Many companies are aware of the potential of AI-powered voice agents for their contact center. However, it can be difficult to know how to get into this kind of customer service transformation project. That's why our teams are increasingly performing diagnostics of call flows in the contact center for companies that are hesitant about trying. In just a few days, this call audit allows us to identify whether the implementation of a voice agent is relevant, and to prioritize the flows to be automated.
According to Gartner, by 2023, nearly 40% of calls received in customer services will be fully automated thanks to artificial intelligence. For contact centers, the development of new voice technologies and AI-powered voice agents is a real opportunity to offer a better experience to their customers, while drastically reducing their costs.
But how can we make sure that this innovative transformation project will be properly framed? How can we verify that an automation project will achieve its objectives in terms of ROI and customer satisfaction? What are the key steps to follow to guarantee the success of the project?
Since 2016 and as a European pioneer of voice agents, calldesk has supported many major accounts and midcaps in the creation and production of their voice agents: Enedis, CNP Assurances, La Poste, Dalkia, FCA Capital...
Through these projects, we realized a simple observation: if the benefits of voice agents are quite easy to imagine, many companies do not know where to start. This is why our teams now carry out more and more frequently an audit of our customers' contact center calls.
The goal? To establish in a few days a clear diagnosis of customer experience over the phone, in order to give our customers a clear picture of their call flows and identify how to optimize them.
This article explains the process of a call flow audit and underlines the interest of this approach for the contact center.
Who is the call flow audit for?
A relevant approach starting from 100,000 calls per year...
Usually, the opportunity to set up a voice agent can be analyzed in customer services receiving at least 100,000 calls per year, which corresponds to a contact center with at least 15 to 20 positions. Starting from this threshold, the voice agent can achieve greater productivity gains than additional recruitment.
The call flow audit is intended for any company studying the opportunity to set up a voice agent in the short or medium term, whether its contact center has 50 or 5000 positions.
... and in all sectors of activity
All sectors can benefit from this approach. At this time, our teams have had the opportunity to carry out diagnostics in insurance, logistics, banking, car leasing, education...
Why conduct a call flow audit?
To identify the problem before identifying the solution
Too often, projects fail in companies that identify the solution before the problem is properly framed. As promising as voice agents may be, they must first and foremost serve a business need: develop self-service on a flow of unproductive calls, improve customer satisfaction on an IVR scenario, fluidize routes using natural language, reduce overall queue time or cost per contact in the contact center...
The call audit provides a clear understanding of what is happening in the contact center, to identify whether or not the implementation of an AI-powered voice agent is relevant or not.
Prioritize the call flows to be automated
Once the relevance of the project has been confirmed, the flow audit also enables the identification of the flows to be automated as a priority. This exercise is not as simple as it seems, since it requires both business and technical skills.
In addition to analyzing quantitative data (call volumes), a qualitative approach is also used to assess the callers' appetite for voice technologies and the level of preparation of the contact center for these technologies.
We have frequently observed a strong discrepancy between, on the one hand, callers' needs and the way they express them, and, on the other hand, the organization set up in the contact center to meet these needs. For example, how many customers get lost in IVR structures? How many are struggling with the jargon of different professions?
Using an external view provides a clear picture of the caller's experience in the contact center, and identifies clear levers for performance improvement. This diagnosis also makes it possible to estimate the time and cost of a voice agent project.
How does a call audit take place?
A short mission focused on knowledge recovery
As mentioned above, the implementation of a voice agent must meet a need. The good news is that the knowledge of this need generally already exists within the company. On the other hand, it is often split between multiple actors: the teams of call center agents in the field, their supervisors, the contact center manager(s), the IT teams... The call audit consists in recovering and gathering this knowledge.
In order to move forward with agility on the project, the diagnosis is organized in the form of a short mission: about 3 days.
During this interval, members of our product and customer success teams specialized in your industry will intervene in your contact center in order to study the experience of your callers and agents, to understand their needs and to identify the way the callers vocalize them.
A mix of business and technical expertise
This custom-built team will interview the various key players in your contact center, in order to familiarize themselves with the point of view of the operational staff. At the same time, they will also conduct an in-depth analysis of your customers' journey over the phone, whether it is through double listening, a study of the IVR branches or an audit of the advisors' pre and post call tasks.
This consulting approach, which is essentially based on human expertise, can be reinforced by the use of technical tools, for example call recording, which allows you to understand and group together the reasons for customer calls and the emotions that emerge from conversations.
Finally, a technical analysis of the current architecture enables the constraints and rules linked to the company's information system to be evaluated, which must obviously be taken into account before any voice agent project.
What is the result of an AI-powered voice agent audit?
The construction of your calls' automation matrix
Once the field mission is completed, we proceed to the detailed analysis of the collected data and the creation of a report, for presentation to your teams.
The heart of this report is the automation matrix, a schematic view of the call flows received in the contact center, associated with a recommendation on each of them :
- Polluting calls that could be dissuaded
- Overly complex routes that need to be simplified
- High value-added calls that need to be exploited
- Unproductive calls that can be automated
Thanks to this diagnosis, it is now possible to establish whether the implementation of a voice agent is relevant or not, and if so, which call flows the voice agent should handle in priority.
What happens after the call flow audit?
A valuable decision support tool
Once completed, the diagnosis can become the first step in your company's strategic thinking on the implementation of a voice agent. Thanks to this clear snapshot of the state of customer service at a given moment in time, it becomes easier to make the right decisions to meet the strategic objectives of your company and your customer service: improving customer satisfaction, reducing customer effort, developing self-service...
A guarantee of support from the field team
If your company decides to launch an AI-powered voice agent project, it should also be noted that this project is more likely to get buy-in from the contact center's field teams because they will have been involved from the beginning.
The best loggers are those who take the time to sharpen their axe before felling a tree. Therefore, to ensure the success of your AI-powered voice agent project, take also the time to sharpen your knowledge of your call flows!
To learn more, visit our page dedicated to contact center diagnosis.
