What is Autonomous Customer Service?

While many industries are struggling with a tight labor market, customer service centers may have some of the biggest challenges of all. As contact centers grapple with a high live agent turnover rate and look for ways to reduce agent frustration, they may need to find a whole new way of operating. Implementing an autonomous customer service solution can be an excellent way to do just that.

Autonomous customer service can help contact center managers implement an effective alternative. By using AI in customer service, managers no longer need to hire customer service agents to deal with increasing call volumes. Instead, a vast majority of the Tier One, simple, repetitive inquiries can be handled with no human interaction at all. Advanced conversational AI technology today includes sophisticated natural language capabilities, accurate discernment of multiple customer intents, and the ability to “learn” from calls taken.

How can AI improve customer service?

When contact centers use AI in customer service, they will be able to respond to Tier One questions immediately with zero hold time for customers. According to Hubspot, “the average call center hold time is roughly 13 minutes, and most people are willing to wait 2-3 minutes on hold before getting upset. However, 57 percent of customers find long hold times to be a frustrating part of the service experience.” Eliminating wait times, therefore, is an excellent way to improve customer service.

How can AI improve customer experience?

In today’s busy world, customers expect to get accurate and rapid answers to their questions as well as solutions to service issues immediately. Implementing conversational AI solutions allows contact centers to streamline their voice, text, and chat channels to respond to customer inquiries as soon as they come in. In addition, the history of customer conversations is stored for further analysis and improvement.

What does AI-powered mean?

AI-powered means that a solution uses artificial intelligence to understand natural language, interpret customer intent, and locate the right answer the majority of the time without human intervention. Replicant’s solution is pre-trained on millions of customer service calls, allowing new contact centers to get up and running rapidly. That said, Replicant’s solution will continue to “learn” over time for each specific application.

Reducing Turnover

Another benefit of an autonomous customer service solution is to reduce live agent turnover. Since Tier One, repetitive questions are resolved automatically, customer service representatives are no longer burdened with these high-volume inquiries. It’s widely claimed that a role in Telemarketing is boring, the reason it has this reputation is because traditional Telemarketing is very manual, unassisted by AI.

By offloading boring questions, an autonomous customer service solution allows human agents to spend time and energy on more complex, interesting questions that require empathy. In many cases, this leads to higher job satisfaction and less turnover.

Rapid, Efficient Implementation

One concern in today’s highly technological world is the cost and implementation time for new technologies. One key decision point is deciding whether to build vs buy an AI in customer service solution. Although building your own solution can give you control and the ability to customize features, the investment in hardware and expertise can be cost-prohibitive and the time to deployment may be months or years.

Since Replicant’s solution is an out-of-the-box solution, typical deployment takes as little as six to 12 weeks – depending on the number of call flows required. Already trained on millions of customer contact interactions, Replicant comes with unparalleled experience to serve your contact center immediately along with the ability to learn more starting from day one. The time and resources from your IT department will be little to none, generating significant returns with very little investment.

Our Autonomous Customer Service Solution

Jill Accardo

Office Depot

Vice President Customer Service and Order Managment

LinkedIn