The Call Center Agent Avatar
Was James Cameron's hit movie Avatar on to something for the call center?
Problem: Your contact center agents can be inconsistent, or even erratic, in how they communicate with customers, and they sometimes veer off topic or forget to upsell or cross-sell when appropriate.
Problem: Customer service costs are increasing at a rate that exceeds customer growth.
Problem: Customers are increasingly unwilling to wait to communicate with an agent.
Problem: Customers sign off without having their questions answered or problems resolved.
If these issues sound familiar, it's because they are problems for most call or contact centers. Companies are always searching for ways to improve customer service, reduce wait times, and save money. Some believe they have found an answer — in interactive virtual agents, commonly known as Avatars.
In a research report from Gartner, titled Key Considerations for a Virtual Assistant Selection, the analyst firm stated that contact center agent avatars deliver a competitive advantage to companies that deploy them, and predicted they would become a standard technology for customer interactions.
A report from Forrester Research concluded that it was time to give call center avatars a serious look, citing that 57% of online customers are likely to abandon a sale if their questions or issues are not answered or resolved immediately.
An IBM study found that, on average, 80 percent of call center inquiries were routine and repetitive and could be resolved using contact center avatar or virtual agent technology.
Online avatars are personalized self-service applications, available as standalone software or, increasingly, as part of a full-fledged contact center software solution, and are positioned as a compliment or an alternative to live call center agents.
They can appear either as an animation or a photo of a real person, and their purpose is to replicate the routine or straight-forward activities that customer service agents do—better, faster and less expensively. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and tight integration with customer relationship management software systems are empowering online avatars to interact with online customers in a natural conversation style and provide immediate answers to consumers questions.
Here is an example: A customer types in a question, such as "I really wanted the shirt in blue with green stripes, but it’s out of stock. Is it possible to order one?"
A call center agent avatar has access to the same databases and knowledge repositories as the customer service representative, but unlike (or more easily than) a human contact center agent, it can extract data from the user, combine it with other information on stock, availability, geography, etc., and return an answer to the customer quickly.
These virtual agents also can ask follow-up questions and have a visibly noticeable "personality" designed by the company. They do this with software that helps interpret natural language, along with business logic configured by the company.
The benefits are easy to see: faster, consistent customer service with lower cost and less hassle. And they are catching on. According to call center avatar vendor VirtuOz, more than 30% of Fortune 1000 companies already have virtual call center agents.
First generation avatars were stationary images that delivered a poor interaction and very mixed search results. Second generation digital assistants became more animated and lifelike, and dramatically improved search results. We're now in the third generation which mimic the company's culture, style and even lifelike appearance. The speech technology includes sentiment analysis which can trigger responses, routings or escalations based on customer input. The search results are more relevant and highly accurate. When combined with AI they enable full dialogues and more social interactions over more channels.
Avatars, chatbots and virtual agents are all part of a trending customer service best practice. But is the contact center agent avatar right for your company? Will they eventually completely replace human contact center agents?
The answer to the first question is eventually, yes. Avatars can be a great solution for routine inquiries or general search. Customers today are getting used to the idea, thanks to their growing ubiquity, but it's probably safe to say that younger customers are more accepting of the idea than older customers. My recommendation: Don't rush into it, but make it a part of your contact center continuous improvement program.
Now to the second question: Will they eventually completely replace human contact center agents?
Definitely not. Does voice mail or email completely obliterate the need for voice communications? No.
There are cases where nothing but a human customer service representative will do. Either the customer isn’t comfortable with an avatar, or the problem or issue simply is out of the realm of what an Avatar can handle.
Research shows that contact center avatars have an 80% accuracy rate, but that means 20% of those customer queries must be handled by other means. Contact center avatars can be programmed to be intelligent, but there is no substitute for real human intelligence and ingenuity.