THE SOLUTION
To help address the rising contact center workloads, Probe CX first performed a comprehensive diagnostic analysis to identify the key drivers of customer contacts. This included:
Analyzing and identifying the contact drivers by channel and prioritizing the processes that were best suited for reengineering, automation or deflection to lower-cost, self-service channels.
Modeling the future-state processes to calculate the potential benefits in terms of automation and channel shift.
Developing a roadmap to drive incremental digital uptake and intelligent automation across the client's customer service operations.
Armed with these insights, Probe CX implemented a two-pronged approach centered around call deflection and virtual agent technology:
Call deflection implementation: Oration.
To start, Probe CX integrated Oration by Convai, a cloud-based call-routing plugin with advanced speech recognition capabilities. Oration was able to identify callers who were inquiring about the client's eCommerce platform and, rather than forwarding them to a live call agent, redirected them to the client's web chat service. This was enabled through Oration's banner deflection feature, which would present callers with an option to continue their interaction via the web chat channel.
AI-powered web chat support: virtual agent.
To prevent web chat agents from experiencing further strain, Probe CX developed a tailored virtual agent. This AI-powered assistant was designed to handle a significant portion of the order tracking and checkout-related inquiries that were coming through the chat interface.
When a customer reached out via web chat or was redirected from the Oration call deflection system, the virtual agent would provide direct assistance. If the virtual agent was unable to fully resolve the issue, it would pass the customer details and chat history along to a live web chat agent for further support.
The virtual agent was introduced gradually with an initial rollout to only 5% of the client's online retail traffic during limited weekday business hours (9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday). After only eight weeks of monitoring performance and fine-tuning, the virtual agent was expanded to handle 100% of web chat inquiries across an extended 9am to 9pm, 7-day-a-week schedule. The hours are continually increasing and the virtual agent will eventually operate 24/7.