Call centres face the challenge of widely varying inbound calls during annual occasions like Black Friday and without automation and virtual agents will have no viable solution to handle these demands says Ryan Falkenberg at CLEVVA.
For most people, Black Friday is a chance to buy that must-have item they had had their eye on for months. It is also a massive day for retailers. Outside of the week or two before the start of the festive season, there are few other times when they have so many shoppers determined to buy products.
But things can also sour quickly. We have all sat in frustration waiting for an online retailer’s site to come back online because its servers could not handle the traffic. We have also all seen the damage that desperate shoppers can inflict on physical retailers. And with online retailers in particular experiencing record Black Friday sales year on year, such incidents will only become more common.
Real world scenario #1
More specifically, they turn to their bank’s contact centre. That can be frustrating at the best of times but it is doubly so on days like Black Friday. Wait times are magnified. Harried contact centre agents, desperately trying to get through as many calls as possible, probably cannot give your query or complaint the attention it deserves.
With so much data at their disposal, banks anticipate these increased call volumes. And many do scale up in the run-up to, and aftermath of Black Friday by making sure as many contact centre agents as possible are on duty.
While that absorbs some of the pressure, it is often not enough to meet customer demand. That is to say nothing of finding extra floor space for temporary contact centre agents or the need to train them up simply for a week or so of work.
Even if they have worked in a bank’s contact centre previously, there are still unique systems they need to be trained in. Scaling human capacity up and down to meet demand spikes is challenging, but what alternatives are there?
Real world scenario #2
Retailers can deal with most of those incidents in-house. But things are very different when there is money involved. In a physical store, thieves might steal a customer’s phone before gaining access to their banking application and emptying the accounts, this is a fairly common occurrence in South Africa.
Online shoppers, meanwhile, might fall victim to Black Friday scams. For their part, retailers may struggle with the increase in transaction volumes or encounter payment processing issues. When any of those things happen, people turn to their bank.
Urgent customer conversations are critical in most businesses. You might, for instance, need to cancel your card immediately after a theft. Or you may have missed a payment that the business needs to remind you about.
Capacity scaling
Many contact centres struggle to take the right approach to urgent conversations. Some lack the resources to rapidly ramp up and deal with increased call volumes. Others face customers who do not answer calls from numbers they do not recognise. Yet the business still needs those conversations to happen.
If the traditional approach is not working, how can companies ensure that they reach the customers they need to as fast as they need to?
Before answering those questions, it is worth examining why call centres struggle to scale quickly. A good example involved a bank promoting its insurance products by handing out leaflets at a taxi rank at the end of the month.
In and of itself, that was a good strategy. It was the right target market for that specific insurance product and the bank was meeting its customers in their daily lives. Importantly, by timing the marketing to just after payday, the bank reached those customers when they had money and were willing to spend it.
The trouble was the bank’s contact centre simply could not keep up with the volume of calls that came in as a result of the campaign. Although the bank anticipated it would need additional contact centre agents, scaling up and back down as quickly as it needed to simply was not practical.
Putting aside the difficulty of finding enough contact centre agents, getting them trained up to the level where they could field any queries associated with the incoming calls was impossible.
The bank likely missed out on a lot of prospective customers as a result. After all, how many times would you contact a business with the intention of making a purchase before giving up and moving on?
Those same scalability issues can arise in all sorts of situations and affect both outbound and inbound conversations. That means that contact centres must think differently when it comes to urgent conversations.
Automating the call centre
With rapid scaling such a challenge for contact centres, what approach should they take instead? A good start is to automate as many conversations as possible.
In the example above, the bank could have printed a QR code on the leaflet alongside the contact centre number. After scanning it, the prospective customer would have been connected instantly to a virtual agent.
Or let us say someone calls a bank’s helpline with a Black Friday-related query or presses the help button on the bank’s application. Instead of being put in a queue to speak to a human agent, they are immediately connected to a virtual agent. AI-powered digital experts can have immediate conversations with customers.
These agents have the expertise of a senior contact centre agent or even a banker and can independently help most customers with the majority of rule-bound queries.
They can also work across multiple channels at once, and can handle thousands of customers at a time. They stick to rules yet can shape to each customer’s context. This ensures every conversation is consistent, compliant and hyper-personalised.
As a result, they can process most of the high call volumes, handing off to human agents only when they get stuck or there is real emotion involved. Where relevant, the virtual agent will hand off to a human agent to complete the engagement.
Virtual agents stick to rules, so every conversation is consistent, compliant and hyper-personalised. They handle the urgent, repetitive, rule-based work so human agents can focus on higher value work – like figuring out where to drop the next lot of leaflets.
With lower call volumes to deal with, human contact centre agents can focus on the calls where a human connection is essential. They can better handle these calls with empathy and care because they are not chasing an average handling time clock. This not only makes customers a lot happier, but it also makes human agents happier too.
There is no doubt that, as much as banks appreciate the extra transaction volumes, Black Friday can be a stressful time. But with the right tools in place, it does not have to be.
CLEVVA builds, deploys and manages Virtual Agents for companies. These conversational process automation specialists drive down the cost of customer, supplier and staff engagements.
