Improving customer satisfaction sounds like it would be an easy task - you just need to make every customer on every call happy each and every time.
This, of course, doesn’t account for things like long hold times from large call volumes or high agent attrition from the daily stress of it all. Or rising customer expectations through a need for instant gratification.
When you sit down and consider all the factors to make that goal a reality, it really starts to feel like a pipedream.
This is where Conversational AI comes in. Through intelligent automation and smart recommendations, contact centers are improving customer satisfaction while reducing service costs.
See how this multinational banking leader achieved 70% reduction in call waiting time with AI
Why Improving CSAT is the Best ROI
How many times have you called or messaged a brand and been disappointed by the experience, or lack thereof? The truth is, most of these interactions leave us wanting more.
Consumers have extremely high expectations when it comes to their brand experiences and every year that expectancy gets higher and higher.
For many customers, having a bad experience is enough to change brands. So much so that Businesswire found that 86% of consumers will leave a brand they trusted after only two poor customer experiences. This equals a high cost to pay for a bad customer experience.
Positive customer experiences will create lasting brand advocates and the best, most effective way to do that is by ensuring your agents can put your customers first at every point in the customer journey - and they don’t have to do it alone.
How Artificial Intelligence is Affecting Customer Satisfaction
When applied to customer experiences, Conversational AI uses machine learning and intelligence to truly understand a variety of human intents and to interact with them on a natural, conversational level.
In a study, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers looked at customer perception and examined how AI and employee service quality influence customer satisfaction.
They found that customer satisfaction with AI service drove better customer loyalty because it allowed for greater employee engagement and empathy to their needs.
They also noticed that employees who were supported by AI had better job performance and were less likely to turnover which in turn aided positive customer experience. Polite and satisfied customers are more likely to respond positively to employees and support better attitudes and behaviors in the workplace.
How to Improve CSAT for your Call Center
Improving customer satisfaction means really understanding your consumers wants and fully meeting their needs. This can mean opening communication channels across new platforms, getting detailed customer feedback or finding new ways to empower your agents.
One of the most effective ways to resolve your customers' pain points while improving your agent’s experience is by utilizing intelligent assistive automation.
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) serve as a frontline customer representative, ensuring that the first contact points a customer has with the company are positive and consistent. IVAs provide an opportunity to automate up to 60% of live agent interactions which allow them to spend more time focusing on the customers who need it the most.
How Conversational AI Helps Businesses Achieve Better CSAT
The results that are achieved using Conversational AI to improve CSAT are incredible. In a recent case study, a multinational banking leader who implemented CAI in their customer support process saw a 25% increase in their CSAT scores while saving more than $9M in operational costs!
This major US bank had a major problem. Their contact center was overloaded with customer inquiries on lost and stolen cards, balance transfers between credit card companies, and account statements for loans. The IVR that was supposed to be supporting requests could not contain more than 40% of the callers adding to even higher agent workloads.
The operational cost was rising while customer satisfaction was tanking with an increasing volume of support requests that continued to be routed to human agents.
The financial services firm partnered with Kore.ai to build a smart call deflection and virtual assistant system that could address their need: understanding caller’s intent and smartly deflect the incoming call to web or chat channels to help unclog the call centers.
The results are astounding. 52% of customer calls are handled by intelligent virtual assistants supporting IVR and chat. Over two years, this major US bank saw a 70% reduction in call waiting time and operating costs were reduced $9 Million. With Conversational AI, routine customer requests and transactions can easily be automated to deliver faster service, save human agent time and ultimately increase customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Read the case study to find out how you can automate the most common tasks.
Implementing Your New Call Center Virtual Assistant
So, how do you get to better customer satisfaction and cost savings?
When 75% of business interactions with the outside world are routine or repetitive, there is a lot of upside to implementing intelligent virtual assistants and automation for improving CSAT.
There are a lot of chatbot options on the market today but very few are truly intelligent virtual assistants aimed at supporting businesses.
Creating a unified agent and digital channel experience to deliver faster, smarter, and more highly personalized customer service isn’t easy. This was at the core of why we developed our SmartAssist Platform - to make customer service more manageable.
SmartAssist enables contact centers to deliver a world-class customer service experience by exponentially improving the agent experience through intelligent automation. Our Conversational AI analyzes real-time conversations and serves up the right knowledge articles and proposed next steps so agents can solve customer issues faster.
Turn your team into Super Agents who spend most of their time engaging customers in empathic conversation that translates into rewarding experiences. Making customers happy and empowering agents for success doesn’t have to feel like a pipedream, with Kore.ai you can achieve better CSAT while lowering operating costs.
