Enterprises of all scales have faced the impact of the pandemic. We learned a lot about our systems and personnel in these times. Both have been put to a rigorous stress test during this phase. We also learned that our existing customers are our saviors and brand ambassadors as our sales struggled to open new relationships. Along the same lines, contact centers had to pivot themselves from operating as a cost center to a revenue-generating center.

While the facelift was needed for revenue generation, as per our observation across industries, businesses faced problems around:

Increase in call volumes by over 50%
Decline in support capacity by over 20%
Resulting in increased wait and hold times by 200%

It became increasingly challenging to manage the operations of the contact center. Some systems and personnel were better prepared; however, everyone started looking outside for a solution.

A short-term tactical fix was delivered with digital deflection to control call volumes, along with computer telephony integration (CTI) and an accelerated agent desktop solution to reduce average handling time. The medium and long-term focus shifted to finding a solution in conversational artificial intelligence (AI).

Therefore, conversational AI has become the center of interest across enterprises to drive successful contact center transformation that:

Enhances IVR authentication
Increases call containment
Schedules callbacks
Predicts and notifies issues
Identifies preemptive and self-learning intents
Creates heuristic patterns
Contextualizes responses
Delivers true omnichannel design experience

What is conversational AI, and which platform is ideal for driving contact center success?

In simple words, conversational AI uses AI technologies in virtual agents to interact with people in a human-like way. By bridging the gap between human and computer language, it makes communication between the two easier and more natural than ever before. Conversational AI enables more personalized and intuitive customer care. By putting customers in contact with virtual agents on voice and chat channels, conversational AI makes it easy for customers to obtain helpful, relevant information from your contact centers rapidly.

Cloud-based, conversational AI for contact centers, such as Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI), lets businesses have the cake and eat it too. Groundbreaking advances in AI, machine learning (ML), voice recognition, and natural language processing mean that virtual agents can now understand the nuances of human language and, consequently, the customers’ intent. These innovations in conversational AI are finding their way into the enterprise market, enabling more personalized and intuitive customer care.

Why Google CCAI and is it an affordable option?

In a recent Forrester study, organizations that deployed Google Cloud CCAI saw reduced costs, improved productivity, and resources redeployed to higher-value roles. Moreover, the study revealed that CCAI eliminates the need to manage and update legacy IVR systems and reduces the amount of time and effort needed to roll out new capabilities or provide services to a new product.

Highlights of some of the benefits realized through that Forrester study associated with the composite organization:

Call deflection savings totaling $8.1 million to $14.3 million
Chat deflection savings totaling $1.3 million to $2.4 million
Efficiency gains for contact center agents totaling $1.3 million to $3.7 million
Management efficiencies totaling $1.1 million to $2.3 million. CCAI eliminated the need to manage and update legacy IVR systems and reduced the amount of time and effort needed to roll out new capabilities or provide services to a new product
Reduced agent churn totaling $447,633 to $1 million

How is Google CCAI less disruptive?

Many cloud-based contact centers in the market have excellent omni-channel capabilities backed by smart CTI integrations across well-known CRMs for seamless IVR to agent handoffs. However, CCAI stands out for its strategic partnerships with the legacy contact center players such as Cisco and Avaya. This means enterprises can facelift the legacy IVR, one use case at a time, to ensure no disruption or migration is needed, and it is a seamless transformation for their contact centers.

Also, smarter voice recognition with dedicated processing power to voice-enabled smartphones, smart home devices, and in-app voice integrations has expanded the scope for voice support at a much cheaper cost to deliver a more intelligent, personalized conversational experience.

Sounds interesting? Here is more!

Enterprise operations can prioritize support channels and support lines at individual use case level while focusing firmly on the Nirvana state of running a contact center with virtual agents. Simultaneously, businesses can gradually upskill their agent workforce to support more fulfilling job duties.

By leveraging Google’s powerful analytics platform, organizations learn more about customer behavior and upgrade accordingly to deliver the user experience in demand. AI and ML advancements in Dialogflow have made it possible to recognize language and deduce context and build relationships, improving the quality of the overall conversational journey.

At Virtusa, our team believes in six modern design principles to deliver user-centric, digital contact center transformation strategies to generate results:

Design thinking
Digital native
Cloud native
As-a-Service setup
AI first
Voice is the future

Final thoughts

As you accelerate your transformation to a cloud-based contact center, CCAI can be deployed in a matter of few weeks, so you can start realizing value from the platform sooner than you had ever imagined.

If your business’s highest priority is customer excellence, then contact center transformation is not an option but a means to survive and excel – to manage costs and create new revenue streams.

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