Don’t let the title fool you. It’s not as cold as it sounds. With a focus on customer care, it’s seemingly more important to have a call centers’ agents focus on the most difficult tasks, tough questions, complex problems, and high-value sales – not with simple things that raise the contact centers’ costs and waste a rep’s time. After all, isn’t the purpose of optimizing web self-service to answer these questions before a caller reaches for their phone?

Consider the benefits of web self-service. The more answers that can be accessed on the web, the fewer calls a center receives. A 2011 study of 1,500 European consumers conducted by Artificial Solutions reveals that “96% of people are now visiting a website first, when trying to resolve a query, instead of calling a company.” This number has grown significantly in past years, showing that you can directly reduce calls into the call center through web self-service. Not only are you saving money in the contact center, you are also improving experience for the consumer.

In contrast, outsourcing, which saves the company money by reducing overhead costs, does so at the risk of impairing the customer experience. This seems to be supported with the study conducted by an NYU associate professor regarding consumer perception of IVR (available here), which in many cases is just another form of cost cutting. Nearly half of all respondents believed that IVR benefits neither the caller nor the company. The only IVR system that does not seem to be perceived this way is Interactions, because it’s the only truly conversational automated system and works as easily as speaking with an agent. Consider the benefits of automating just a simple application, such as a store locator. While most people will find the store online, there are still many callers who “slip through the cracks” to your call center agents in order find a local store. Interactions catches these calls and helps them find a store quickly and easily, almost perfectly simulating the conversation the caller would have with an agent.

Who does this benefit? It benefits the company by saving money that would have been spent to have live agents take these calls. Additionally, it benefits the agents by allowing them to focus on more difficult calls and removing the simple tasks that may bog them down. It also benefits the callers because they find the information quickly, without going through a complex menu tree, without hold times, and without having to repeat any information.

When you consider all the simple requests that Interactions can easily automate, which were never adequately managed by traditional automated systems, you begin to realize the potential of our system. It will benefit your customers, cut your costs, and free up your agents to handle the really tough calls. (Although who knows – Interactions may soon be up to tackling those calls as well. Stay tuned!)