Virtual agent and Customer Insights – joining the dots in customer service. – Power Platform Adventures

In this blog I am going to be looking at the process of ID
& V (Identification and verification ) process that is adopted in customer
contact centres  .  Whenever the customer calls in to report a
problem or has a query or wants to make a complaint, irrespective of the nature
of the service there is one aspect  that always
remains a common factor – identification of the customer prior to registering
the service request.

Over a period , countless hours are spent in identifying the
customer irrespective of the nature of service that has to be provided.  This is a lot of valuable time lost which
could have been spent on the actual customer issue allowing customer service
agents to be  able to provide higher
quality of service and better turnaround times.

As per a study conducted by IBM , businesses spent  $1.3 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls in 2017 , which has been on a steady rise ever since . The study also found that chatbots can help businesses save on customer service costs by speeding up response times, freeing up agents for more challenging work, and answering up to 80% of routine questions.

If we try and do some number crunching – lets say an average call center with 100 center agents would take up 1500 customer calls a day. If the average call lasts for about 20 mins , and the amount of time spent on verifying the customer is 30% of the total duration .The total amount of time spent on customer verification amounts to 150 man hours a day. Even if 50% percent of the customers initiate the conversation over the digital channel supported by a chat bot , that amounts to 75 man hours per day saved in customer verification alone ( I am yet to calculate the time saved in resolving simple customer queries). Over a month that amounts to a saving of approx. 2250 man hours, which could as well be spent on the actual issues / complaints reported by the customer, leaving the mundane task of verification to the automated channels.

The process of creating a fluid chatbot conversation with
added intelligence becomes event more effortless if we are able to provide the
ability to configure the end to end conversation enriched with data and
insights into the hands of the subject matter experts as opposed to developers.
 This is exactly what has now been made
possible with the introduction of Dynamics 365 virtual agent for customer
service by Microsoft.   The tools provides a simple “drag and drop”
interface which enables SMEs to create conversations on common topics that are
most frequently queried by their customers , thus providing more power into the
hands of “citizen developers” . The tool integrates with Microsoft Flow which
in turn enables dynamic content to be brought into the conversation via out of
the box or custom connectors connecting to the various back office systems.  Note : Custom connectors is the only scenario where
the additional lending hand is needed from the developers .

The virtual agent is complemented very well with the new customer service insights tool which helps SMEs understand the trending topics that the customers are most concerned about in their line of business . Which in turn allows the business SMEs to create additional conversations based on the topics highlighted by the customer service insights tool . This is where the concept of “digital feedback loop” can be seen in action , enabling an on-going process of continuous improvement of the quality of customer service supported by technology.

The image below illustrates the digital feedback loop in action: