Despite the advances in technology especially when it comes to communication channels, voice is still the go-to method for most customers reaching out for support. Artificial Intelligence (AI) language models may increase the sophistication of customer service, but customers still want to hear a voice at the other end of their interaction.
In fact, 80% of consumers rank phone interactions as their preferred customer service channel. When customers have difficult problems, they want to be able to speak to a live human being. But it’s not just customers with this preference — 81% of service desk agents also say phone is their preferred method for resolving those complex issues.
As businesses journey into the future, AI will play a major role in resolving customer challenges. While 1.6% of agent interactions are AI-automated, Gartner expects that number to rise to 1-in-10 by 2026 — or higher. That’s a boon for any customer or employee support team, potentially saving up to $80 billion in labor costs per year by 2026. AI will ultimately help perform some of the more mundane daily tasks, leaving more time to focus more on valuable and complex work.
The question remains: how can your business realize those cost savings without compromising the quality of your customer service interactions? Or without abandoning customers’ preferred way of reaching out: the always-relevant voice call? If your business is already leveraging SAP Service Cloud and Customer Experience Solutions, leveraging voice AI tools can make your service desk more effective — and keep customers happy.
AI is important, but it’s not a silver bullet. There’s no magic wand you can wave over your customer phone calls and solve every problem at minimal cost. If you can leverage voice AI solutions to handle an increase in call volume or to solve common, everyday issues with your existing budget without sacrificing CX or quality, you don’t have to see your operational costs increase — they may even decrease.
Voice AI is a form of conversational AI that can understand, interpret, analyze and interpret human speech and interact with users, and leverage intent detection to resolve customer or employee issues.
Voice AI can provide support to contact centers in the form of real-time transcription of calls, detecting the tone of a request, and quality analysis for each and every interaction through Natural Language Understanding (NLU), machine learning, and automations. That, matched with access to customer profiles in SAP, can create overall better service outcomes.
It must be noted that AI will not — and should not — completely replace your agents. Adding AI can make you more effective without losing the personal touch. The key is knowing how to weave AI and other new voice technologies into your SAP tech stack. Too much over automation can lead to a deterioration of customer relationships and instead of improving experiences, may end up making them worse.
In a recent webinar, we demoed our cloud contact center integration for SAP, which features these technologies — such as voice self-service and AI-powered analytics — and how they can enhance experiences for both agents and customers. Read on to explore the highlights and benefits for service desks like yours.
When implemented properly, voice AI gives organizations the ability to offer automated service in a conversational format that ultimately saves customers time — without sacrificing quality service. When you’re using SAP Service Cloud, you can incorporate voice AI to enhance caller experiences without additional manual work from your end.
In the instance of a traditional customer support voice call, the moment a customer calls in, a voice AI-powered system can reference their call-in number based on information in SAP to provide an instantly personalized experience. The AI knows who they are, and can deliver an automated intro message, such as: “Thank you for calling, [Name].” Right away, the caller gets a boost of confidence — they know you recognize them.
By leveraging Natural Language Understanding (NLU) the caller experience goes from having to deal with traditional, lengthy, IVR flows (i.e. “press 1 for order status,” and so on) to simple conversational flows where open ended questions can also receive open ended responses. For example, a caller can say “I need help with an order” and the system understands exactly what needs to happen next.
The goal isn’t to dodge customers. It’s to get proactive with common solutions before they ever need to talk to a human. Implement these features with your SAP Service Cloud so customers have the resources to address common problems first.
Then, if the problem remains unresolved, they can get in contact with an agent directly.
Something else is happening as your customer moves through their journey with your service desk. Not only is using information that exists in SAP giving them better service, your agents are also able to do their jobs better.
As a customer or employee is interacting with AI powered self-service options in the early stage of an interaction, that means that agents aren’t spending their time on basic requests, like password resets or providing status updates. Instead, agents are focused on more complex issues and are able to spend the time and energy to resolve those issues.
When a customer connects to an agent directly, the agent will already know what the customer is dealing with through the data collected during the self-service stage. Once the call is over, information will automatically be added to the customer profile in SAP, such as a call recording and the issue the call resolved.
Voice AI can help you scale your offerings while still providing the human touch. With speech and sentiment analysis after the call, you can use AI to go through the recording and collect metadata without additional work from your agents. The next time the customer calls in, future agents will know more about the customer’s disposition and call history.
Within SAP, those working in contact center management get the bird’s-eye view. From here, you can use voice technologies to sculpt how each interaction should go and proactively identify trends.
Voice AI automates a lot of what a contact center manager does in a day. Instead of sorting through every single interaction that happens in a day, week or month, it can help analyze these interactions and identify the ones that really need attention.
Gone are the days where managers are coming in to provide guidance or coaching only when things have escalated. Instead, they are able to identify trends early on with AI-powered conversation analysis.
With an SAP integration, managers can create better experiences, more intelligent IVR flows, and personalization — all within the system they’re already working in daily.
Within SAP, you can create a user experience map by leveraging NLU to approach each interaction. For example, adding “fetch caller information” would retrieve the name of the customer and the description of an outstanding customer or employee support ticket. With that information in hand, you’re free to customize the experience. Want to craft a text-to-speech announcement? You can use the tool to dynamically insert the name so it’s not just a “static” announcement every user hears.
The drag-and-drop features of your customer journey allow you to make changes on the fly. For example, let’s say you have an “outage” issue with your solutions and expect all sorts of customer calls because of it. You can update user flows to deflect calls by prompting an announcement or even including a link to a common solution. This eases the strain on your entire service desk and can be done in a few minutes.
When you’re a contact center manager, you can drag and drop any variables you want to create custom reports. You can automatically schedule these reports to be sent to email recipients you choose, including yourself. If you need to keep certain managers in the loop, for example, you can do that by setting it once and letting the reports run in the background without any additional manual work from your end.
By integrating the latest voice technologies with SAP Service Cloud, these elements will be subtle tweaks, happening in the background. But those tweaks add up, providing a responsive, personalized experience for customers — and, thanks to voice AI solutions, you can achieve that personalized experience at scale.
If you’re ready to enhance your SAP tech stack, the process is easier than you might imagine. The statistics show customers prefer voice interactions. But with the right tools in place, including proactive intent detection, you don’t have to overwhelm your existing agents with a larger workload.
3CLogic’s cloud contact center integration for SAP combines the latest voice technology solutions with the business intelligence of SAP’s powerful CRM and service management software to create simplified, personalized customer interactions.
It’s time to expand the possibilities by embracing AI. Use these tools to enhance call center automation on the backend, and every customer’s journey will feel just as human as ever.