As organisations grow, the pressure to maintain the service levels that led to their growth increases.
By Ryan Falkenberg, CEO of Clevva
Delivering effective customer service at scale requires specialist skills – skills that are not core to many companies. As a result, a lot look to contact centre specialists to perform this function on their behalf.
These business process outsourcers (BPO) are highly skilled at running very efficient servicing centres at a lower cost than a non-specialist business can achieve. Plus they can scale quickly and respond to fluctuating volumes far more effectively.
For the last decade, these BPOs have been key contributors to South Africa’s employment market, with jobs within the contact centre industry having grown to over 270 000.
They have achieved this growth by perfecting the recruiting, training and managing of our talented youth, and leveraging their natural ability to have warm conversations.
Yet, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, new options have emerged in the market. Highly capable AI agents can now have customer conversations at the level of human experts which is set to change the customer service landscape forever.
As with human agents, AI agents require highly skilled teams to train and manage them. While many internal teams are keen to try their hand at mastering these AI agents, the reality is that they require dedicated focus and deep specialisation in areas such as large language models, conversational process automation, data analytics and process intelligence.
Fortunately we are now seeing the emergence of specialist digital BPOs entering the market. These conversation automation specialists will train and manage AI agents for you, so you don’t need to worry about how to get it right internally, especially as new technologies keep emerging.
What you get is a team of highly capable AI agents that have specific sales, service or support conversations with your customers and staff, and ensure that required actions get triggered into your line of business systems.
These AI agents are increasingly handling the high volume, rule-bound calls that clog up contact centres, freeing human agents to focus on the calls that take more time, yet have more impact.
The implication to the sector is significant. Not only can companies get access to instantly scalable capacity, they can significantly lower their cost per call while being assured of greater consistency and compliance. Yet with such a compelling case for adoption, what is holding so many companies back?
A key reason is that it’s not that easy to build an AI agent that people really want to talk to. Building a good prototype in a test environment is one thing. Getting it to operate in production at scale is very different.
The risks with compliance, the complexity of integration across channels and systems, and the number of rules that AI agents must follow in context, make it a daunting task for many.
That is why more and more contact centres are looking to outsource their AI agents to experienced digital BPO partners. Yet not all digital BPOs are alike.
Here are some guidelines to choosing the right one.
Firstly, make sure they can demonstrate their capabilities using live calls and chats. A live conversation It’s one thing showing a demo – it’s a completely different thing automating a conversation where a customer does not follow the prompts, asks a question rather than giving an answer, or suddenly expresses frustration, is very different to a planned demo. A digital BPO worth their salt will be able to build an AI Agent that can handle real conversations while still sticking to prescribed rules and guardrails.
The second thing to look out for is their ability to start small and scale as they demonstrate success. Most company leaders see the value but want to assign more calls to an AI Agent only after it proves it can meet both business and customer needs. So start by assigning a specific call type to your AI Agent and then steadily expand the role once it has demonstrated its ability to deliver.
Finally, make sure your digital BPO is capable of taking the complexity away from you. They need to offer you all the skills and technology needed to get your AI agent working with your call systems and your channels. You really don’t want to have to worry about all the intricacies that make an AI Agent work or not. By taking this burden off of you, they allow you to focus on your core business.
Finding the right digital BPO partner allows you to rapidly scale your capacity to serve, lower your costs and improve both your customer and employee experience. It means you can future-proof your contact centre now, without wasting time trying to work it out.