Companies invest 10 billion dollars per year in their customer relationships. Yet only one in 10 customers is satisfied with customer services. How can this discrepancy be explained?
[Find the interview in video format on the BFM Business website (FR)]
Every year in France, companies invest 10 billion Euros in their customer relations to build more modern and efficient contact centers. However, there is a huge gap between the desired image and the perceived image. While 80% of companies believe they have excellent customer service, only 8% of their customers agree with them.
What explains this discrepancy, and how can it be remedied? Answers to these questions with Vincent GIRE, co-founder and CEO of the startup calldesk. calldesk uses artificial intelligence to build tomorrow's customer service.
A customer service that no longer fulfils its promise
Today, customer service has lost sight of its original mission: transforming unsatisfied callers into brand influencers. "The customer service of many companies today creates frustrations for the customer: complicated calling hours, long queue times, the need to go through several callers to get an answer to their request...", notes Vincent Gire. "We created calldesk to reduce these irritants" he adds.
"By using artificial intelligence, we want to give back to customer service its original definition, and allow companies to improve the experience they deliver".
calldesk: AI as a solution to the limits of customer service?
The problem with most contact centers today is that they can't absorb the entire flow of incoming calls. The reasons are numerous: call overloads, routing errors, many polluting calls...
calldesk therefore sets up conversational voice agents (also called "callbots" or "voicebots"), capable of dialoguing in natural language with the caller to process his request. Simple and repetitive requests are handled by a virtual agent, which frees up the time of human agents.
These conversational agents are capable of understanding the reason for a call, directing it to the most competent teleoperator, and even handling the customer's request end-to-end, in a logic of customer autonomy (selfcare).
Thanks to the voice agents, companies can offer a 24-hour customer service, immediately available without queue time, capable of absorbing call overloads.
The future: the virtual agent at the service of human agents
While calldesk voice agents already handle millions of calls a year and equip the customer service departments of more than twenty major accounts (La Poste, Enedis, OUI.sncf, Swiss Life, Covea, CNP Assurances...), Vincent Gire concludes: "The virtual agent and the human agent have complementary skills, and this will not change in the future. The core competence of the human agent is relational. We will continue to build virtual agents at the service of human agents".
