Global Tech Company Multiplies CX and Savings in the Contact Center Using Intelligent Automation
One of the world’s largest technology companies had a goal nearly every business can relate to. They sought to create better experiences for customers calling their contact center, as well as for the agents taking their calls. This brand is known for leading innovation throughout the world—but their customers often received a different impression when they called the company for support.
The interactive voice response (IVR) phone system for their online store, for example, struggled to capture the customer’s true intent; it routed 60 percent of inbound tech support calls to the wrong agent group—usually to sales agents, who either transferred the calls or spent their costly minutes attempting to resolve customers’ issues.
These misrouted calls dialed up operational costs for the contact center, as well as customer and agent frustrations.
An Ideal Starting Point
The company engaged CSG, who saw how to vastly improve the call routing by using a conversational AI-powered IVR. CSG would stand up a virtual voice agent to greet inbound callers and provide selfhelp, as well as route customer inquiries related to order status, sales, billing, account management and tech support.
CSG offered this intent-based call routing capability as part of its comprehensive solution, Intelligent Automation for the Contact Center. The solution, which is powered by CSG XponentTM, applies the CSG Conversational AI platform to engage customers and assist contact center agents in a variety of ways. All its use cases drive toward these
outcomes: creating better customer and agent experiences while reducing operational costs.
For this company, CSG would launch intentbased call routing in the online store IVR as a proof of concept. It was a high-impact starting point, considering the high customer friction and operational costs the online store’s existing system generated.
How the Virtual Agent Works
Conversational AI allows a virtual agent to listen, understand and respond to humans in ways that mimic natural conversation. It greets a customer with an open-ended prompt when they call the contact center (e.g., “What can I help you with today?”). It converts the customer’s response from speech to text, and then it analyzes the text using natural language processing, allowing the AI to zero in on the customer’s underlying intent in ways other IVRs and lesser AI platforms tend to miss.
USE
CASE 1:
STORE IVR
30%+
TO MISROUTED CALLS
2 MIN
The virtual agent combines the customer intent information with dynamic rules and logic, as well as customer account information and customer trends, to respond to customers’ inquiries and service their needs. When the virtual agent tries to resolve the call on its own, but when it determines a live agent is necessary, it uses its intent understanding to route the customer to the right agent group the first time.
The hallmark of an AI system is that it is always learning, and CSG’s platform has accelerators that speed up AI deployment and training. It also uses a single AI “brain,” allowing the company to reuse interface logic and integrations across several channels and use cases. That includes— as this company would realize to its advantage— multiple IVRs.
The centralized nature of the AI promotes consistency throughout the company, and it requires less time and effort to expand the platform to other parts of the enterprise, as well as to other channels. The conversational AI platform can expand globally, as it runs in more than 80 languages. The platform is also easy to modify; this has enabled a fast time-to-market for the global tech company’s updates to their IVR.
Taking Calls by Week 10
Because the crux of the online store IVR’s issue lay in its misrouting, CSG focused on optimizing the system to pinpoint customer intent. CSG designed and developed the proof of concept over multiple sprints, and the new IVR was up and running in only 10 weeks.
The conversational AI immediately reduced misrouted calls from 60% to less than 30%—a figure that continues to shrink as CSG optimizes the company’s system. The “smarter” IVR also helped the company improve live agent metrics: average handle time decreased by two minutes per call, reducing operational costs and getting customers to a resolution faster.
Repeating Success
Seeing the results of the online store IVR, the tech company sought other systems they could similarly improve using Intelligent Automation for the Contact Center. They saw another opportunity with the phone system that supported customers of one of their flagship product lines. The company was trying to contain calls in this product IVR by redirecting customers to the ample self-help content on the product’s website. But the legacy IVR lacked precision in directing callers to the right self-help topics; even after being redirected, customers often had to do additional navigation on the website to find the answers they needed.
To tackle this challenge, the company and CSG set up another virtual agent. It would ask open-ended questions, and, using the customer intent, business logic and contextual data, it would respond to customer questions with answers based on the relevant web pages. Customers could also have the virtual agent send them an SMS text with the links to those pages for further help.
Once the company was routing 100% of the flagship product calls to CSG’s new IVR, they saw agent transfer rates drop from 37% to under 10%. The new IVR was also saving live agent call time by referring 55% of callers to the web resources.
Contributing to this dramatic efficiency boost was the Automatic Number Identification (ANI) Lookup the company was able to install. Using ANI Lookup, the IVR could identify existing customers to help personalize the IVR prompts, streamlining their path to the resource they needed and simplifying their call experience.
Leaders in the company’s contact center were ecstatic to see these results.
“The metrics [are] extremely significant and far exceeded my expectations,” remarked the company’s senior director for contact center technology.
Another leader called the new IVR “such a great advancement in our experiences.”
The company is taking advantage of the solution’s scalability and is deploying three additional applications, including one that will serve customers globally in more than 10 languages. Repeating their successes from one IVR to the next, the company can now ramp up a new conversational AI-powered IVR in just four weeks.
At the same time, the company can continue leveraging data-driven insights to fine-tune the natural language understanding, rules, and logic of the systems they have launched to further push their efficiencies. They are even adding backend API connections to the flagship product IVR, for example, which will add ways for customers to self-serve through the virtual agent. The continued scaling and optimization is helping the company realize ever-increasing value from Intelligent Automation for the Contact Center.
Value and cost reduction, however, are only half of the equation. The sophisticated conversational AI interactions deliver what customers come to expect from the global technology company’s brand, embodying their state-of-the-art identity.
About CSG
CSG empowers companies to build unforgettable experiences, making it easier for people and businesses to connect with, use and pay for the services they value most. Our customer experience, billing and payments solutions help companies of any size make money and make a difference. With our SaaS solutions, company leaders can take control of their future, and tap into guidance along the way from our more than 5k-strong experienced global team. Want to learn more about how to be a change maker and industry shaper like our 1,000plus clients? Visit csgi.com to learn more.
THE METRICS [ARE] EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT AND FAR EXCEEDED MY EXPECTATIONS.