Saved by Zero (Contact Resolution)

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Before trying to establish zero-contact resolution, companies need to understand their customers, advises Jon Allen, vice president and general manager of Telligent, a Verint company. That understanding comes from data collected in previous and future customer interactions. “Feedback is important. You need to know about your customers before they contact you. You need to glean information about their possible interactions. It’s important that people be able to get what they need easily.”

Ideally, customers should be able to find answers to fairly basic questions easily on company websites. For slightly more complex issues, customers might need to do a little more digging. That’s why it’s important to design an automated system using AI that will move the customer through a logical chain of queries to resolve issues quickly, only moving them to human agents when a fully automated resolution will not be possible, several experts agree.

The last thing any customer wants is to get hung up with chatbots, interactive voice response systems, or other automation that cannot help them with their needs.

“You need to be able to automatically move to the next best action,” Allen advises.

To ensure the optimization of zero-contact resolution, it’s important that customers use it whenever possible.

However, there is a risk that at least some customers will feel that companies do not want to talk to them, or that they won’t get any human contact, so it is important to have a plan for customers to be able to exit a system and talk to a human, cautions Roy Atkinson, a group principal analyst at Informa Tech.

“That risk is both to the current interaction and to customer retention. Complex issues are sometimes worked through with assistance from another human, while simple questions can be readily handled through technology. Not every case is suitable for zero-contact resolution, and sometimes customers won’t know until they are working with the system. There should not be any dead ends for customers; it’s important that they are able to change paths to get service.”

Atkinson and others stress that customers shouldn’t feel that they are being forced to use automation.

Even if customers might accept zero-contact resolution for many interactions, poorly designed systems that don’t recognize quickly the need to escalate an interaction to a live agent or that don’t quickly and logically deliver the information customers request will result in customer backlash, according to Janefalkar. “It’s a slippery slope if done poorly.”

A well-designed system, on the other hand, will continue to gain customer acceptance and will improve over time, experts agree.

“We have seen some companies that have implemented robust self-help with AI/machine learning drop contact volume by 30 percent,” Atkinson says.

To ensure customer acceptance, Snell recommends educating customers about automation’s capabilities and advantages.

Sagar Rajgopal, cofounder and chief operations officer at outsourced business services provider Ubiquity Global Services, says customers should be educated early and often about the capabilities and advantages of automated systems, especially as new capabilities are added over time. Not only should the IVR and website contain this information as one of the first items customers experience, but contact center agents should also be encouraged to promote self-service. If, for example, a credit card customer calls in to make a payment, the agent could take the payment and then let the customer know about the automated option for the next time.

But Rajgopal adds that there will always be some customers who prefer live agents and others who prefer zero-contact resolution, which can be predicted by previous customer history and by demographics. Younger customers tend to lean toward automation; older customers are more likely to prefer live agents. But any customer’s preference could change over time or for specific needs. For example, it might be easy to book simple travel plans via zero-contact resolution, but trips involving multiple destinations, hotels, meal plans, and sightseeing tours might be better suited for live agents.