It’s Time to Modernize Your Voice Channel

Today’s customers have unprecedented options when it comes to engaging with your organization. They can email. They can live chat. They can converse with a digital intelligent virtual assistant from their mobile device.

Here’s the thing, though—you still need to provide an excellent experience for the customers who want to pick up the phone. In fact, recent Verint research found that about 40 percent of those surveyed said they prefer to reach out to a company primarily over the phone.

With that in mind, your organization needs to be prepared to deliver excellent self-service to those callers regardless of the complexity of their problem.

To do that you need to embrace a modern approach to your voice channel.

This means providing your callers with AI-powered self-service with an intelligent virtual assistant in the voice channel, so that you can increase agent capacity, while also saving money by containing more calls.

It also means, of course, evolving beyond your current interactive voice response (IVR) system to provide an experience that meets current customers’ expectations. As well, it means eliminating long hold times and making your voice channel secure from fraudsters.

And ultimately, it means saving your contact center money and adding efficiency for your operations.

Modernizing Shouldn’t Be Risky, Expensive or Lengthy

A modern voice channel allows for both self-service and assisted service through a combination of traditional telephony and conversational AI solutions.

Some contact center managers hear this and think of a long deployment and implementation process that requires them to tear down the platforms they’ve come to trust, switch telephony providers and ACD systems. That’s not the case, at least when it comes to how we do it at Verint.

Modernizing your voice channel shouldn’t be a rip-and-replace experience. Rather, when you upgrade your voice channel with an AI-powered intelligent virtual assistant like Verint IVA Voice, you can easily augment your existing call flows, without disruption or any long, expensive infrastructure changes.

You can also integrate your IVA with your current CRM systems, so you can build upon your existing CX efforts.

This process of modernizing your voice channel also doesn’t need to be a drawn-out, frustrating experience. At Verint, we can implement an IVA into your voice channel in a matter of weeks, not months—taking the risk out of your deployment so you can begin seeing immediate outcomes for your customers, your live agents, and your contact center budget.

Voice IVA vs. Today’s IVR

In the modern CX landscape, a legacy IVR that only provides basic voice responses and rudimentary routing capabilities isn’t going to cut it. Our research has shown that customers are easily frustrated in the voice channel.

They won’t tolerate endless menus and, pretty soon, they’ll be shouting “customer representative” in a bid to fast track their way to a human agent—boosting your labor costs and hurting contact center efficiency.

By placing an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) powered by next-generation conversational AI as the first point of contact when you receive a call, you’re not short-changing your customer. Rather, you’re empowering them to quickly direct their conversation to where it needs to go.

With a voice-enabled IVA, your customers receive personalized interactions based on prior interaction history with your company. Verint IVA Voice, for example, goes far beyond the capabilities of a simple question-and-answer chatbot.

Using a variety of language models, including generative AI, it can provide a transactional experience instead of just delivering information. Verint IVA Voice can, for example, reset a customer’s password or send them a new insurance identification card or rebook their flight—all without the need for human intervention.

Beyond that, the IVA should be able to provide multi-intent understanding. This means that it can understand when a customer needs help with multiple issues and can handle them one at a time.

This allows for first contact resolution within the voice channel, providing true interaction containment that saves your agents’ time and delivers big savings for your contact center operations. At the same time, your customer walks away with everything they need.

Better Transfers, Better Routing Experiences

We know your next question: but what if the IVA can’t give the customer everything they need?

That will certainly happen at times, because some interactions do need a human touch. And moreover, your customers deserve to speak to a live agent when they haven’t received their desired resolution.

A modern voice channel should be able to use AI capabilities to provide a seamless experience that goes beyond basic routing. It should be able to transfer a caller across channels without skipping a beat.

At Verint, we use our Smart Transfer Bot to gather and deliver context from multiple sources in real time to deliver the right outcome. This could be a chat session with a live agent, or perhaps a request for more digital information, or the opportunity to schedule a callback.

The Smart Transfer Bot provides the context of the interaction and the history of the customer in an easy-to-read summary that will save the agent as much as 30 seconds in handle time. This graceful transfer between AI and human agents is vital to delivering a continuous and effortless customer experience that also helps to reduce average call times.

The Smart Transfer Bot saves a financial services firm more than $9 million annually by reducing call durations, all because the bot provided self-service history and context to the agents.

Callbacks Help Smooth Out Peak Call Volume Periods

Now, there’s also the reality that there are times when your live agents are swamped with people who can only get their query resolved by a live agent. Maybe that’s an open enrollment period for an insurance company, a rollout of a new online banking platform for a financial services institution, or an airline facing major interruptions due to a big storm.

Regardless of the cause, a modern voice channel shouldn’t leave customers on hold for long. Customers expect options, and you need to provide that to them by offering a callback.

Through your voice IVA or even through digital channels, they can use Verint Callback to schedule a call when it works for them. This allows you to “smooth out” peak periods to make more efficient use of agents’ time, improve call center productivity, and reduce the need to hire additional resources.

It also reduces the number of repeat callers, which further reduces spikes.

Safe and Secure

Unfortunately, the voice channel is highly susceptible to fraud. In fact, contact center fraud in the U.S. loses companies more than $20 billion each year, and that figure has actually been growing year-over-year.

A modern voice channel needs to be prepared for these attacks, as today’s fraudsters aren’t one-off hackers but rather highly organized, experienced criminals who know how to find weaknesses in your security protocols and exploit them. ​

By exploiting customer and company info and then convincing live agents of their false identity, these criminals can inflict severe financial losses in a short amount of time. And, in addition to monetary losses, customers obviously won’t stay with you if you can’t guarantee a safe experience.​

A modern voice channel needs to put AI-powered solutions to work to stop these fraudsters before they can ever reach a live agent. Using AI algorithms, the Verint Call Risk Scoring Bot analyzes more than 60 data points from telecom metadata and caller behavioral analytics to assign a risk score to every call made into the contact center.

To ensure that the bot can efficiently identify and fend off fraudsters’ ever-evolving tactics, we regularly collaborate with fraud analysts and business sponsors.

Verint Call Risk Scoring Bot can not only detect and prevent fraudulent activities in your call center, but ultimately help lower average handle time for legitimate callers and add an additional layer of customer data protection.

When a major American convenience store chain was hit by a fraud ring that was attacking their gift card system, they deployed Call Risk Scoring to stop the threat. The bot disconnected these known fraudsters, reducing gift card fraud by 95% and saving the company more than $1 million within a year.

A Modern Voice Channel Should Drive Agent Capacity

Again, a modern contact center still needs live agents. Your agents are experts when it comes to your company’s policies, procedures, and values. They do, and will continue to, play a vital role in providing a great customer experience in the voice channel.

A modern voice channel, however, allows these agents to focus on tasks that truly need a human touch. Rather than answering endless calls about resetting a password (as we mentioned above), they can now focus on more complex customer needs, given that those password resets are now handled in the IVA.

In many cases, we’ve seen customers double agent capacity after implementing AI-powered solutions within their contact center operations.

We do this with our team of Verint Agent Copilot Bots. You already met the Smart Transfer Bot above, which saves an average of 30 seconds per call—however, that’s only one way these bots reduce agent handle time. The Knowledge Automation Bot allows an agent to instantly search across all your company’s knowledge sources to get the customer the right answer.

The Coaching Bot delivers the agent with real-time guidance on how to most effectively handle the call, all without disrupting the agent’s workflow. Then, the Wrap Up Bot uses generative AI to deliver the agent a summary of the call based on the call transcription.

Working together, here’s how Verint Agent Copilot Bots can turn a six-minute call into a three-minute call.

Boosting your agent capacity leads to significant contact center savings during a time when finding more agents isn’t just too expensive, it’s also logistically impossible.

In addition, this process of modernization makes your agents’ day-to-day jobs more enjoyable, reducing turnover to help lower re-staffing and training costs.

Want to learn more about how to modernize your voice channel for better customer experience? Book a demo today.