Everything You Should Know About An Autonomous Contact Center

By Replicant
February 16, 2021

You may have heard the term “autonomous contact center” and wondered what it’s all about. How does it differ from other AI-driven contact center solutions? What, exactly, is it?

We’ve put together a list of FAQs to help you learn more and understand how an autonomous contact center can help you improve first call resolution and free up agents to handle more complex calls.

What is an autonomous contact center?

An autonomous contact center is an AI powered contact center solution that makes customer service elastic and scalable by having conversational AI answer, respond, and resolve up to 90% of Tier-1 issues, and intelligently route the rest to human agents. It integrates with your existing cloud contact center to expand your ability to respond to customers 24/7 and frees your agents to focus on more complex, empathy-required issue resolution.

Why is it useful?

Todays’ contact centers are overstretched handling unpredictable spikes in call volumes and with so many changes happening, unpredictability seems to be here to stay. An autonomous contact center provides always-on elastic capacity to lift the burden of Tier-1 calls from agents, enabling your contact center to scale up and down in real-time without having to adjust agent scheduling or worry about agent availability.

What is elastic customer service?

Elastic customer service means you can scale customer service up or down according to customer demand without ballooning costs, training new agents, offshoring, or planning for seasonal fluctuations. With elastic customer service, you can meet customer demand 100% of the time, while only paying for what you use resulting in higher CSAT and more productive agents.

What’s the difference between an autonomous contact center and IVAs or conversational AI?

An autonomous contact center goes beyond what an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) or conversational AI solution can do. It’s designed to handle complex, nuanced conversations in real-time with AI Voice agents that respond at human-like inflection and speed. Continually improved by machine learning, the autonomous contact center is the closest thing to human agents you can deploy, at 50% of the cost.

Does an autonomous contact center integrate with my current investments?

An autonomous contact center integrates with your existing cloud contact center, effectively augmenting its capabilities by adding AI-powered service to your customer service strategy. We currently offer out-of-the-box connectors for leading contact center solutions and CRM software, and, as a fully managed service, we can build custom API integrations to fit customer needs.

How difficult is it to get started with an autonomous contact center?

Easy. It typically takes anywhere from four to eight weeks to go live.

Does an autonomous contact center work across all industries?

An autonomous contact center works in any industry that has customers calling about Tier-1 issues. If your agents are fielding the same repetitive requests every shift, an autonomous contact center can lift that from them and free them to handle more complex calls and/or conduct proactive outbound calls. Imagine what else your agents could be doing to deliver high value customer experiences!

What call flows and use-cases is an autonomous contact center best at resolving?

Tier-1 calls that are typically the rote, routine, repetitive requests that customers make. Here are just a few of the uses cases:

Retail & eCommerce: manage basic troubleshooting such as product issues, track packages, returns and exchanges
Insurance companies: schedule claims appointments, streamline claim processing, and engage in proactive sales outreach
Financial Services: manage new account registration, balance updates and loan pull-throughs
Healthcare: manage prescription refills and orders
Travel & Leisure: manage common guest troubleshooting and booking
Food Delivery: place orders using outbound calls for real-time, accurate order placing
Subscription-based: oversee order management such as adding items or changing the quantity, shipping or delivery dates on existing orders
Gig-economy: schedule on-boarding and verification calls or allow couriers to call 24/7 for convenient scheduling
Pay-as-you-go: manage renewals and payment collection to increase retention and decrease faulty payments

Is Replicant an autonomous contact center?

Yes. Replicant Voice is an autonomous contact center that leverages voice AI to deliver always-on, elastic call center capacity for customer service. It delivers multi-experience, omnichannel support across voice, SMS, mobile flex forms, and other customer service channels.You can think of Replicant Voice as a self-service, Thinking Machine ™. Just like agents, Replicant Voice can speak with your customers in a natural tone, answer questions without delay, and resolve customer service issues quickly. Replicant Voice eliminates hold times, manages unpredictable call volumes, and gives agents time back to resolve high empathy, Tier-2 and Tier-3 calls.

What results have you seen with existing customers?

+50% average reduction in direct customer service costs as compared to a highly optimized, third-party business process outsourcer (BPO)

+50% reduction in average handle time (AHT)

100% reduction in hold time for higher customer satisfaction

+50% reduction in call escalations for repetitive calls

+5% higher accuracy and lower error rates as compared to human agents

+94% inference accuracy with continuous learning

How do I get started?

Replicant makes the process easy. It’s a subscription service with monthly billing for usage and an annual platform fee. It works out-of-the-box and integrates with your existing contact center software.

Click here to view a demo and learn more.