In a typical contact center, a five-minute call typically loses two minutes to authentication and figuring out the problem. AI tools can help reduce the time spent on authentication and diagnosis through virtual agent triage. The reflex is to bank the savings as headcount. The opportunity is to reinvest them.
One of our leading principles at Zoom is conversation to completion. There are five levers around restructuring for AI that we feel provides tactical ways to execute on this reality.
Lever 1 : Capitalizing on capacity.
Time saved could be used for educating customers, cross-selling, building relationships, and preventing the next call. This is the lowest effort shift; simple behavioral changes where agents are encouraged not only to be more efficient, but capitalize on the time that's now opened up on each interaction.
Lever 2: Mining new data
At minimum, managers can be freed up to coach intelligently, not just listen to random call samples. But a role-redesign is where value compounds: redirecting strong agents to become data scientists is entirely feasible.
The contact center turns into a discovery engine for the roadmap, not just a place to resolve tickets. This is the most underappreciated lever AI offers.
Lever 3: Going after long tail use-cases.
Additional capacity allows organizations to go after long-tail cases that were previously deemed uneconomic.
The 2am contact, long-tail languages, volume previously abandoned. All of this becomes possible with AI.
Lever 4: Flexing the proactive muscle
Retaining revenue is cheaper than net new capture of revenue, and proactive service is almost always cheaper than reactive service. Reducing the need for manual handling of some L0 and L1 cases allows you to redeploy resources to actively manage relationships and proactively solve challenges.
Vignette: A major global airline randomly surveys frequent flyers to evaluate satisfaction from their recent flights. Top travelers who indicate dissatisfaction will get a call from a customer advocacy team who attempts to understand the problem and review the feedback. The simple act of the proactive outreach in response to a poor service event is a significant loyalty lever. Deploying humans to conduct this sort of exercise is the type of work that is enabled with additional capacity.
Lever 5 : Re-deploying agents to new roles
Agents typically understand an organization's operational, process, and product gaps better than the functions that own them. That knowledge is wasted on ticket resolution alone.
Redeployed, agents can act as CX multipliers: anticipating customer needs and uncovering insights that can drive stronger relationships and potential revenue opportunities.
These agents may move into roles focused on AI design, data scientist pusuits, or focusing on long-tail use cases. It's critical to think about rebuilding and optimizing operating models allowed by AI's enhanced workforce capacity
