Scaleups — defined as high-growth enterprises that average an annualised growth of 20% over a few years — are characterized by their ambitions to scale rapidly. Comprising both startups as well as established companies undergoing a phase of rapid growth, scaleups commonly onboard millions of customers in a matter of weeks – or even days – by introducing disruptive technologies to improve the way their audiences live, work, or play.

Given the unique DNA of such companies, there is an especially strong imperative to adopt automated customer experience (CX) technologies, that allow them to scale their operations while retaining a high level of customer satisfaction for the millions of new customers navigating their way through the company’s offerings. 

It’s hard to match the level of service provided by a customer service agent attentively listening to a customer’s questions. But such functions would inevitably struggle to deal with millions of new customers onboarded in the span of weeks. At the same time, expanding a team of call centre agents is a tedious process that often spans weeks or months, given the time needed to recruit new workers and train them to handle customers.

On the flip side, while there are technologies such as interactive voice response (IVR) and chatbots that link customers to relevant resources while reducing the load on human agents, these have gained a reputation for being confusing at times, often leading customers through an endless loop of selecting options and being put on hold.

Combining the practicality of traditional CX technologies with the intuition and familiarity of a human voice, Voice AI provides companies with a viable way to streamline their call centre operations, and ultimately maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction while scaling their businesses rapidly.

Read on for 3 reasons why Voice AI can underpin the rapid growth of a scaleup business.

• Keeps call centre operations efficient and productive

While call centre operations deliver high value to companies, turnover rates are notoriously high – often due to the high-stress environment agents are subject to. By automating your call centre operations with Voice AI, the stress on the customer service representative is alleviated. Human agents can then focus on more complex tasks, feeling more fulfilled with their work responsibilities.

For instance, repetitive and tedious tasks such as payment reminder calls can be handled over to Voice AI, which could be the first point of contact for customers. Thereafter, the Voice AI will quickly assess and classify payment intent based on pre-determined data points and pass on more complex matters that require a human touch to an agent. With the agent’s workload significantly reduced, the company is more likely to be able to deliver the level of service needed to ensure business success.

Moreover, Voice AI agents operate 24/7, doing the work of entire teams without associated labour, training, and space management costs. This reduces the need for businesses to worry about mass hiring, training, and upskilling of their workers, all while meeting customer demand and expectations.

• Generates customer insights to help customer retention

On top of streamlining and reducing the workload for human agents, Voice AI is able to evaluate and analyse all calls that come through the company’s call centre and generate valuable data.

By using AI solutions to break down data silos, unify sources and analyse them, businesses can create hyper-personalised experiences for their customers to inspire brand loyalty. Customer data collected during these calls can also be used to generate useful insights that lead to an elevated customer experience, increasing customer retention for the business.

• Supercharges the customer acquisition process

Most businesses rely on call centre operations to reach out to new markets and retain existing customers. However, many scaleups struggle with manpower issues, and might not have the resources to focus on fully staffing a call centre. Furthermore, telemarketing calls typically result in low success rates. By adopting AI-powered voice assistants, large volumes of repetitive calls can be automated and made simultaneously. Voice AI agents can even make up to 200,000 calls an hour — 400 times more than a human agent!

For startups and scaleups, this means that company management is able to focus on strategic hiring for important functions such as R&D roles, instead of trying to hire customer service agents for their telemarketing. Businesses leveraging Voice AI can thus scale up calling capacity more sustainably and quicker than their human-only counterparts.