By Sourabh Gupta

Sourabh Gupta

Each customer interaction is an opportunity to create a bond and develop a lasting relationship. At present, the most significant barrier to that opportunity is the ability of the average business call center to respond to customers as soon as they reach out. Waiting times are up, frustration is rampant, and everyone – from the customer, to the call center employee, to the CEO – is unhappy with the situation.

Here’s the truth: it’s not the company’s fault.

Customer service failures don’t happen because you’ve deprioritized customer support and the overall customer experience. Instead, most customer interactions are limited by the traditionally cost-prohibitive nature of customer service. Costs have gone up, job retention rates are low, and it’s difficult for companies to have one agent available for every inbound call.

Voice AI as Customer Service Win?

There’s one way to save money and increase customer satisfaction. Voice AI is the game changer that customer service needs to weather The Great Resignation and fix the impending recession.

This machine learning-based technology allows you to create a buffer between your customers and a live representative, an entity as human-like and comfortable as talking to an actual person. Voice AI simulates everything your customers expect from a live agent and can solve small problems and reroute the more complex queries to human agents.

It also saves you money and time.

Proactively Serve Customers, Offer Personalization

Voice AI enables companies to answer customer calls and queries instantly, without the constraint of calls falling within regular working hours. Voice AI can handle complex conversations as it is trained to understand customer pain points and offer solutions. It has access to their conversation history with the company, can check and act on open support requests, and can bring up crucial information such as payment due dates, balances and order status.

In fact, voice AI can quickly guide your customers through the most common types of inquiries at any time, day or night – no human involvement needed.

Other areas in which voice AI shines are maintenance schedule reminders, offer calls and personalized pitches. This isn’t voice spam. It’s an actual call from the company with a clear offer and, more importantly, the ability to answer questions about the offer in real time.

According to recent research, companies that implement voice AI see a spike in their customer satisfaction (CSAT) score and many achieve CSAT scores of 4.0 and above. We also see strong first-call resolution rates and the average wait time falls to zero. The result is a personalized, proactive experience that takes minutes, not hours. It’s a win-win for everyone involved in the customer service process.

Reduce Costs Without Affecting Customer Experiences

One of the biggest challenges in customer service is reducing costs while increasing CSAT scores.

Voice AI agents are seven to 10 times cheaper than manual calls, allowing some contact centers to cut operational costs by 50% while maintaining a high CSAT.

This means you don’t need a call center staffed by two or three overworked agents. Instead, you have a group of happier employees who solve real problems needing a human touch while the AI handles minor inconveniences.

We’ve crunched some of the numbers: For outbound campaigns, you can use voice AI to improve call speed by 70% and reduce customer qualification costs by 60%. Finally, you can reduce the lead qualification cycle time by 70%.

On the back end, the AI can make multiple concurrent calls and process each customer using data from their own dossier. Instead of paying for thousands of cognitively mundane and impersonal calls, voice AI offers a personalized and pleasant alternative.

Scale with Customer Demand

About 70% of your regular customer service calls are repetitive. A call comes in asking about a feature or product quirk that could be answered with a Google search. That said, we don’t want to send customers elsewhere when we can help them ourselves.

Voice AI reduces the operational nightmare of maintaining a large team of human agents performing mundane and nonvalue-adding tasks. The voice AI works with the human team like a host. They set up the experience, get the customer comfortable, and if things escalate, the human can step in with the final touches.

Additionally, every company has received thousands of calls after a big product launch. Customers who might not be comfortable with the new version look for answers to basic questions while new customers want to make the most of the new software. The result? A call center that is jammed from morning to night.

Voice AI lets you scale seamlessly. With it, the bulk of call spikes will be handled by digital voice agents and the human counterparts can grow as needed. This is the first time in information and communications technology (ICT) that a call center can scale similarly to software.

Your customers judge you in many ways. By adding new tech to your customer service tools, you can keep them happy while saving money and time. And, most importantly, you can get the peace of mind that comes with knowing customers’ needs are being met – even while the whole company sleeps.

Sourabh Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Skit.ai, an augmented voice intelligence platform designed to empower contact centers to manage customer inquiries more efficiently. Founded in 2016, the company is operational across India and entered the U.S. market in June 2022. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @Skit_ai on Twitter.