Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
VPI's Virtual Call Agent Technology Can Improve Call Center Scheduling
Global provider of customer experience and workforce optimization solutions VPI (Voice Print International (News - Alert), Inc.) recently unveiled its breakthrough VPI VirtualSource, a groundbreaking, hosted, pay-as-you-go contact center solution. VPI VirtualSource leverages conversational, on-demand virtual agents powered by Artificial Intelligence to automate inbound and outbound calls and reduce mundane tasks from human call center agents.
VPI's intelligent virtual agents provide a conversational experience that was impossible with traditional touchtone or speech IVR. Virtual agents adapt to conversation flow in real time for personalized call resolution, they use their short-term memory to keep track of prior conversation flow and long-term memory to recognize callers and remember preferences from previous calls.
Several organizations are already using conversational virtual agents to lower call center scheduling costs, improve customer experience, and gain a competitive advantage in several ways including: Reducing the number of calls handled by human agents by automating a range of inbound and outbound call types; decreasing the workload of human agents by gathering information and then transferring the call with the collected information; transferring calls to virtual agents to effectively capture information such as sensitive PCI (News - Alert) credit card payments; and expanding call handling capacity as business needs evolve without having to hire employees.
“With a very smooth conversational flow and dynamic adaptation to the caller, VPI's virtual agents have achieved what the industry sought to achieve more than a decade ago when the first virtual assistants came out, truly providing the ability to off-load and supplement the agent pool down to the tracking of performance. This is a solution that should not be overlooked,” said Nancy Jamison, industry principal of Contact Centers at Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), in a press release.
Eighty percent less expensive than human agents, VPI VirtualSource automates a broad range of calls at a low cost, while virtual agents achieve higher rates of call completion than traditional and speech IVRs. They can handle an inbound or outbound transaction end-to-end, or they can handle the routine parts of calls and then easily transfer the caller to live agents along with the information already collected.
VPI VirtualSource is a new module within the VPI EMPOWER customer experience optimization suite. The combination enables managers to automatically monitor and compare the performance of virtual agents using intuitive Web-based reports. The solution records both virtual and human agent conversations for review and quality evaluation.
VirtualSource leverages VPI Fact Finder analytics technology and the awareness of its Artificial Intelligence engine to annotate calls with in-call data and events used to automatically classify calls, enhance call searches and discovery, and trigger alerts when management attention is needed.
“Traditional self-service channels have failed to provide positive customer experience because they are designed to take customers down a simple linear path,” said Mike Mercadante, chief technology officer at VPI, in a release. “Humans, however, do not think in a completely linear way and only get frustrated when forced down that path. Unlike a typical voice-activated IVR, virtual agents do not use decision trees. They acquire their knowledge and skills by training much like human agents -- the more call scenarios they listen to and handle, the smarter they get.”
VPI is a provider of integrated interaction recording, quality management, analytics and customer experience optimization solutions for enterprises, contact centers, trading floors, government agencies and first responders. VirtualSource integrates with existing telephony technology and most contact center applications and databases. The smart technology continuously adapts, requiring less scripting and programming to maintain than legacy IVRs.
Edited by Jennifer Russell