Over the last two years, demand for call centres has grown as more businesses pivoted online, changing how brands communicate with their customers. Transitioning towards post-pandemic recovery, businesses must continue to transform the way they operate — particularly in the way they deliver customer experience (CX).

New research shows that 93% of customers have higher expectations of CX than before, and according to a 2021 study by Salesforce, as many as 82% of customers expect to continue contacting call centres at pandemic-era levels. These statistics are a testament to the importance of maintaining the efficiency of call centre operations and how this efficiency is key to maintaining customer satisfaction.

Automating Call Centre Conversations with Voice AI

Even in a digital-first era, the human touch is still a valued aspect of interactions between customers and companies. While traditional call centres will remain the backbone of communications with customers, companies will need to look at ways to further enhance the efficiency of call centre work.

This is where voice AI comes in. In recent years, voice AI has emerged as a game changer that could reshape call centre operations with the power of automation. In this post, we take a look at several types of common call centre conversations that voice AI can automate and enhance.

• Lead Generation

Many businesses rely on telemarketing calls to generate and convert leads. However, telemarketing calls often get routed to voicemail and result in low success rates, typically between 1 to 3%. Furthermore, customer agents average 300 to 500 calls daily, while a voice AI assistant can make up to 200,000 calls a day! Voice AI assistants are also able to sort and classify leads based on existing data and resources. Poor quality leads can be dropped, while good quality leads are passed on to human agents who can continue the conversation and subsequently close sales.

• Helpdesk Requests

While most call centres use interactive voice response (IVR) services for customers looking for 24/7 help, the lengthy and complicated menu options may frustrate customers. Past research has also found that more than half of customers abandoned businesses altogether because their call was routed to an IVR system.

In contrast, voice AI assistants are able to handle routine helpdesk requests in a more interactive, empathetic, and intelligent manner, all while maintaining the human touch. An essential part of ‘humanising’ the voice AI experience is to enable it to support more languages and accents, especially those that customers are accustomed to hearing every day. Our voice AI assistants are able to understand and speak more than 15 ASEAN languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, Thai, Hindi, Tamil, Filipino, Vietnamese, and English, and with regional accents. They can also automatically switch between multiple languages, ensuring that multilingual customers can best communicate their needs without language barriers getting in the way.

• Loan Collection

Loan collection might be a difficult task, but voice AI can play a role in simplifying this. For instance, voice AI assistants can schedule calls for loan payment reminders, automating the task and freeing human operators up to take on other tasks. Deploying voice AI also allows companies to pull up the data they need in real-time during these calls. With this data readily available, voice AI assistants can identify the best approach for customers and the types of loan repayment and restructuring options that would most appeal to them.

• Know Your Customer (KYC) Processes

Know Your Customer (KYC) processes are crucial when it comes to the financial services and banking industries. Relevant personal information has to be collected and verified to comply with various regulations. These processes can be lengthy and complicated, and many customers either quit midway or need to be reminded to complete verifications.

By deploying voice AI assistants to take over these processes, they can assist customers in completing them and drive conversions for the business. Voice AI assistants are also able to operate 24/7, which enables them to contact customers and prospects all around the world, without time zone differences getting in the way.  This frees human employees up to focus on specific conversations during their working hours.

• Customer Feedback

Customer service calls often end with a short feedback survey, an important tool for businesses to gather the data they need to improve customer satisfaction. However, callers often opt out of these conversations due to the impersonal nature of automated recordings used for the surveys. This is another scenario in which voice AI assistants can be deployed to gather the feedback that businesses require from their customers. While human agents move on to more complex and high-value tasks, voice AI assistants are able to collect customer data and generate insights that businesses can use to improve customer satisfaction.

A Smarter, More Efficient Customer Experience

Regardless of the industry in which your business operates in, voice AI will be able to enhance your call centre operations and elevate the quality of your customer experience. From automating simple and repetitive tasks to collecting and analysing data, voice AI enables your business to save time and improve communication and engagement with customers. To learn more about how you can adopt voice AI for your call centre operations, contact us today for a discussion or to schedule a product demonstration.