Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Doesn’t it feel good to call your favourite food joint to order Haleem, and the call centre agent greets you by your name?

With growing competition in most business segments from healthcare, education, food, clothing, banking and telecommunication, Pakistani consumers have become more demanding. Managing customers’ experience has become crucial for the survival of brands.

A handful of Pakistani brands have started the journey to transform the customers’ experience. Still, most are struggling because of processes and technologies.

Personalisation takes a variety of forms. In the physical world, it is about taking care of individual customers. The companies must meet a new standard on digital channels: the “care of one”, an ethos that focuses all decision-making on serving individual customers and their personalised needs. For example, e-commerce players have reset the bar by providing personalised offers. Advertising has also moved in this direction. At the same time, technological innovation has enabled the radical reinvention of the operating model as the cost of creating personalised experiences continues to decrease. This combination allows the companies to double down on hyper-personalisation and the care-of-one approach.

Over the years, I have watched artificial intelligence swiftly move from a thing of the future to a practical element in improving contact centre operations. With the contact centre remaining a vital component of the customers’ acquisition and retention, it seems evident that continual advancements are essential in boosting the success of businesses worldwide.

We now see artificial intelligence play a big support role in the customers’ service. Many Pakistan-based business process outsourcing (BPOs) uses AI for the most menial tasks, like changing addresses. However, when it comes to something bigger, AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes IA (Intelligent Assistant).

Intelligent network interfaces are beyond compare when it comes to improving the contact centre experience for improved client acquisition and retention. Understanding how artificial intelligence beneficially alters the contact centre landscape has helped me see how this feature benefits business operations.

Emotional Sensitivity

To better serve clients, contact centre agents must accurately detect and respond to emotional changes in the caller’s voice. Improperly reading the client’s emotional status can sour the end-user experience and paint the company badly. Since clients share negative business experiences far more often than positive interactions, unfavourable reviews could spread like wildfire due to a single agent’s inability to pick up on these details.

However, an intelligent network has the power to pick up on the tonal differences and speech pattern changes that indicate a heightened emotional state. The system then notifies the contact centre agent about the client’s emotional status to enable a positive result to an interaction that may have otherwise taken a negative path.

The system also has the power to provide feedback about the agent’s emotional response and act as a guide for the use of a beneficial tone. Not surprisingly, contact centres with this dynamic feedback system in place report a 28 per cent increase in the satisfaction of their customers.

We now have solutions where the AI listens to the call in real-time and communicates to the call centre representative what they need to tell the customers. Moreover, in addition, the AI tells the representative what to sell this customers next and what they will need next. They will listen to the call, and the artificial intelligence will, through word recognition, intonation and the context of the call, will be able to do amazing things in five years.

Word choice dictionaries

The clients who dial a contact centre’s number have a complaint or question needing a quick resolution. When calls are improperly routed through the system, the clients feel frustrated before reaching the desired department, making it difficult for the contact agents to fully resolve the issue.

Thankfully, continual improvements in the word choice dictionaries used by the contact centre software vendors actively help improve the client experience by routing the calls to the correct department every time. An intelligent network can detect short and long-tail keywords to accurately direct the client through the menu system without a delay.

Like the tone of voice and speech patterns, word choice is an intelligent indicator of the state of mind of each client. If any clients utilise hostile language, speech analytic software can send the callers to specialised agents to offer an additional layer of service and support. Thus, this intelligent system improves the customer’s relations and boosts cyber-security.

Speech recognition

With each activity day, an intelligent network becomes more adept at learning about the unique needs of its associated client base. The system actively improves service quality by learning how to accurately implement traffic management and speech recognition techniques for each business model. As the client resolution times decrease in response, the quality of service (QoS) stats increase in tandem. Since the system learns day-by-day, a commitment to the utilisation of cloud contact centre software for the long-term has the potential to offer returns in the form of steadily increasing QoS improvements.

Intelligent networks

The telecommunication infrastructure must scale in response, as the interactive voice response (IVR) system learns about the company’s operations. With IVR and intelligent networks as a long-term growth strategy, cloud-managed services facilitate the expansion of a highly scalable infrastructure. Storing software-defined vast area network (SD-WAN) drivers in the cloud allows the IT-managed services to increase exponentially in size through the years.

In the post-Covid world, Pakistani buyers are using more digital channels. The companies in Pakistan should prioritise hyper-personalisation. Of course, the enterprises are at different starting points: incumbents are often slow to shift gears, while startups have the benefit of skipping the learning curve and accelerating their capabilities. The companies across industries had already blazed this trail. It’s now up to executives to follow their lead. Today’s technology allows a Pakistani startup to compete with the large corporations, often without borders.

(The writer is an Edtech expert)