How voice bots can help manage high call volume in the contact center

As technology and online customer experiences continue to evolve, people’s expectations are increasing when it comes to the quality and immediacy of the customer service they receive.

According to McKinsey, three-quarters of online customers now expect help within five minutes. They don’t want to wait on hold or to be transferred between multiple agents or teams, and the friction of traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems won’t make them any happier.

It’s no longer enough for a business to provide great products and services. To scale and compete, you need a solution that allows for swings in demand, and that helps keep your customer experience consistent when the unexpected occurs. Your agents must also feel supported if your organization is going to be successful in the long run. To keep team morale high, agent burnout low, and customer satisfaction on the rise, consider adding voice bots to your customer service tech stack.

Voice bots can handle simple repetitive queries, giving your live agents more time to focus on complex or sensitive customer issues that require critical thought and the human touch. By using voice bots in your contact center, you can elevate the level of customer service you provide, better manage high call volume, and speed up overall response times.

How do voice bots for the call center work?

When you imagine a voice bot, your first thought might be of popular voice-enabled digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The conversational experience is similar for the customer, but in the customer service world, voice bots — and the foundational technology they’re built on — are a bit different.

Voice bots leverage conversational IVR technology to help customers engage in a self-service solution using their voice. The purpose of this is to help businesses scale, enabling them to better handle fluctuations in caseload without adding additional agents, and to reduce the amount of time it takes customers to resolve their issues.

Using AI and natural language processing (NLP), voice bots interpret meaning and intent from voice conversations. These conversational AI bots can understand human language and intentions — without requiring customers to use specific programmed commands — and they can route customers to the right live agent, based on skills and experience, when a human interaction is necessary.

Better manage high call volume and speed up response times

Voice bots make it easier for your contact center to provide customers with access to 24/7 help, without long wait times or hold music. They can help customers find what they need quickly by guiding them through self-service options, providing extra assistance and relief to agents when there is a surge in high call volume.

Here’s what to look for when choosing a voice bot solution for your contact center.

AI-powered: the best voice bots use advanced AI models to train and continuously refine voice bot accuracy and personalization based on customer transcripts. Look for conversational AI bot that can determine a customer’s intent and cues, even if they switch to another language mid-conversation, and that can identify the top reasons for reaching out with the biggest impacts on your business.

Easy to build and quick to deploy: look for a voice bot solution that makes it easy to build a bot using an intuitive UI and drag-and-drop builder — no coding needed — to help scale your contact center quickly and provide faster service.

Accessible self-service options: a good voice bot will offer IVR deflection to route customers to self-service support, providing experiences where customers can resolve their issues themselves — on the channels they prefer.

Provide personalized interactions and easy transfers to live agents: voice bots are not a replacement for human agents, they’re a complement. Look for a solution that uses skill-based routing to seamlessly transfer inquiries when necessary — handing off the personal information gathered by your voice bot to live agents before they enter the conversation.

With Sprinklr, you can give your customers immediate, personalized support with voice bot assistance, accessible self-service options, and live agent transfers the minute they call. It’s all powered by AI and built on the only unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform. Sprinklr’s AI-powered voice bots make your contact center more accessible, so you can help more customers in less time — all while improving the customer experience — so you can scale your business and better handle demand swings, without adding more agents.

Find out how Sprinklr Voice offers everything you need in a contact center solution, including voice bots, ACD, IVR, speech analytics, automated quality, and workforce management — with the advantages of a unified Sprinklr Service solution, for a seamless agent and customer experience.