Call Deflection and Virtual Agent technology achieve game changing Contact Centre results for major supermarket.

The demand for online grocery shopping and delivery was getting higher than ever, and Australians were becoming increasingly dependent on it. But, with that growth came a dramatic increase in enquiries and Contact Centre demand.
 
One of Australia’s biggest supermarkets came to us in search of a solution that could take the strain off overburdened contact centres, while keeping enquiry resolution standards up.

Our client’s online retail business was experiencing significant year-on-year growth, with annual revenue increases up to 27%. While the expansion was welcome, it put a strain on the client’s contact centre operations with their call and web chat agents struggling to keep up with the growing volume of customer enquiries - especially those related to the client’s eCommerce platform.

Both voice and digital channels were feeling the strain, as customers sought support with issues including order tracking, checkout processes and other online shopping-related concerns.

Increased average handling times, slow case management and an overall decline in customer experience were becoming a major concern.

Their contact centres were inundated with enquiry traffic, so, to help find a solution to the rising contact centre workloads, Probe CX first performed a comprehensive diagnostic analysis to identify the key drivers of customer contacts. This included:

Analysing and identifying the contact drivers by channel, and prioritising the processes best suited for reengineering, automation or deflection to lower-cost, self-service channels

Modelling the future-state processes to calculate the potential benefits in terms of automation and channel shift.

Developing a roadmap to drive incremental digital uptake and intelligent automation across the client’s customer service operations.

Probe CX implemented a two-pronged plan centred around two main approaches: Call Deflection and Virtual Agent technology.

Call Deflection implementation: Oration by Convai

Probe CX introduced Oration, our cloud-based call-routing plugin with advanced speech recognition capabilities. It could identify callers who were enquiring about the client’s eCommerce platform and, rather than forwarding them to a live call agent, redirected them to the client’s web chat service.

Virtual Agent technology

To ensure that web chat agents weren't suddenly inundated due to the Call Deflection implementation, Probe CX developed a tailored Virtual Agent to handle a significant portion of the order tracking and checkout-related enquiries that were coming through the chat interface.
If the virtual agent was unable to fully resolve a customer’s issue, it would pass the customer details and chat history along to a live web chat agent for further support.

A 41% reduction in effort needed for central contact centre agents, both call and web-based, to handle eCommerce-related customer interactions, combined with a 96% accuracy rate for the virtual agent in successfully resolving customer queries.

We achieved a 28% shift in customer interactions from traditional voice channels to more efficient digital channels, and reduced costs related to staffing, infrastructure and operational expenses by over $1million.