Spring cleaning for your phone-based customer service: giving VoiceBot & IVR a thorough scrub

Automation in customer service has developed at breakneck speed in recent years. That holds true for IVR solutions and voice portals just as much as for the comparatively young field of automated chat and messenger dialogs. All the more reason for companies to make full use of the potential of solutions already in place, or to keep optimizing them. In the following article, we explain what matters most and which tools help you carry out an efficient spring clean specifically in phone-based customer service:

1.) Analyze customer behavior in the dialog

What exactly does the customer want, and does the automated dialog get them to their goal quickly? Are you already recording real customer conversations and chat transcripts in your customer service so you can analyze them with AI support afterwards? If not, now might be exactly the right time to modernize this area. Only this kind of analysis can effectively reveal the different terms and phrasings customers use for identical issues. It also lets you see whether and how dialogs with existing customers differ from those with new customers, and whether the reasons people call have changed significantly over the years. If they have, the dialogs obviously need to be adjusted.

2.) Modernize scripts and professionalize announcements

When customers hang up without having achieved anything, the dialogs themselves can be the reason. What matters isn't just what is said (content), but also how it's phrased (form). Pick up the phone yourself and ask: Is the wording and tone still up to date? Does the voice still fit the company's image, and is it motivating? Is the sound quality still up to today's standards? Often it's a company's own staff who recorded the scripts, which unfortunately tends to show. This is a case where it really pays off to bring in professional voice actors to produce the newly written announcements. Compared to the positive effect on callers, the cost involved is minor. If your announcements are dynamic or change often - for example due to seasonal promotions or information that needs frequent updates - it can make sense to move from statically pre-recorded texts to dynamic TTS (text-to-speech, or speech synthesis). The quality here has improved considerably compared to just a few years ago, as you can easily tell from your smart speaker. More at: www.crealog.com/de/produkte-loesungen/one-number-voice-portal

3. Reduce drop-offs further

Friendly, clearly understandable announcements (not for you - for the callers!) in top sound quality already reduce the number of drop-offs on their own. On top of that: the fewer options you offer in the dialog, the less confusion for callers, and the lower the drop-off rate. It's generally worth finding out how many callers actually follow the paths you designed. Do detours happen often, or do callers even end up going in circles? If so, you risk drop-offs, or more calls get forwarded to the service center than originally planned, which can noticeably worsen your defined KPIs. Do your dialogs already support fully free text or voice input, which gets customers to their goal much faster, especially for more complex requests? If not, it's time to bring your voice portal up to the current state of the art (the gold standard). Then nobody has to sit through endless menu options or work their way through multi-level menus anymore. Just let callers respond freely to the question, "What can I do for you?"

4.) Identify more callers with confidence

For self-service applications, it's worth pre-qualifying or even authenticating the customer up front. Your CRM can then support the dialogs with customers and supply the VoiceBot with important customer and contract data for optimal, automated handling of the request. Secure authentication of the caller also speeds up processes in the service center. Valuable or particularly important customers, and escalated tickets, can then be given priority handling. Equally important: if callers have already been identified by the VoiceBot, agents can be given the customer's data and history before the call is even handed over. This requires linking telephony with the company's CRM systems. Have these IT systems been changed, modernized, or perhaps even moved to the cloud recently? If so, it's worth urgently checking whether all systems still work together smoothly and data is actually exchanged flawlessly.

5.) Improve self-service through natural-language dialogs

Among the key requirements for a high-performing conversational AI solution are innovative speech recognition and language processing technologies, along with fast access to different data sources via interfaces. Only this combination lets an AI-powered customer dialog ensure that the right answer is found for nearly every request. What also particularly satisfies customers and end users: around the clock, they can, for example, start requests via VoiceBot or ChatBot, place orders, check delivery times and use many other services. Today's speech recognition (NLU: Natural Language Understanding) can pick up not just individual words but entire sentence contexts, so even complex questions from the caller are correctly interpreted.

6.) Resolve additional customer requests on the first contact

How many requests (intents) still require a human agent to step in and handle or follow up on them today? Which voice dialogs are structured in a way that still requires the call to be handed over to a service agent for final resolution? Is it worth automating further processes? Our tip: sit down with the CreaLog experts and go through all your use cases at leisure, discussing together which of them can now be reliably resolved end-to-end by a VoiceBot. More at: www.crealog.com/de/top-menue/professional-services/

7.) Give all contact channels access to central information

Many companies that started their self-service strategy with a voice portal now also use ChatBots and messenger services for automated customer communication. These contact channels can offer customers the same information and draw on the same data. This is made possible by modern, AI-powered omnichannel solutions that use a unified data foundation for both voice and text services, so customers get the same quality of service seamlessly across every communication channel, around the clock. Here too, it's worth checking whether this was considered during implementation, and whether voice and chat bots really do access the identical data set - or whether content has to be maintained multiple times.

Did our tips give you some ideas for your own spring cleaning? For even more support, just get in touch with us.

By the way: for an efficient and sustainable spring clean in your own four walls, you'll find matching tips here: https://utopia.de/ratgeber/tipps-fruehjahrsputz-effizienz-nachhaltigkeit/