Great value of a virtual contact center assistant

It is not a new problem that contact centers experience difficulties in hiring talent since most job seekers don't like repetitive and tedious tasks. At the same time, they are facing increasing operational costs due to intense competition for scarce talent and high demand for customer care services. One way of solving this problem is hiring a Virtual Contact Center Assistant. Or as we tend to name them: digital employees.

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What is a virtual AI assistant?

Virtual AI assistants are applications that utilize artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and conversational automation to achieve human-level capability in completing repetitive and routine tasks. They can significantly reduce the need for human employees while speeding up processes and simplifying customer interactions. In the context of a contact center, the digital assistant can perform customer care functions such as taking calls, chatting with customers, and email correspondence.

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The benefits

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Cost savings

The Covid pandemic and containment measures taken by the Netherlands government had a profoundly negative impact on the Dutch economy. The GDP shrank by 3.7%, forcing the government to intervene with a program to retain jobs and support employers. However, these measures failed to prevent job losses, and the unemployment rate rose to 3.8% in 2020. The government forecasts economic growth of 2.2% in 2021, which will lead to cautious growth in certain sectors.

It may not be immediately cost-effective for employers to hire workers in this environment, especially since recruiting good staff is costly and time-consuming. Still, some critical positions, such as customer service and contact center personnel, need to be filled. Digital assistants offer an attractive alternative because of their ability to perform the repetitive tasks performed by humans. Digital workers are cheaper, faster, more accurate than humans and cost less than 50% of the total cost of hiring human staff.

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Improved operational efficiency

Virtual AI assistants can mimic humans and, over time, manage to perform better than humans. Research suggests that automation can complete 50-70% of the tasks done by humans, leading to a 20-30% improvement in operational efficiency. They can also reduce the straight-through process time by 50-60% with a return on investment in triple-digit percentages.

Digital employees can help reduce data entry and processing errors by 99% and can be onboarded in every team. They can effectively handle most repetitive and manual, expensive, and error-prone tasks. This frees up human resources for higher-value activities. These incredible achievements are due to recent advances in cognitive technology and deep learning.

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Meet our digital employee Jennifer

Our digital employee is called Jennifer and can handle all first-line contacts with clients via mail, social, phone, or live chat. You can let it handle all those repetitive and tedious tasks your employees don't like. This makes work a lot more fun. Only the one-offs or more complex questions are transferred to human staff.

Apart from the internal benefits, the customer also wins. Customers will benefit from a decreased 'average handling time' and an increase in 'first time right.' And when a complex question comes, the contact center specialists have more time to handle it well.

There are many benefits of adding one or more digital employees to your team:

• no IT project required
• no upfront costs
• training and onboarding Jennifer takes less than 3 weeks
• up to 50% cheaper than a human employee
• available 24/7
• scalable and flexible depending on the workflow
• up to five times faster than human employees
• our digital employees are multilingual and can handle international clients

If you would like to hire our virtual contact center assistant, please reach out to us!

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