Supermarket reduces contact center service efforts by 41% with call-to-chat deflection
41%
reduction in contact center service efforts
28%
shift from voice to digital channels
$1M+
savings across employment, infrastructure and operational costs
The client
A leading full-service supermarket retailer.
The challenge
The client's online retail business was experiencing significant year-on-year growth, with annual revenue increases up to 27%. This rapid expansion put substantial strain on the client's contact center operations with their call and web chat agents struggling to keep up with the growing volume of customer inquiries, particularly those related to the client's eCommerce platform.
Customers were reaching out through both voice and digital channels, seeking support with issues including order tracking, checkout processes and other online shopping-related concerns. The overwhelming number of these eCommerce-focused interactions led to increased average handling times, slow case management and an overall decline in customer experience.
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:
1
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.
2
Modeling the future-state processes to calculate the potential benefits in terms of automation and channel shift.
3
Developing a roadmap to drive incremental digital uptake and intelligent automation across the client's customer service operations.
- Call deflection implementation: Oration.
To start, Probe CX integrated Oration, a cloud-based call-routing plugin with advanced speech recognition capabilities. Oration was able to identify callers who were enquiring 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 enquiries 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 enquiries 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.
The result
The combined call deflection and virtual agent capabilities implemented by Probe CX include:
A reduction in effort needed for contact center agents, both call and web-based, to handle eCommerce-related customer interactions by 41%.
The achievement of a 96% accuracy rate for the virtual agent in successfully resolving customer queries.
A 28% shift in customer interactions from traditional voice channels to more efficient digital channels.
The delivery of over $1 million in cost savings related to staffing, infrastructure and operational expenses.
Additionally, in the first six months after the virtual agent went live, there was a 70% reduction in voice calls related to product availability. This freed up the client's more tenured agents to focus on handling more complex customer inquiries.
