AI-powered voice assistants can help you manage fluctuations in staff turnover. We also look at how voice assistants could help your business save on costs without compromising on good customer service.
If your contact center is experiencing high staff turnover, you are not alone. There are many reasons why customer service staff are leaving their roles and it is sometimes difficult to find, hire and train new staff in time to support the existing staff.
There are many reasons why customer service representatives (CSRs) are leaving their roles en masse.
Lockdowns have put pressure on call and contact centers resulting in fewer people to take more calls. Also many people have chosen to not return to their roles at call centers after furloughs and layoffs and move on to seek other types of jobs. This phenomenon is sometimes called the Great Resignation. According to Gartner, customer service businesses have been particularly affected by the Great Resignation.
This research lists these reasons for staff wanting to leave their roles at customer service centers:
Of all the reasons, too many calls were cited by as many as 1-in-3 customer service representatives as a key reason why they wanted to leave their jobs.
Voice assistants can help your contact center and your contact center staff by handling not only high call volumes but also the types of calls that your customer service representatives might feel are repetitive and unchallenging to deal with on a daily basis.
In fact, many businesses are now using voice AI to offer their customers first-line self-service options. Examples of the types of calls voice assistants can handle exceptionally well include:
Helping a customer check the status of an order or delivery
It’s these kinds of high frequency calls that can overwhelm your contact center staff during busy periods, adding to their stress levels as well as adding to their overall time spent in post-call administration. Voice AI allows you to automate these frequent transactions.
Some of our clients report that our voice assistants handle between 30-50% of the calls their contact center receives annually. Many of these calls are handled entirely by voice automation. That’s a lot of potential pressure taken off your CSRs by using voice automation at your contact center.
Read a case study on how a leading logistics company uses voice AI to help with first-line contact support here.
Unlike with recorded messages or IVR solutions, callers can interact naturally with voice AI. Callers can speak naturally with the AI, ask questions to the voice AI and get clarification from it. Advanced language processing algorithms help the AI understand the caller’s intent with almost human levels of understanding. Good voice AI also speaks naturally making for good, consistent and pleasant customer service experiences for every caller to your business.
Using voice assistants doesn’t result in negative customer experiences. In fact, many customers state they are happy to use voice AI as long as their issue is solved.
And since voice assistants are a scalable service, call waiting times for customers can be greatly reduced. There will always be enough voice assistants available to handle the volume of calls you are receiving at any point in time.
Also, by saving your CSRs time, your CSRs can focus on solving more complex problems for customers. This is one of the pain points many CSRs report. With automation handling more of the first-line requests, your human agents have more time to focus. This is not only naturally better for your customers but also more rewarding for your CSRs.
Voice assistants also offer a reliable way to offer after hours support so you can give back some work-life balance to your human agents, even when it’s busy. Without the need for additional hiring and training, you will be saving on staff costs and looking after your core teams better.
Furthermore, voice assistants do need to be managed. New business processes and new information about your business will naturally emerge over time and your voice assistants need to be kept in the loop. Your CSR staff are your experts and with a good voicebot platform, they can be the ones to manage the voice assistants.
Talkie’s platform, for example, is a no code solution where even non-technical CSRs can easily make updates to the voice assistant dialogues and logic without having to write a single line of code.
Offering opportunities to specialize in automation management adds some incentive to stay in a role, gain skills and maybe even one day become a specialist conversation designer.
Read more about our Conversation Designers at Talkie.ai here.
When it’s busy, you need to hire more staff but when it’s not, you either have to keep on the extra staff or let them go. Hiring and training staff is expensive and outsourcing is not always as desirable as having your own in-house team for many reasons.
Voice assistants can scale up to answer calls almost instantly during busy periods and scale back down when things settle down. That’s less hiring and training needed — and less firing — again saving your business money.
With voice AI, you can also expect a much lower cost-per-call. With additional automation, you can also save time and therefore costs on post-call administration.
Say, for example, your voice assistants are set up to take customer appointments. By integrating the voicebot platform with your booking system, the voice AI can update the booking system almost immediately after the call and add notifications to the relevant staff member’s calendar.
Read how a leading hairdresser franchise put in place a fully automated virtual receptionist service using Talkie’s voice assistants here.
Let’s summarize the ways that voice assistants can help your business when you’re experiencing high staff turnover.
Find out how voice AI from Talkie could help your call or contact center business.
Talkie.ai is a leading provider of advanced voice automation solutions for businesses.
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