Artificial Intelligence (AI) empowers contact centre employees

“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” – Doug Conant, CEO

Meet Janice

Janice works in a busy contact centre dealing with customers on the phone on a daily basis. A bright graduate, Janice started enthusiastically in her first role, enjoying the customer contact and doing a great job.

However, a year on and Janice is disillusioned. The repetitive nature of the job, dealing with the same enquiries every day is starting to drag. Even when Janice does get a call that she can get her teeth into, she spends more time on the call trying to search for information on different systems than she does speaking with the customer.

A recent study in 2018 claimed that legacy silo systems in the contact centre costs the industry £2bn annually in lost efficiencies. On average, during a six minute call, an agent spends 75% of the time looking for information and just 25% dealing with the customer.

Janice feels tired and has started taking longer breaks – and more days off sick. Janice’s shine has gone.

Janice is not alone. The same UK Contact Centre Industry report cited that in a medium sized contact centre, 35% of customer agents leave within a year. For larger contact centres, the number is even higher, with staff turnover reported at 44%.

With recruitment, HR and training costs for each new member of staff amounting to £6,100 each time, clearly staff turnover is a big drain on the bottom line.

What does Janice want?

Janice’s manager wants to keep her and other agents like her engaged and happy. She knows that 80% of the queries into the contact centre can be covered by the top 20 frequently asked questions.

Janice wants to be freed from answering these mundane, routine questions to be able to deal with the complex enquiries, the VIPs and the more vulnerable customers.

Remove agent repetition and drive employee engagement in the contact centre

Cirrus technology can help agents like Janice by taking away the everyday tasks and freeing her to focus on more challenging customer calls that require the human touch and where she can excel.
Introducing a Virtual Assistant (like Cirrus Conversational Artificial Intelligence Solution, CAI) can help to support customers out of hours. It can enable your contact centre to direct customers to have their query resolved, even when you’re closed.

Customer processes, such as checking bank balances, answering queries about opening hours and refund policies can be addressed with a self-service portal.
With Cirrus’ Open API, we can integrate with your existing CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics) and back office systems to enable simple transactions and customer verification. Automation speeds up processes, is more cost efficient and improves your customer satisfaction.

Meanwhile, Janice is now free to work on higher value transactions and your VIP customers. The result? An engaged, happy agent and improved customer experience.

Find out more about how Cirrus can help your contact centre do more with less by requesting a demo.