents to customer service calls can be just as costly when it comes to retention and branding. 

Contact centers must be judicious about where their hiring budget goes. It’s unfeasible to proceed with normal training budgets and processes in the face of skyrocketing attrition rates. Instead, leaders should look to allocate investments to automation softwares that leverages conversational AI to fully resolve tier-1 requests and make agents’ jobs more engaging and less monotonous. After all, automation that uses conversational AI only needs to be trained once. 

Truth #2: Brands are at risk 

Bad customer experiences are driving customers away faster than ever. According to PwC, one in three customers will leave a brand they are loyal to after one bad experience. What’s more frightening for contact centers is that what a customer defines as a poor experience can occur before your agents even get on the phone.

For understaffed contact centers, queue times have jumped up significantly. When a customer calls in, they can quickly become frustrated with dated IVRs that aim to deflect rather than resolve. Where automation can help brands is by acting as a “first line of service” for agents. Rather than simply pointing customers to websites or long queue times, automation can achieve the same resolution that humans can, without straying from your brand’s promise of excellent customer service. 

Truth #3: Customer patience has reached all-time lows

As WFM challenges worsen in contact centers, customers are losing their sympathy. Nearly 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience.

90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. Customers expect a response from a company within five minutes or less. Without an easy-to-reach contact center, your CSAT scores are fighting an uphill battle. That’s why the benefit of automation that results in zero queue times is impossible to ignore. 

Truth #4: Traditional solutions are failing

Record-setting resignation rates have increased the need for labor. But where seasonal or temporary hires would step in to fill the gaps in years past, today’s unprecedented resignation rates are exposing the risks of quick hires. The drawbacks of seasonal or temporary hiring include:

• Relying on past KPIs that no longer hold to forecast future and immediate hiring needs
• Sunk training costs from hires that have joined in the last year and attrited
• No guarantee of lower AHTs, higher CSAT scores, or lower queue times
• Cost overruns, sometimes paying for agents to not be online
• Harm to your brand promise from lack of control and unpredictability
• Staffing issues in BPOs themselves

Truth #5: The “innovation race” is on

According to Harvard Business Review, 52% percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the pandemic. Just about all, 86%, said that AI was becoming a “mainstream technology” at their company in 2021. 

That’s because AI-driven automation directly addresses the challenges brought on by the Great Resignation. It performs the jobs of an unlimited number of agents, helps retain your current employees by automating repetitive tasks, gets customers resolution faster than ever, and protects your brand promise. 

The post Five New Truths: How the Great Resignation is Changing Contact Centers appeared first on Replicant.

With increasingly contagious variants, and changing safety protocols, more contact center agents are yet again unavailable for work. This, of course, has increased pressure on contact centers already battling staffing shortages, inconsistencies with outsourcing partners, and unpredictable call volume spikes.

While nearly every industry has been impacted, led by travel, hospitality, and healthcare, the ripple effect for contact centers in particular has been in their ability to serve customers.  

Recent months have made it clear: workforces and staffing fluctuations aren’t going anywhere. Here’s what contact center leaders should take away from the latest pandemic-driven disruption.

Employees are stretched thin

Workers all over the world were already exhausted – and resigning at record-setting rates – prior to the latest COVID-19 surge. But the most recent wrinkle has added even greater stress to employees’ lives as absences increase, childcare and school closures become more unpredictable, and customers become angrier. 

In contact centers, this has highlighted the need for additional employee support. If you’re leading a team, it’s important to view your employees as a reflection of your brand. Customers calling brands with greater support resources regularly use that to inform their total spend with a business. 

Harvard Business Review’s list of employee support strategies include training and upskilling. Learn more about how AI can help employees learn new skills rather than compete against humans.

The need for flexibility has never been higher

With unpredictable staff numbers day-to-day, entire departments can be forced to sit out weeks at time. Unfortunately, call volumes in most industries are not just impossible to forecast, but rising by the month. 

Contact centers experiencing difficulties with under- or over-staffing are great fits for conversational AI. Replicant’s Thinking Machine can not only fully resolve tier-1 customer requests, it scales up and down based on your needs.

It can be positioned in front of live agents, during after-hours or weekends, or be turned on and off based on your headcount and call volumes. The best part? You only pay for what you use. 

Traditional solutions are no longer enough

The challenges of 2021 were unprecedented and have accelerated the need for innovation in the contact center. It’s imperative that every stakeholder in your organization’s customer service operation takes a step back in 2022 to reassess how they traditionally addressed uncertainty and risk, and evaluate the limits of those solutions against recent challenges.

Drawbacks of Seasonal or Temporary Hiring:

• Rely on past KPIs to forecast the future
• Result in sunk training costs
• Don’t guarantee lower AHTs, high CSAT scores, or lower hold times
• Expensive, sometimes require paying for agents to not be online
• Can harm your brand

Whereas temporary employees, agent assistant solutions, and BPOs can excel in performing “damage control” in times of need, modern automation offers a long-term foundation that can completely transform the capabilities of a contact center.

Replicant’s conversational AI provides guaranteed 24/7 service, only needs to be trained once, and can do the job of unlimited tier-1 agents while protecting your brand’s reputation. 

Conversational AI should automate routine tasks

Replicant’s Thinking Machine goes beyond “talking the talk”; it acts as a high-performing agent and integrates seamlessly with the most commonly used systems. Its common use cases include authenticating callers, opening service tickets, updating customer information, closing cases once resolved, and much more. Conversational AI can also completely replace your IVR.

The offloading of routine calls and repetitive back-office work is one of the leading reasons agents love Replicant as much as customers. With less hold times, and more engaging calls, agents are able to deal with the kinds of creative, high-empathy calls that only humans can handle. 

The post What COVID Surges Mean for Contact Centers appeared first on Replicant.

For contact centers at this stage, understanding the tradeoffs between each approach is the first step in the decision making process. 

But even after you have a grasp on “build versus buy” there still remains a lot to consider before making a decision. While the potential benefits of conversational AI are clear – staffing solutions, higher CSAT scores, eliminated hold times – so too are the risks of building it yourself. 

Beyond the upfront costs of a dedicated in-house development team, a months to years-long project timeline, and numerous integration requirements, the downstream costs of building conversational AI in-house far outweigh those of working with a solution provider. 

Below are some of the most common, though under-discussed, costs businesses incur when they try to build their own conversational AI solution.

Production ineffectiveness

There is a stark difference between successfully building a conversational AI solution, and deploying a conversational AI solution that is actually successful at what it’s designed to do. 

Many conversational AI solutions can perform exceptionally well  in a controlled environment. However, once deployed, conversational AI’s effectiveness can struggle when met with real-world challenges like accents, noisy environments, and customers who use slang instead of traditional keywords. 

There are unlimited scenarios that can happen when a customer picks up the phone and a conversational AI is unprepared for the unpredictable. Conversational AI is a highly complex technology that requires both an understanding of your business as well as elegantly designed conversational linguistics in order to be effective. 

The cost: Without a team of ML engineers, AI experts, and best-in-class natural language processing and QA practices, an ineffective solution can end up costing you more valuable agent time as escalations increase and customer patience runs thin. 

The Replicant difference: Replicant’s out-of-the-box conversational AI is purpose-built for customer service. This means there is no scenario that the Thinking Machine hasn’t already encountered, and subsequently mastered. We never outsource development or implementations, meaning the effectiveness of your product is never at risk and your customer brand is always accounted for. The Thinking Machine also leverages pre-built powers that can be dragged and dropped to scale conversations and A/B test new flows with ease. 

Frustrating conversation design

Effective conversational AI – that is, its ability to fully resolve customer issues or intelligently route customers to the right place – still doesn’t guarantee customer satisfaction.

CSAT is most often correlated to a fast, natural experience. In order to create this, conversations must be designed for quick turns between human and machine speakers. AI must allow customers to ask multiple questions at once and have the continuous learning ability to pick up on new styles of speech. 

The cost: Poor conversation design can lead to numerous CSAT issues. Without in-house experts in both machine learning and the principles of conversational design, customers interacting with poorly designed AI will find themselves repeating questions or conforming to robotic styles of speech as they would with a traditional IVR. 

The Replicant Difference: Replicant’s Thinking Machine boasts a below-one-second latency between turns in a conversation and over a 94% inference accuracy. For the customer, these factors mean they can speak quickly, ask multiple questions right up front, and often end up getting their issue resolved faster than they could with a live agent leading to CSAT scores on par or better than humans. 

A black box of analytics 

A modern conversational AI solution doesn’t guarantee modern analytics. In fact, building an analytics platform to capture customer conversations, surface insights, and unlock actionable recommendations is a project unto itself.

Contact centers interested in building their own conversational AI should be certain they can leverage the data it will create to avoid having a black box of analytics.  

The cost: Without full analytics capabilities, contact centers who build conversational AI won’t have access to data around what’s working, what needs improvement, and whether or not your solution is successful. And without fully built self-service options, low analytics capabilities will cost contact centers time when they want to edit scripts or respond to customer trends. 

The Replicant Difference: With Replicant, contact center leaders get visibility into all customer support conversations through an end-to-end dashboard. Once the Thinking Machine begins taking calls, contact center managers can instantly monitor conversations, analyze insights from unstructured conversation data, and take action immediately with self-service script editing to create an optimal customer experience fast.

Insufficient redundancies

Conversational AI is a leading solution for staffing challenges and unpredictable call volumes in the contact center. However, this only amplifies the importance of back-up planning during inevitable outages and rising DDoS attacks.

When building a solution, make sure your redundancy planning can stack up with the best out-of-the-box solutions that often include layers of fail-safes that eliminate the costly risks of downtimes. 

The cost: Without a backup plan for climate, cybercrime, and outage-driven downtimes, insufficient redundancies can lead to a litany of problems. Hold times can skyrocket, data can be compromised, and astronomical human hours can all follow a poorly timed conversational AI outage. 

The Replicant Difference: Replicant’s platform provides high-availability infrastructure for every customer that runs 24/7 with efficient load balancing across thousands of concurrent calls. With multiple layers of redundancy, even the largest and most prolonged outages mean the Thinking Machine provides always-on support. 

The post Part 1: The Unforeseen Costs of Building a Conversational AI Solution appeared first on Replicant.

The numbers put into perspective 3 trends that many contact center leaders already suspected: 

1. The phone is still a leading customer service channel despite the growth of self-service options. 
2. Poor CSAT scores are on the rise due to long hold times and unreliable service. 
3. And the pandemic has created a tumultuous hiring environment that is exacerbating customer service capacities. 

As 2022 begins, contact center leaders are on the hunt for solutions. In order to meet the customer service demands of, as the New York Times puts it, “a nation on hold,” contact centers must keep an eye on the trends shaping what success looks like. 

Here are 10 of the most important trends heading into the 2022 New Year. 

#1: Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organizations. 

The “Great Resignation” led to unprecedented agent churn, leading to longer hold times than ever and headaches for hiring and training managers. But, data shows that more engaged employees are more likely to stay put. This is especially important in contact centers, where repetitive calls can lead to agent burnout. Technologies like conversational AI can fully resolve tier-1 calls and will allow agents to focus on the work that helps them engage and grow in 2022. 

#2: At least 72% of customers are likely to share their positive experiences with six other customers.

Positive customer experiences are increasingly becoming a key differentiator in every industry, and a tool for growth. And just like employee churn is on the rise, customers are more willing than ever to take their dollars elsewhere when dissatisfied with their service. Contact centers who invest in their experiences with the goal of building their brand will see their reputation rise. 

#3: Nearly 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience.

Speed and convenience are the first steps to positive customer experiences. Without an easy-to-reach contact center, your CSAT scores are fighting an uphill battle. Contact centers should evaluate their IVRs, eliminate rigid menus, and make sure every step a customer takes helps resolve their issue – not waste their time. Customers expect a response from a company within five minutes or less according to Forrester.

#4: One in three customers will leave a brand they are loyal to after one bad experience.

Bad experiences are driving customers away faster than ever. What’s more frightening for contact centers is that what a customer defines as a poor experience can occur before your agents even get on the phone. Customers understand that agents are stretched thin, but with solutions like conversational AI available there’s no longer a need for long hold times and unproductive IVRs that sour experiences from the start. 

#5: 86% of buyers say they’re willing to pay more for a great customer experience. 

If customers are willing to invest more for a better experience, they expect brands to do the same. If you’re a contact center leader, every investment you make should contribute to great customer experiences. Personalization, call-back options, multi-language, and omnichannel service should all come standard at contact centers.

#6: E-commerce is expected to account for 23.6% of all retail sales by 2025, compared to 11.0% in 2019. 

Today’s customers can shop for everything from clothes to hotel rooms to insurance and healthcare in a completely digital, frictionless environment. Retail contact centers should focus on creating equally frictionless customer service experiences that promote further sales instead of using digital trends as a reason to shrink their customer service investments. 

#7: Customer experience is currently the most effective use of AI in insurance.

According to PwC AI Predictions 2021, 65% of responding insurance providers cited better customer experiences as a benefit of using AI. Conversational AI can automate more aspects of claims processing, create more regular customer interactions, and analyze more data than competing solutions. 

#8: Continued workforce challenges will drive an unprecedented restructuring of healthcare service and support.

In healthcare, contact center restructuring is already underway. The industry can’t afford for its talent to be focused on redundant tasks after its most taxing two-year period in modern history. Automation that can help patients get answers, schedule appointments, execute reminders, and more, will ease the burden of contact centers. 

#9: “Delivering a great employee experience will be the leading indicator of business success in 2022.” 

The other side of all these contact center trends is the contact center itself. The experience of your customers is a direct reflection of your employees’ experience. Contact center agents who are armed with the data, assistance, and modern tools to succeed will provide customers with better experiences and signal a business that takes service seriously. 

#10: “Good customer experience minimizes friction, maximizes speed and efficiency and maintains a human element, embedded within the automation.” 

With modern options advancing every day, the divide between good and bad automation has never been clearer. Customers want automation that works like a human, and alongside humans. Conversational AI allows humans to talk in a natural tone without having to hit rigid keywords. It also intelligently escalates calls it can’t solve with automatically generated summaries to a human, so customers can continue the conversation where it left off. 

BONUS: Data drives AI, not the other way around

The sooner you start with conversational AI, the more data you’ll acquire to help it improve. This is important, because the goal of effective AI should not be to create data, but to learn from it. Contact centers who have begun using conversational AI for even the smallest use cases have a head start against their competitors, as the technology gets smarter and uncovers unsupported call flows with each customer interaction. 

The post 10 Trends Contact Center Leaders Should Watch in 2022 appeared first on Replicant.

Statistics from the last 18 months are rife with signs that point toward further transformation in the contact center industry. 

In 2021, pandemic-related challenges continued to fuel call volume spikes and customer frustrations. Workforce shortages made it harder than ever for contact centers to hire, train, and retain talent. And emerging technologies like conversational AI have accelerated digitization and changed what consumers expect from automated self-service. 

Below are ten of the most telling statistics from 2021, and how they will continue to shape contact center strategies in the coming year.

76% of customers are calling on the phone when contacting customer service. (Source: CFI Group)

It’s no secret that channels like chat, SMS, and social media are on the rise as customer service mediums. But voice – and the phone channel in particularly – remains a preferred method of service for customers. Contact centers should prioritize modernizing, personalizing and eliminating hold times on their phone channels to ensure CSAT scores don’t suffer in the most common place service is rendered.

91% of consumers reported they have experienced poor customer service in the last six months. (Replicant 2021 Contact Center Survey)

For customers, frustration was at an all time high in 2021. Lengthy hold times, inflexible IVR menus, and poor self-service options were just a few of the reasons customers reported subpar experiences.

The length of hold time matters when it comes to the emotions of customers. The research shows 44% of people report being annoyed, irritated or angry with a 5 – 15 minute wait time. (Replicant 2021 Contact Center Survey)

No experience was a bigger contributor to poor customer service scores than hold times. Due in part to staffing issues, and in part to rising customer demands, the public’s tolerance for hold times over 5 minutes waned in 2021.

56% of consumers cite automated telephone systems as the most frustrating aspect of poor customer service. (Source: Customerthink)

Contact centers have tried for years to find automation solutions for the phone that don’t sour customer experiences. But the results show that still isn’t happening. If a customer can’t fully resolve their issues in a natural, human-like fashion, they’re likely to be dissatisfied by automation.

95.7% of contact center professionals view customer satisfaction as the most important call center metric. (Call Centre Helper, 2021)

That customer satisfaction is the top priority of most contact centers is nothing new. But contact centers are seeing CSAT affect customer loyalty more than ever, and all retention and growth strategies hinge upon delightful customer experiences.

Calls rated as “difficult” by customer service reps increased by 100% during the Covid-19 pandemic. (HBR 2020)

Repetitive and routine customer requests are often not difficult in nature. However, when they compound over time, agents have less time to focus on the rising volume of complex calls. Automating routine calls allows your most talented agents to focus on what they do best – find creative and empathetic solutions for difficult problems.

Benefits of Big Data Analytics in Customer Service (NewVantage; Syncsort; Hosting Tribunal 2021)

• 59.0% Reduction in operational costs
• 59.9% Increase in productivity
• 36.2% Better decision-making

The need for rich analytics and deep insights into customer service interactions has never been higher. Luckily, intelligent end-to-end dashboards mean conversations are no longer a black box. Customers who fully leveraged contact center data in 2021 made better decisions, were more productive, and are set up for greater success in the future.

55% of call centers spend 6-12 weeks training and onboarding new agents. (CallCenterhelper 2021)

As agent churn increased in tandem with hiring needs, training and onboarding became an unignorable obstacle for every contact center. The time, money, and resources spent onboarding new agents can only be avoided with technology like conversational AI – which only needs to be trained once and improves automatically over time.

Less than 10% of contact centers have agents reaching proficiency in less than two months. (CallCenterhelper 2021)

Even after an agent is onboarded, it takes months for them to perform at their peak abilities. Contact centers must place an emphasis on agent empowerment – giving them tools to focus on complex calls that keep them engaged and avoid performing repetitive interactions that can lead to burnout and greater attrition.

Conversational AI resolves 100% of tier-1 issues. 

Conversational AI uses natural language processing, machine learning, and big data to enable computers to converse in a human-like way. This can be via voice, SMS, or chat. Customers can express themselves as if they were talking to a human agent and, through speech recognition, conversational AI is able to flexibly scale to resolve 100% of tier-1 calls at cost, transforming the operational efficiency of contact centers. It is the closest thing there is to talking to a human.

The post The 10 Most Important Contact Center Stats of 2021 appeared first on Replicant.

The discussion made one thing clear: analytics in the contact center have never been more important.

2021 changed the way customers think. The pandemic upended every industry, and customers asked more questions than ever about the services they use. Contact centers faced hiring challenges that shook customer satisfaction scores as demand soared and agent availability dwindled. 

ECSI – the leading provider of accounts receivable management and campus-based student loan servicing – was a shining example of a contact center getting smart to overcome the challenges of the market. 

By using conversational AI to relieve their strained live agents, they also uncovered rich insights about their customers that further helped them improve how they serve them. 

Highlights from the webinar can be found below, and the full webinar can be downloaded here. 

What challenges lead ECSI to conversational AI?

Bowman also noted the highly cyclical nature of their contact center. “Nothing’s easy about the call volume, our business is very seasonal,” he said.

“There’s very busy times of the year. And then there’s very slow times of the year. And so just with any other business, it’s hard to staff for the huge peaks, and then those valleys in your call volume. We just had inconsistency that we always wrestled with as far as having the right number of people, and that also put a strain on service level.”

Why was Replicant the solution of choice?

What results did ECSI see after deploying Replicant?

“The contact center can dig into these reports, these dashboard reports,” Bowman said, “look at actual caller behavior, get really minute detail on what’s going on in these queues and the Thinking Machine, and then put numbers to it to demonstrate to our product design team and our customer experience team.”

What impact has has Replicant has on ECSI’s contact center?

What advice would you give other leaders considering a solution like Replicant?

Watch the full webinar to learn more about ECSI’s success leveraging Replicant conversational AI.

Additional analytics resources:

• Conversational AI is No Longer a Black Box (Blog)
• Replicant Analytics Overview
• Replicant Analytics One-pager
• Insurance Case Study

For a personalized demo of how Replicant can transform your contact center, book a walk-through today.

The post Webinar Recap: How Conversational AI Transformed a Financial Services Contact Center appeared first on Replicant.

While customers benefit from many aspects of digitization, many contact centers are experiencing increased staffing challenges as workforce management becomes more difficult every day. 

Fortune reports that in September 2021, 4.3 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs. Labor shortages are expected to remain high in 2022, too. In Fortune’s survey of CEOs, 73% report that labor/skills shortages will disrupt their business in 2022. 

This trend has the potential to drastically disrupt customer experiences, agent morale, and contact center operations. What was already a turbulent industry has become even more difficult. 

How can contact centers strategically address this issue? Below are highlights from our free guide “Preparing for Contact Center Agent Shortages in 2022”.

The Challenges 

On the whole, contact center challenges come down to unpredictability. How long will hiring challenges persist? When will supply chain constraints cool off? Are pandemic-driven working conditions here to stay? 

Customers are well aware of the overall challenges presented by the pandemic, but their patience only goes so far. Today’s customers increasingly expect more options and more high-touch, personalized experiences. Their brand loyalty is more at-risk than ever. 

According to the 2021 Replicant Consumer Survey:

• 91% of consumers reported they have experienced poor customer service in the last six months 
• 70% say it’s harder to reach a real person now than at the beginning of the pandemic
• 56% say the most common form of poor customer service was long wait times

Contact centers are at a crossroads. Choosing a strategy that solves today’s problems while setting their agents up for success in the long-term is key. Here are a few of the most common approaches.

Strategy 1: Improve Workforce Management Optimization

The complexities of 2021 have impacted agents as much as they have customers. Whether your contact center implements outsourcing, automation, or a combination of both, retaining your in-house talent should be a primary focus in 2022.

• Deflect to self-service. Provide customers with a coordinated journey for self-service to offload repetitive work from agents. But keep in mind that self-service options should not just deflect customers from live agents, it should provide exemplary CSAT scores by allowing them to choose their preferred channel – including the phone. 

• Empower agents with data and support. The more customer information that can be provided to agents during calls and the more assistance they have in how to address or solve the issue, the easier it becomes to deliver satisfying results. Contact center platforms that automatically authenticate customers and provide relevant data to agents greatly improve retention rates.

Strategy 2: Hire a BPO to scale live support

The primary advantage of Business Process Outsourcing is that it’s a straightforward way to add live agents. Every BPO has their own pricing model, but for the most part, you pay for what you need without a long-term investment, no office overhead, and no employee HR costs. 

The downside is that BPOs need to be trained in your business, but they’re not your employees. And, as they typically have high turnover, they may not deliver the same standards of CSAT as you would expect your own staff to provide. 

You lose quite a bit of control over customer experiences when you use a BPO and, while they are good short-term solutions, they don’t solve long-term problems such as poor agent engagement or customer forecasting. 

Strategy 3: Strategically deploy emerging AI technologies

According to our recent survey nearly 80% of consumers said they would speak to an AI agent to avoid long hold times. While 57% of consumers would speak with a conversational machine even if the hold time was only five minutes. We found that 44% of people say that they are more comfortable with AI-based customer service solutions now than they were before the pandemic because they’ve become accustomed to digital interactions. 

Conversational AI has matured enough to be practical and helpful — while proving it can help agents work better and help customers resolve common issues. Initial fears that AI would eliminate human jobs remain unfounded. 

• Conversational AI resolves 100% of tier-1 issues. Conversational AI uses natural language processing, machine learning, and big data to enable computers to converse in a human-like way. This can be via voice, SMS, or chat. Customers can express themselves as if they were talking to a human agent and, through speech recognition, conversational AI is able to respond to multiple intents and changing contexts. It is the closest thing there is to talking to a human.
• Benefits of conversational AI Conversational AI can be deployed within weeks, giving contact centers rapid automation for their most common inbound requests. And where BPOs still require staffing and call forecasting, conversational AI scales with your call volume, meaning you only pay for what you use, when you need it. 

For a full breakdown of the benefits and considerations for each strategy, as well as key data points to consider when getting started with a strategy, download the full guide. 

The post Preparing for Contact Center Agent Shortages in 2022 appeared first on Replicant.

In retail and e-commerce, the holidays mean an increase in order management, return, and delivery inquiries. For insurance and healthcare companies, inclement weather and unpredictable events always lead to claim spikes. And for everyone, continued pandemic and workforce challenges will compound holiday-related contact center traffic like we’ve never seen before. 

But, fortunately, there are many approaches to ringing in the busy season efficiently, and digitization and automation should be at the core of contact center leaders’ strategy. This year, keep your customers happy, hold times to a minimum, and your customer service agents empowered with a well thought-out strategy that minimizes rather than exacerbates the impacts of seasonality.

Here are 5 ways to navigate this year’s seasonality for your contact center. 

1. Make self-service clear

Self-service options like apps, FAQ pages and chatbots are only as good as your customers’ ability to find – and navigate – these resource. Make your self-service options clear wherever a customer may start, and don’t limit them to just online or app-based resources. Customers still prefer the phone as a service option and a strong omnichannel self-service strategy makes this option easy to find for all customers – not just those who navigated to the Help Center on your website. 

Tip: Conversational AI solutions allow customers to resolve 100% of their tier-1 issues naturally over the phone, without having to navigate rigid IVR menus just to be rerouted to your website to find answers. Conversational AI improves CSAT and ensures hold times don’t lead to customer attrition by answering every call. And when escalations do occur, it can initially authenticate customers, schedule an outbound call or collect call summary notes before handing off to an agent and more to make the most out of your customers’ and agents’ time.

2. Reserve agents for the most important calls

Harvard Business Review’s “10 New Call Center Trends & Predictions for 2021/2022” found the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times. The frustration felt by customers is just as impactful on agents. Not only are they required to resolve complex customer concerns, they often must do so while balancing their routine, day-to-day tasks.

Tip: In order to maximize your agents’ ability to provide empathy and understanding to customers, take the burden of tier-1 calls off their plates. An investment in conversational AI automates all tier-1 requests with faster resolution times and higher CSAT scores than any other solution, and allows live agents to focus completely on issues only humans can properly understand. The result? Higher retention rates and satisfaction among both customers and agents.

3. Outsource wisely 

Even with a BPO in your back pocket for “predictable” high call volumes, forecasting challenges will persist. Unless a BPO is your full-time contact center operation, seasonal usage often includes cost overruns due to large training demands and idle agent capacities when overstaffed. While BPOs can greatly reduce hold times and add more available support hours, today’s modern technologies can do the same without any guesswork or cost unknowns. 

Tip: Conversational AI is like having thousands of your best agents on call 24/7 for your customers – and you only need to train it once. Its flexible capacity means you can leverage it when you need it and only pay for what you use. Conversational AI also adds out-of-the-box PCI compliance, HIPAA compliance, and security and redundancies at every step so you don’t have to worry about outages or limitations around what types of requests you’re allowed to use it for. 

4. Make the most of your conversation data

While seasonality presents a complex contact center challenge, there is also opportunity in the rich data conversations that your customers provide. During periods of high call volumes, do everything you can to capture fully transcribed customer conversations and be prepared with a modern dashboard that allows you to discover key trends among your customers. Capturing conversations not only increases your insights into rich data, it allows you to take action immediately to improve call flows. Replicant’s dashboard provides the ability to edit scripts in real-time with point and click functionality so your automation never falls behind.  

5. Plan for 2022

Busy seasons take months to plan for. Whether or not you’re able to accomplish all the optimization you’d like this season, one thing you can always do is learn so you can prepare for 2022. This year has presented challenges unlike anything contact centers have seen before. The conversation data you capture this year can produce insights that will improve your seasonal strategy into next year. Keep track of what tactics work well, what common requests were unsupported by your current automation flows, and think big when it comes to modernizing your contact center. Solutions like conversational AI are more powerful and easier to implement than ever before, and its ROI can quickly grow to completely transform the way you serve your customers. 

The post 5 Ways to Navigate Seasonal Call Volume Spikes appeared first on Replicant.

Let’s assume you’ve addressed the fact that 70% of consumers indicate that it is harder to reach someone in customer service than before the pandemic. And you’ve taken into account that 91% of consumers say they have experienced poor customer service in the past 6 months. 

Now, as contact center leaders set their sights on 2022, the new challenge will be adopting the right qualities to make contact centers amenable to the shortcomings of the previous year to remain adaptable and scalable.

Given that the modern customer is here to stay, as are the changes created by this year’s events, here are some of the most important qualities contact centers should adopt for success in 2022.

Scalable Capacity

The workforce management challenges of 2021 have made one thing clear: predicting staffing needs and hiring cycles is not only an arduous process, but a virtually impossible task, especially as it relates to hiring agents. 

And, it’s not just because there aren’t enough talented agents available to hire – Fortune reports the “Great Resignation” has the economy down 5 million employees from pre-crisis levels – but at the rate most contact centers need to scale, it’s simply unrealistic to expect hiring cycles to align with unpredictable customer demand and seasonality. 

While Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) remains a suitable option, truly scalable capacity gives call centers the ability to respond at a moment’s notice to even the most unpredictable spikes in call volumes. 

Contact centers should have  flexible capacity that is infinitely scalable and only costs money when it’s being used to support their customers. 

Conversational AI is one solution, and is akin to having thousands of your best agents on call at any moment. It eliminates hold times, completely resolves tier-1 issues, and often increases CSAT when compared to IVRs and live support. 

Conversational AI not only prepares contact centers for volume increases, it prevents overstaffing, which quickly leads to cost overruns, especially in relation to BPOs. 

Unlimited Empathy

According to “10 New Call Center Trends & Predictions for 2021/2022”, published by the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times.

It’s been a year of frustration for customers as hiring shortages caused hold times to skyrocket and supply chain challenges created shipping and ordering chaos. How should contact centers respond?

First and foremost, with empathy and understanding. 

Most customers understand that this year’s challenges have been out of most businesses’ control. But to truly empathize with the customer experience,  live agents should be focused completely on issues only humans can properly understand so that customers get the empathetic support they need.

Conversational AI personalizes customer interactions to resolve routine, high-volume requests at unprecedented speeds, which frees up live agents to handle high-empathy issues. 

This symbiosis between conversational AI and agents means customers get the right level of service for their issue, and agents aren’t bogged down with repetitive requests. 

The result? Higher retention rates and satisfaction among both customers and agents.

Around-the-clock Availability

Today’s customers are busy. Part of their changing expectations is that they can receive assistance whenever and wherever they need it. 

The phrase “the best ability is availability” should be a leading mantra for any contact center in 2022. An automation solution with 24/7, 365 capacity means your contact center is always open so customers can get answers at their convenience. 

With a solution like conversational AI, customers can place orders, retrieve account documents, register a new product, start a return – the list goes on and on – at any time of the day or week. 

Depending on their schedules, customers can also schedule a call-back and conversational AI can execute outbound calls to reach them when it’s most convenient.  

Delighting your customers doesn’t have a timestamp, and maximum availability ensures that every time a customer contacts support, they’ll leave with a resolution, not frustrated by inconvenient hold times or unreachable agents.

Deep Customer Insights

In 2022, no customer conversation should go un-analyzed. Contact centers should not just be able to resolve customer issues, but also provide insights into their customer interactions to serve customers better every time. 

In the world of conversational AI, this means your customer conversations are no longer a black box.

With Replicant, contact center leaders get visibility into all customer support conversations. Through a single, user-friendly dashboard, contact center managers can monitor conversations, analyze insights from conversation data, receive recommendations for improvements, and take action. 

Important insights contact centers should track in 2022 include:

• Why customers contact support
• Customer sentiment
• Most successful conversations with A/B testing 
• Call dispositions
• And other KPIS like call volume, average handle time, and customer satisfaction

Downstream Visibility

The other side of the analytics coin is that conversation data is only as good as your ability to take action from it. 

Contact centers need the ability to not just draw concrete conclusions, but see how they can address their gaps and opportunities. 

From conversation insights, contact centers must have the flexibility to take action immediately by updating conversation scripts to create the optimal customer experience. 

Contact center leaders should also have the ability to create new automation flows when trends reveal increases in unsupported customer requests.

Contact centers have long lacked the kind of self-service needed to scale their automation solutions without manual analytics and laborious technical projects.  

But, conversational AI solutions have evolved to the point where every contact center should have instant control and visibility over their conversations. 

The post 5 Must-Have Qualities for Every Contact Center in 2022 appeared first on Replicant.

It also heightened patients’ consumer needs as appointments became harder to book, claims took longer to process, and information became harder to obtain.

That’s because healthcare was subject to the same customer service strain many industries experienced throughout the pandemic: staffing shortages, hiring challenges, and triaging difficulties from unpredictable call volumes.

A recent Deloitte-Scottsdale Institute survey of health systems’ digital transformation initiatives showed that “consumer satisfaction and engagement” is a top goal of 92% of health systems investments.  

How those digital initiatives will take shape is on the minds of every healthcare leader. Here are 5 trends to know going into next year:

Personalization matters

As healthcare moves further into the digital world, patients expect personalization at every step. This can create a familiar experience despite decreases in face-to-face interactions between providers and patients. 

Virtual care solutions must be able to meet the patients where they are, providing multiple methods of engagement that can be personalized to clinical requirements and patient preferences. Removing points of digital friction, such as the need to download an app and use complex authentication processes, is a priority. – Gartner

Conversational AI takes the repetitive and generic call scripts out of patient interactions. It integrates with any backend system to identify callers and locate their records. It greets patients by name and can learn the best time to reach a patient, adding a personal touch while also speeding up the time to resolution. 

Proactive patient care is expected

Healthcare doesn’t start the moment a patient walks into a clinic or end the second they leave an appointment. Today’s consumers expect to have digital resources available to them while preparing for an appointment and well after a visit. 

A superb consumer experience requires the thoughtful analyses of these core processes and the skilled application of technology, process change, culture change and the strengthening of accountability. – Harvard Business Review

Replicant’s outbound messaging and call capabilities make it possible to automatically reach out to patients to provide appointment updates and reminders and ensure they show up prepared. After an appointment, providers can also automate follow-up conversations and share clinic or prescription information to ensure patients always have access to the information they need. 

Workforce management tools must help patients and employees

With workforce optimization on the minds of every healthcare experience leader, no 2022 patient experience solution is complete without tools that make employees’ jobs easier. 

A solution like conversational AI serves both sides of the customer-provider relationship by automating tier-1 calls (reducing hold times to zero for customers) and offloading repetitive tasks from employees. This benefit not only frees your workforce to focus on high-empathy patient interactions, it makes their work more engaging and improves retention rates. 

Conversational AI also scales quickly to an unlimited capacity. Automatically generated insights for unsupported call flows allow your team to respond to customer inquiry trends with new conversation flows that further offload employee tasks. 

Security has never been more important

“Since the onset of the pandemic, health care facilities have been among the top targets for ransomware attacks and will likely continue due to the large amount of personal-sensitive data.” – Deloitte

While daunting, this information is nothing new to healthcare professionals. Any application, software, or AI solution introduced to healthcare must have the redundancies and safeguards in place to protect patient information. 

With Replicant, data is securely encrypted at rest and in transit, backed up regularly, and hosted in secure databases. Replicant is HIPAA, PCI and SOC 2 compliant to protect information at every turn in a patient interaction. 

Population health: Show don’t tell

Every healthcare organization from clinics to hospitals to dentists is facing an increased need to demonstrate they’re doing everything possible to provide best-in-class patient experiences and preventative healthcare support.

With reminders, proactive prescription care, 24/7 accessibility, and realtime reporting throughout, conversational AI makes it easy to not just improve population health, but show your effectiveness. 

“With the help of AI, healthcare organizations can better tackle complex challenges related to population health management like declines in patient satisfaction, rates of readmission and rising costs of care.” – Forbes

Conclusion

2022 will be a pivotal year for how patients receive healthcare and what they expect out of a provider. These trends point to an increased demand for seamless, straightforward service that departs from the long hold times and disjointed experiences that used to define many patients’ view of healthcare. 

“Health systems are only belatedly recognizing the need to provide great medical care and a terrific consumer experience — that performing poorly in one role will impact performance in the other.” – Harvard Business Review

Leaders who take an experience-first approach to serving patients will be the first to see increased satisfaction scores, higher retention and engagement rates, and more productive employees. 

The post Five Key Trends in Patient Experience for 2022 appeared first on Replicant.

According to The 2021 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, the top request of CEOs to CIOs is “digitalization” as CEOs look to CIOs and their teams to “frame and set an agenda for the use of technology.”

But before the upcoming year’s strategies and iterations are set in motion, customer service experts are taking a deeper look to set them up for future success. 

And what they’re finding is completely shifting their idea of innovation. 

According to the survey, the top two reasons for pursuing digital initiatives are to enhance customer experience (58%) and improve employee productivity (57%), categories which were each upended by the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects.

Customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) have long been topics pursued in silos – often led by completely different teams, goals, and information sets.

Enter total experience, or TX. 

TX makes the case for identifying the needs of both the customer and the employee to build more lasting and impactful business outcomes. 

Stakeholders in customer service and workforce management should take note.

It’s a strategy that’s not only growing in prominence, but one that today’s technologies are prepared to meet. Here’s what you should know. 

What customer service leaders should know

The use of total experience leads to better results for the customer, as they’re provided a more comprehensive selection of digital channels to choose from. 

In addition, more empowered employees under a TX approach means greater availability and better conversations for customers who need to interact with an agent. 

Increase both employee and customer retention by investing in multiexperience technologies to improve user experiences across channels, devices, touchpoints and interaction modalities. -Gartner Recommendations

This experience-driven agenda for technology investments is key, according to Gartner. By taking into account every touchpoint of a customer-employee relationship, businesses develop digital initiatives that increase confidence in customers and employees and drive satisfaction and loyalty.

In customer service, this means more productive agents and, in turn, better served customers.  

Taking it one step further, TX should also leverage data and analytics to remove barriers between shared customer-employee experiences. 

For example, if a customer experience leader is able to use technology to surface real-time insights about trending customers requests in a given period, they can quickly develop channels to automate certain flows or make more agents available for tier-2 and above requests. 

Related: Will AI Replace Contact Center Agents?

What workforce management leaders should know

Workforce management challenges have grown in tandem with rising customer demands. For employee experience leaders, it can be difficult to see down the digital transformation roadmap when staffing against customer uncertainty is blocking the way. 

A global talent shortage creates a major obstacle to fulfilling the top priorities of CEOs: growth and a notable increase in, and focus on, technology-related and workforce areas. A total experience strategy would connect customers and employees, supported by technologies and multiple modalities. -Gartner

For contact centers in particular, TX means empowering agents to connect with customers more directly.

This can be achieved with experience-driven solutions that automate tier-1 customer conversations and allow employees to focus on more engaging interactions. 

The key for workforce management leaders is finding an automation solution that can make this happen and maintain or even improve customer satisfaction scores at the same time. 

For the employee, TX innovation should also make their technology interactions more seamless. A solution shouldn’t just offload tasks, but work alongside agents to execute intelligent conversation handoffs and generate work orders, tickets, or automated summaries when there’s crossover between employees and automation. 

Employee experience leaders can use TX to provide a framework. They can join CX leaders in advocating for the customer, while ensuring that any investment takes into account the employee as an equally important stakeholder. 

Why every business leader should care

Gartner’s strategic planning assumption is that “By 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels.”

Whether CX or EX has undergone more growth – or seen more challenges – at your organization, it’s easy to see how recent market challenges are bringing the two worlds together. 

Isolating the customer from the employee from a technology standpoint may make sense on a departmental level, but as the world shifts more rapidly every year to a digital ecosystem, the pain points of siloed strategies will only grow. 

As a Top Strategic Technology Trend for 2022, TX affords leaders the best opportunity to explore modern technologies that focus on reducing friction at every turn of a customer journey and every interaction an employee has with technology. 

The post What is Total Experience (TX)? appeared first on Replicant.

Hiring shortages, high agent turnover, productivity declines, and unpredictable surges in customer demands and call volumes are just a few of the challenges facing today’s contact center leaders.

From insurance, to e-commerce, to telecommunications, contact centers have quietly become one of the most scrutinized departments across every industry.

According to “10 New Call Center Trends & Predictions for 2021/2022”, published by the Harvard Business Review, the pandemic has created 68% more call escalations, 50% more difficult calls and 34% longer hold times.

What takes the issue from problem to crisis is the fact that hiring customer service agents has never been harder, nor more important. Fortune reports the “Great Resignation” has the economy down 5 million employees from pre-crisis levels.

Our recent survey reveals brands that don’t address gaps in customer service are at risk, with 76% of respondents saying a poor customer service experience negatively impacts their perception of a brand and one in three saying it affects loyalty.

In our guide “Overcome the Contact Center Crisis with Conversational AI,” we outline why conversational AI is leading contact centers back into customers’ good graces with answers to some of the industry’s most pressing and timely challenges.

Here are some of the highlights:

Elasticity creates contingency plans

Like any effective crisis response, a good strategy begins with emergency preparedness. Elastic capacity – a defining feature of conversational AI – adds instant flexibility to contact centers who are at the mercy of unpredictable call volumes.

This is reducing the need for industry leaders to hire and balloon costs when volumes change. It is also eliminating the need to notify a third party vendor that you’re anticipating a surge. When call volumes spike, conversational AI automatically responds in tandem.

Instant ROI alleviates budget constraints

From an operational standpoint, conversational AI is reducing OpEx costs for contact centers while ensuring that they can scale service to a virtually unlimited number of customers — without adding human agents, hiring a BPO, or investing in the costs and time of training new agents quickly.

The pandemic has strained budgets, but AI improves efficiency and streamlines processes and workflows with the kind of ROI leaders need more than ever.

Discover your conversational AI value with the Replicant ROI Calculator.

Natural conversational AI achieves results

Natural language processing, machine learning, and big data enables conversational AI to converse in a human-like way. Instead of having customers attempt to hit certain keywords, callers can express themselves naturally.

Through speech recognition, conversational AI is able to respond to multiple intents and changing contexts, allowing it to resolve the majority of tier-1 requests without a live agent.

More empowered agents leads to less turnover

Conversational AI provides customers with a premium experience, while reserving human agents for higher-level support, cross-selling and upselling opportunities. It allows agents to deliver better support while making their jobs less stressful.

It fundamentally changes how contact centers operate by introducing an additional “digital workforce” that completes tasks alongside human agents to deliver better customer experiences while improving employee retention and productivity.

Customer frustrations are put to rest

Conversational AI is allowing contact centers to directly address the most common complaints levied by today’s customer. Hold times are eliminated entirely. Service becomes available 24/7, year-round. Customers don’t need to repeat themselves or conform to machine-like patterns of speech. And contact centers don’t need to retrain agents to see their CSAT scores improve with each call.

Conclusion

As contact centers map a new way forward following a tumultuous two years, conversational AI is doing more than just bridging the gap. It’s allowing industry leaders to rethink what’s possible when serving the modern customer and optimizing their workforce management strategies.

The post From Understaffed to Overprepared: How Contact Centers are Bouncing Back appeared first on Replicant.

We hear you. Conversational AI has made huge strides to become the automation solution of choice for both customers and contact center leaders. Its ability to interact naturally with humans to completely resolve consumer issues and excel across channels for a seamless customer experience, places it at the cutting edge.

But the benefits conversational AI provides in improving customer interactions are just the tip of the iceberg. Zooming out, here are 10 of the most unexpected business outcomes that contact center leaders can realize after they choose to implement a conversational AI like Replicant’s Thinking Machine. 

1. Speed-to-value

When contact center leaders think of technology implementations, they often picture months- to year-long endeavors that require constant management to get a solution to the finish line. We don’t blame you. But conversational AI isn’t a code-heavy or from-scratch undertaking. Contact centers can expect to hit milestones with ease because conversational AI comes purpose built for customer service.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine includes models already trained on customer service data and it’s deployed faster across any use-case with Replicant Powers. It seamlessly integrates with existing contact center solutions, provides enterprise-grade security, and is production-ready within weeks without waiting on heavy customization timelines.

2. 24/7 availability

Consumers have made their feelings clear: they’re tired of waiting. One of the most important benefits of a fast conversational AI implementation is that your consumers can start interacting with your brand to get resolutions to their issues immediately. With conversational AI, contact centers can provide full issue resolution around the clock, through weekends and holidays, without paying premiums for off-hour agent support, or outsourcing to costly BPOs.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine scales up or down when you need it, to be there when agent availability is low and calls spike unpredictably, regardless of volume. Customers can trust that their brand of choice will be available to solve their problems whenever and wherever it’s most convenient for them, without ever waiting on hold. 

3. Game-changing analytics

When complemented with the right platform, conversational AI provides out-of-the box analytics that don’t simply show the success rates and dispositions of customer interactions, but help contact centers optimize their operations as a whole. Instantly searchable and automatically tagged by intent, customer interactions flow directly into user-friendly dashboards for easier management and greater visibility.

This makes it easy to QA full conversation transcripts and view insights like what’s working, where there’s room for improvement, and easily test and edit in Conversation Builder. Replicant makes it simpler than ever for contact centers to surface previously unsupported conversation flows, introduce new ones, and continuously improve scripts to better serve customers. 

4. Efficient agent collaboration

Conversational AI doesn’t succeed in a vacuum, and certainly doesn’t aim to take the place of live agents. The technology thrives at handling both straightforward and complex tier-1 requests, as well as ensuring that agents are set up for success with context when calls require human intervention. 

Contact center agents can expect to benefit from automatically generated call summary notes in instances where escalation takes place and callers are pre-authenticated to get to the heart of customer issues faster. With greater collaboration, agents are freed from handling repetitive tasks, and empowered to focus on using their creativity and empathy to resolve top tier customer issues.

5. A back-office all-star 

The Replicant Thinking Machine goes beyond “talking the talk”; it acts like any high-performing agent and integrates seamlessly with the most commonly used systems. Its ability to authenticate callers, open service tickets, update customer information, close cases once resolved, and more, only add to the massive efficiency gains contact centers receive operationally when they implement conversational AI. Learn more about Replicant Thinking Machine’s integrations here. Trust us, your agents with thank you, too. 

6. Increased customer satisfaction

Our 2021 Contact Center Survey found that 70% of consumers find it harder to reach someone in customer service than before the pandemic. 91% said they have experienced poor customer service in the past 6 months. More importantly, 75% of respondents feel that poor customer service gives a negative impression of a brand. 

These statistics are at the core of what the Replicant Thinking Machine solves. Our 100% success rate of conversational AI deployments all boast CSAT scores in the mid-to-high 4s (out of 5) and build on the trust established by some of the most reputable Fortune 500 brands. For tier-1 requests, the Replicant Thinking Machine even regularly outperforms live agents in CSAT due to its ability to resolve issues quickly, naturally and with zero hold times ever. 

“Our mission is to deliver something high quality and unique for older adults and we want to innovate within our customer service as well. We wanted our customer service to feel seamless and personal without the typical burdens of automated calls like customers repeating themselves, having to wait on hold, or getting stuck in IVR menus.” – E-commerce Replicant Customer

7. Endless expansion opportunities

It sounds simple, but starting small is the key to scaling conversational AI. For example, using conversational AI to provide order information to customers during a busy holiday season can provide value not only in the short term, but also long term. Beyond eliminating hold times for these inquiries during the holidays, contact center leaders might also get insights into new issues that customers are inquiring about.

The Replicant Thinking Machine can be deployed to support immediate conversation flow types like the holiday example referenced above, while surfacing new ones, and eventually function as an IVR replacement. Once you see conversational AI’s effectiveness in one use-case, additional applications will begin to pop up endlessly, driving exponential ROI.

8. Resolution over deflection

Not every conversation is best served by artificial intelligence, and success rates shouldn’t be measured solely on conversational AI’s ability to resolve intended conversation flows. The Replicant Thinking Machine understands this, and is trained to quickly and intelligently pass conversations that are out of its scope to a live agent. 

Too often, customers with an obvious need to speak to an agent are forced to listen to long menus, or are deflected to self-service channels like apps or FAQs that don’t apply to their issue. With conversational AI, contact centers can automate intelligent routing to agents and improve CSAT scores by quickly getting live agents to handle the right types of customer issues.

9. Continuous innovation

Contact centers who adopt conversational AI enter a path of continuous improvement and innovation with a single investment. Replicant’s Thinking Machine not only gets smarter with each of the millions of interactions it performs every month, but is constantly improved with additional functionality. 

Chat, SMS, secure FlexForms, precise geotagging, and multi-language are just some of the capabilities that propel your automation roadmap forward. While you can think of Replicant as your “agent of the month,” our team of experts are your go-to resource for finding additional areas of value to ensure your investment remains a market leader, even as the technology advances.

10. Value for every stakeholder

Conversational AI provides value to all stakeholders including customers, contact center leaders and agents. Customers receive resolutions to their immediate pain points. Contact center leaders drive better customer experiences with better insights through informed conversations. And, agents are empowered to focus on what they do best, resolving high impact customer issues for higher job satisfaction.

Customer service expectations have changed with a world turned upside down by unprecedented challenges, and conversational AI is built to bring value to every touchpoint in the modern contact center experience. 

The post Top 10 Contact Center Outcomes of Conversational AI appeared first on Replicant.

Many people can probably remember feeling a sense of dread when calling a business and finding themselves stuck in an automated phone tree. Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) driven call center analytics technology has made significant strides in recent years, both in terms of being more helpful to consumers as well as companies.

On the consumer side, pressing choice-limited buttons has been replaced by conversational AI technology, improving customer experience. Consumers can now find answers to common questions using natural language much faster than remaining on hold for long periods of time. According to a Harris Poll, business executives have replaced cost-cutting with an improved customer experience as the first reason to invest in conversational AI.

On the business side, AI technology allows companies to not only divert basic, easy-to-answer questions to an automated solution but also to collect a vast amount of data that can provide actionable analytics and insights for continuous improvement and new business development.

How can real-time analytics help my call center?

Real-time and predictive analytics can provide deep insights into everything that happens on a call. An effective conversational AI analytics tool should analyze call disposition, generate tags for conversation turns and events, and produce transcripts of every call. All of this data provides the business with opportunities to improve customer service.

How can analytics improve call center procedures?

A good dashboard should show opportunities like the percentage of calls that present upselling potential, or the percentage of calls that are being abandoned and the reasons why. These trends can present opportunities to optimize call flows, which, in turn, increases customer satisfaction.

Do conversational AI records contain sensitive customer data?

Although consumers are willing to share more personal data than ever in order to have a customized experience with businesses today, the question of security and sensitive information is an important one.

As you consider AI-driven solutions for call center operations, be sure you choose one that is compliant with both the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI). Logged transcripts of customer-based data should automatically redact sensitive information like credit card numbers.

What are the benefits of conversational AI?

By collecting business intelligence data from AI-driven call center technology, businesses can gain real time insights and easily review and improve call performance. AI systems should be machine learning continuously, and every call flow can be compared by building in A/B testing to optimize the efficiency of how requests are handled.

Conversational AI doesn’t just automate and resolve customer phone calls, it provides unparalleled insights into customer behavior. According to GetVOIP, a cloud communication advisor, there is a 61 percent improvement in customer satisfaction in companies that combine AI with human interaction. By using call center analytics, businesses can better view and analyze customer needs through regularly generated reports that will track key performance indicators and resolve issues that are causing longer handle times. 

Conclusion

Data and analytics is what drives artificial intelligence to provide meaningful customer experiences. The right solution can help businesses scale up quickly. Learn more about how fast and accurate our conversational AI solutions are.

The post Call Center Analytics, Insights, & Conversational AI appeared first on Replicant.

Intelligent solutions in contact centers are nothing new. They’ve been used throughout the industry in some form for a while now, helping agents receive calls, matching customers to the right department, and making it easier to automate call transcription.

But as call volumes grow, customer expectations skyrocket, and hiring challenges persist, it’s never been more important for industry leaders to distinguish between the types of intelligence available in the market today.

Here’s a breakdown of three of the most impactful technologies commonly leveraged in call centers, from the traditional to the cutting edge.

Call Routing

What it does

The most common form of call center intelligence is very basic: routing solutions like interactive voice response (IVR) and frontend menus that transfer callers to applicable agents, deflect to other self-service resources, or attempt to contain calls with packaged answers to keyword-driven questions.

For example, in these instances, the customer might say they have a payment question, so the IVR routes them to the billing department, an online or app-based page, or attempts to answer the question itself.

Routing solutions like these replace older menu systems that asked callers to press “1” or “2” for select services, or flows that would autoplay long, rigid menus. Some routing solutions can even perform back-office functions like data entry and act as virtual agents for specific tasks.

Where it falls short:

What dates this form of “intelligence” is its user experience. The solution was initially designed to make the most of hold times and prevent agents from having to extract initial customer intents. Now, it often leads to frustrated callers.

In routing-oriented solutions, for example, an IVR may understand that a customer’s question can be resolved through the organization’s app. In response, it prompts the customer to open their smartphone’s app store, download an app, and create an account.

Aside from essentially creating four more steps for the customer, this solution doesn’t consider that the caller could have been driving during the call, or might not have a strong enough connection on their phone to download an app, leading to more rather than fewer inefficiencies.

What seemed to both the customer and IVR as a simple request now leaves the caller feeling like they’ve just wasted time by contacting customer service and can’t get answers through their preferred channel.

Conclusion:

Public expectations of human-to-machine interactions have changed. If the experience isn’t as simple as talking to their smartphone or at-home virtual assistant, brands are already fighting an uphill battle.

Transcription automation

What it does:

Call center conversations are often referred to as black boxes of data that industry leaders struggle to “open up” to leverage.

Transcription intelligence does the work of automatically putting these conversations into writing so they don’t gather dust in audio files. This unlocks customer interactions for fast, data-driven analysis.

Many legacy CCaaS providers have implemented transcription services as part of their core technology. This added layer brings the same technology built for personal solutions like countertop and smartphone assistants to the contact center. It adds greater visibility into contact center operations and customer data. 

Where it falls short:

Transcription intelligence gets closer to modern AI solutions with a ubiquitous and effective solution for processing natural language. But the technology isn’t built for customer service specifically.

General transcription often struggles with names, alphanumeric strings, and numbers because it’s not advanced enough to handle complex, human-like conversations with a customer. In fact, these interactions aren’t expected to be necessary in the typical conversations that these transcription solutions are built for. 

Many transcription bots can also be static, transcribing what they hear to the best of their ability without adding new intents, words, or synonyms to their dictionary. Inference accuracy and, by association, customer satisfaction, goes down the longer a bot stays online without improving.

Conclusion:

This is another stark example of the difference between the theoretical benefits of adding intelligence to contact centers and the actualized benefit of the technology. Leaders should look for intelligence solutions that improve agents’ toolsets and call centers’ data while also getting better with every call. 

Conversational AI

What it does:

The third category of contact center intelligence is conversational AI which represents the cutting edge of industry technologies available today.

Conversational AI is artificial intelligence turned up to 100%. It can fully resolve customer requests without having to reroute calls. It can transcribe customer service-specific requests and also intelligently tag success rates. And it can distinguish multiple intents and dispositions in fractions of a second and self-improve with each interaction.

The technology has come a long way since its inception and adopters are seeing transformational changes not just in how their employees, phone systems, and data management work, but how customers, agents and internal systems come together to create efficiencies.

Where it stands out:

Practically, there’s a night and day difference between conversational AI and routing or transcription solutions. Gone are sentences like “If you’re calling to speak to X say or press Y,” replaced instead with a machine learning brain that instantly understands the difference between one intent, multiple intents, entities, and the relationships between them all.

A sentence like “I’d like to update my credit card, add a new address, and order a large pizza with pepperoni, olives, and gluten-free crust” can get a 100% accurate response from conversational AI without a delay. Call centers have identified this ability as a crucial benefit for customers.

Conversational AI transcription is also purpose-built for names, alphanumeric strings, email addresses, numbers, and other customer-specific interactions. It can accurately intake these items while performing precise entity extraction at the same time.

Finally, since conversational AI is purpose-built for contact centers, the solution is essentially ready for production when a call center purchases it. There’s no need to spend months or years perfecting a customized solution, or adding third-party AI on top of it.

Conclusion:

While this summary scratches the surface of conversational AI’s capabilities, the main takeaway should be this: the degree of intelligence directly impacts the user experience.

The same way that two websites built on the same platform can yield one extremely frustrating experience and one simple, elegant experience, conversational design can make or break a customer’s call.

The difference between solutions that have been around for years and conversational AI is that the former is built to bridge gaps and add marginal improvements to contact centers while the latter is designed to completely transform contact center and customer experiences.

The post Distinguishing Between Call Routing, Transcribing and Conversational AI  appeared first on Replicant.

If you’re a customer service change-maker, call center leader, or simply in the business of identifying and evangelizing innovation, this free guide is for you.

Over the last few years, AI has matured enough to deliver practical outcomes that are permanently changing the customer service experience for many industries.

Conversational AI is accomplishing this through natural human-to-machine interactions that sound nothing like the “Press 1 to make an appointment” menus of yesteryear. 

It’s a completely new way of meeting customer expectations for fast, accurate, contextual service, while generating significant benefits for the business.

Customers can ask multiple questions in a single go, speak freely without attempting to hit keywords, and spend less time repeating themselves or waiting for an answer on hold. 

That’s because modern conversational AI is fast, responding in less than one second between turns. It’s accurate, boasting an over 94% inference accuracy. And it’s smart, using continuous learning to get better at its job over time. 

For businesses, this means their call centers can completely eliminate wait times. They can rest assured knowing an intelligent Thinking Machine is handling tier-1 calls with the same success rate – sometimes better – as human agents.

This leads to higher customer satisfaction scores, lower costs, and more flexibility for human agents to handle calls only they can – complex issues, high-empathy situations, or those requiring creative thinking. 

And the most important part? Conversational AI is just getting started, with infinite applications and use cases being deployed every day. 

The Definitive Guide to Conversational AI is your free resource to understanding the game-changing technology from the ground up. How it started. What technologies and breakthroughs it’s built on. All the way to the important questions you need to ask before implementing it for your business.

From start to finish, here’s what you’ll learn:

• What conversational AI is and how it works 
• The benefits of the technology 
• Common misconceptions about conversational AI 
• How to get started with conversational AI
• How to identify use cases for the technology
• How to prepare agents for the technology
• The differences between building and buying a solution
• What to look for in a conversational AI partner
• And much more…

The post Introducing the Definitive Guide to Conversational AI appeared first on Replicant.

In the two years since the last in-person ITC conference, the world has been flipped on its head by the Covid-19 pandemic and unpredictable weather patterns. And policyholders from drivers, to homeowners, to businesses, are as plugged in as ever to their insurance coverage. 

For insurance companies, heightened expectations mean they must adopt technologies that allow them to move as fast as possible to deliver quality customer experiences around the clock without sacrificing security or efficiency.

Here’s a look at the most important conversations that took place.

Policyholder experiences must be seamless

As insurance companies create new pathways to serve customers, the policyholder must be kept at the center of their decisions. Whether online, offline, omnichannel, or over the phone, customers must experience the same values and brand elements that caused them to sign up in the first place. 

Insurers must be acutely aware that any customer-facing solution they adopt not only offers a branded experience, but one grounded in ethics. In conversational AI solutions, for example, this means using carefully crafted natural language models that actively remove biases to understand people and languages equitably while offering familiar reliability.

ROI is paramount

Before introducing new technologies to an insurance organization, transformation leaders must know what their return will be. Important questions to ask often start with their own employees. How will a solution save time and empower as many team members as possible – not just management? How will decision-makers track value? And, ultimately, how will a given solution’s value be tracked? 

Insurers must be diligent and utilize tools like ROI calculators to make decisions while ensuring a given solution comes with easy-to-use dashboards that give agents and leaders real-time insights.  

Building vs. buying vs. partnering

As digital transformation becomes ubiquitous throughout the insurance industry, it’s more common for businesses to ask what solutions they can build themselves. Conversely, with a growing market of purchasable technology, decision-makers are more often looking for reliable expertise to come with any given solution. 

Important questions to ask when exploring each avenue include whether your organization has the resources not only to build a solution, but the time and dedicated know-how to manage it long-term. When buying a solution, make sure you’re getting a partner versus a vendor – a team dedicated to your customers, your ROI, and a relationship built on trust. 

Solutions must land and expand

With so many technologies in the market, it’s paramount that insurers don’t simply buy off the shelf year after year. Solutions must get better with age – not depreciate the second they reach production. This is especially important in AI solutions, a field that is improving at a rapid pace.

“Continuous learning in conversational AI means an entire ecosystem of learning,” said Replicant CTO and co-founder Benjamin Gleitzman at our ITC demo. “A solution that automatically improves its ability to understand customers with every interaction, but also has the agility to be regularly improved as a technology to stay ahead of the innovation curve.” 

Security is non-negotiable

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, people will face a growing host of threats from a range of sources,” Chris Krebs, former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during his talk Tuesday. “As connectivity increases, so will threat actors — state actors, criminals and everyone in between.” 

It is non-negotiable that insurers, their customers, and their solutions have full confidence that services are secure and their information protected. This not only means operating all procedures under PCI, SOC 2, and HIPAA compliance, but partnering with solution providers that have redundancies and fail-safes to protect against infiltrations.  

Want Replicant’s full ITC demo experience? Book a virtual walkthrough today.

The post Insurance Innovated: Top Takeaways from InsureTech Connect 2021 appeared first on Replicant.

“Fifty-two percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the Covid crisis,” said the report, citing a study by PwC. “Just about all, 86%, say that AI is becoming a ‘mainstream technology’ at their company in 2021.”

This is especially true for contact centers. Business leaders who accelerated digital transformation out of necessity in 2021 have been pleasantly surprised by AI’s ability to resolve customer service requests and eliminate hold times.

Technologies like conversational AI specifically have matured exponentially since 2019, and are now apt enough to not only cover pandemic-related business gaps, but add ROI well beyond 2021.

Here’s how AI is shaping contact centers of the future: 

Staffing Solutions

Compensating for the skills shortages caused by Covid-19 has presented many new challenges of its own. Contact centers, for example, found that training new agents remotely or increasing their investments in business process outsourcing (BPOs) was time-consuming and expensive. 

In cases where contact centers needed a contingency plan, conversational AI could deploy in weeks and handle fluctuating call volumes at a fraction of the cost, without impacting the customer experience.

Moreover, conversational AI’s ability to resolve the majority of common customer issues is a ringing example of how AI can increase agent retention by offloading repetitive tasks and freeing agents to leverage their creative and empathetic skills to resolve more complex customer issues.

“AI is already beginning to help fill skills shortages of the existing workforce through career transition support tools,” said Rob Jekielek in the report, managing director with Harris Poll. “AI is also helping employees do their existing and evolving jobs better and faster using digital assistants and in-house AI-driven training programs.”

Productivity Boosts

When AI solutions are paired with outcome-driven workflows, business efficiency goes up in unforeseen ways. Conversational AI, for example, doesn’t just resolve tier-1 customer calls, it can intelligently route urgent call types to human agents.

At the same time, conversational AI can automatically summarize call notes and log them in call centers’ CRMs. It can also support revenue-generating use-cases like automated outbound calls to follow up with customers or remind them of impending renewal dates without requiring time on behalf of agents.

All of these are additional benefits to resolving tier-1 customer service issues that contact centers can’t achieve without the help of automation.

“Most executives (74%) not only anticipate AI will deliver more efficient business processes, but also help to create new business models (55%) and enable the creation of new products and services (54%),” the report found.

A real-time call breakdown from Replicant’s conversational AI analytics dashboard.

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