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The aftermath of the global pandemic of 2020 has resulted in a combination of increased customer inquiries and an ongoing labor shortage. Businesses may be considering engaging call center outsourcing companies to help resolve the problem. However, many of these vendors are facing similar challenges. On the other hand, employing contact center AI can offer an automated, optimized, infinitely scalable solution for a fraction of the cost of outsourcing.
To make an informed decision, it is wise to compare call center automation vs outsourcing solutions, weighing the pros and cons of each. Let’s review some of the basics to help provide you with the background to do so.
What is call center automation and what does it entail?
Call center automation involves using contact center AI technology to:
- simultaneously answer an unlimited number of Tier One calls;
- offer customers zero wait time; and,
- free up live agents for more complex interactions.
In addition, data is collected with every conversation, providing comprehensive analytics for contact center management to use for future improvements.
What are the pros and cons of call center outsourcing?
The pros of utilizing call center outsourcing companies revolve around the ability to provide additional live agents to handle overflow or high-volume periods for their clients. This way the client can have additional customer service representatives available without hiring full-time staff.
The cons of this solution include the fact that outsourced call center services require significant training time, suffer from similar labor shortage and retention problems, and require a committed cost investment regardless of usage.
What are the advantages of call center automation?
Modern contact center AI solutions have many advantages as they can take an unlimited number of incoming repetitive calls simultaneously, allowing a business to pay for only what it uses. Conversational AI technologies offer the ability to learn from every interaction, provide comprehensive analytics, and assimilate customer conversations across all channels, including voice, text, and messaging. Gartner reports that more than half of the companies it surveyed are already using some form of automation or conversational AI.
How does automation impact cost?
Automation impacts costs in 3 ways:
- Call center outsourcing companies often charge costly premiums while contact center AI vendors only charge for the automation used.
- Additional customer service support during off-hours and high-volume periods will not cost extra as companies do not have to pay for shift differentials or overtime.
- Automation can resolve common questions and inquiries which leads to customer retention and future sales.
Overall, Replicant increases cost savings by an average of 55% when compared to a highly optimized BPO solution. In addition, our automated solutions are able to log and transcribe every call while offering deep analytics that other outsourcing solutions can’t.
From outsourcing to automation: A customer success story
DoorDash used to rely on outsourcing to handle mealtime call volume spikes. However, the popular food delivery service found that they still had many cancellations and could not capture all their potential business.
DoorDash partnered with Replicant to automate outbound food orders for non-partnered restaurants with higher success rates and lower costs. Restaurants preferred to speak with Replicant’s Thinking Machine because of its straightforward capabilities that made it easy to communicate in a noisy environment. In addition, Replicant was able to reduce order cancellations during busy times by handling an unlimited number of calls simultaneously.
Try This
If you’re ready for an alternative to call center outsourcing companies and would like to try a conversational AI, cloud-based solution, reach out to Replicant today. We’d love to share our technology with you and show you what kind of call center automation ROI you can expect at your organization.
