Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Bots and Other New Self-Service Channels Will Require Schedule Modifications
If 2016 is remembered for anything in the customer support industry, it might be remembered as the year of the bot. Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Skype recently began test marketing Skype Bots, or services that use artificial intelligence techniques to send responses to users, including chat-like responses. Facebook (News - Alert) has been introducing bots through its popular Messenger system, which is increasingly be used by large companies as a support channel. It’s essentially a new, more “human-like” means of automated customer support, and while customers are still getting used to them, there is evidence that they are a smarter self-service channel with more natural interactions than traditional “dumb” channels like FAQs. Bot technology combines artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand the end user, and digs deep into knowledge bases to find answers and deliver them in a conversational way.
While bots are intended to offload some live call and contact channels for human agents, it’s important that they be fitted together properly with live help, according to a recent article by Heather Clancy writing for Fortune.
“Bots can certainly help answer simple questions more efficiently, but that means human agents need to become even more empathetic,” wrote Clancy. “And that could mean allowing them to abandon canned scripts even as software agents memorize and ‘learn’ from them.”
The bots will be a source of crucial information for human agents who pick up interactions from where the bots left off, so from an omnichannel perspective, it’s more critical than ever before that self-help and live channels be vigorously integrated. No customer wants to begin a transaction with a bot and have to start all over again the moment a human agent picks up.
For companies relying on bots to take some of their more basic customer query, there will be a challenge in accomplishing this integration so it’s seamless to the customer and doesn’t represent just another speed bump on their way to fast and efficient live help. There will also be scheduling challenges to overcome. Customers may engage in self-service help during different times of the day than they traditionally choose to contact live help. But if a significant portion of them choose to engage with bots and then need escalation to live help, you may not be able to rely on historical call patterns to build your schedule. Simply put, the more popular bots get, the more they may change call patterns.
Increasingly, because of newer methods of self-service like mobile interactive IVR apps and bot technology, contact center scheduling may become even more complex than it is now. It’s important for companies to be up-to-date in their scheduling and workforce management solutions, and choose cloud-based technologies that can offer multisite flexibility, robust reporting and alerting, and a means to monitor and control schedule adherence. While many organizations today are experimenting with newer channels such as video chat and bots, they’re still relying on scheduling solutions designed for premise-based telephone call centers. Here in 2016, that model is beginning to look like a relic of the past, and contact center solutions need to evolve to keep up.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi