Automation: Assuring “customer service” during COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all parts of the enterprise, and it varies dramatically for each department. Mitigating the impact of the crisis and ensuring business continuity is the need of the hour. These unprecedented times require everyone to evaluate how contact centers are leveraged & how contact center employees can deliver quality customer experience in a remote setup. The emotional state of consumers and business and various macro-economic factors adds up to the challenge. But this also presents an opportunity for the organizations to excel by providing compassionate customer service so that customers feel involved.

The strategic decision-makers who are heading to the drawing board to re-strategize the working model for a customer service department, on a broad level will have the following questions to ensure business continuity:

The solution to these questions can be clubbed in two broad categories:

An optimal route for organizations would be to have an attended automation product to empower customer service teams with features that solve the problem. EdgeVerve, an Infosys subsidiary, provides one of the leading automation products — AssistEdge Engage, which is not only easy to integrate and deploy but also helps cater to the problem at hand currently. The in-built product capabilities such as single sign-on, availability of most frequently used data of customers in a single view, and one-click attended automation, among others, makes it easier for the agent to resolve queries. Any agent would need help on a situational basis when handling a customer request; a step-by-step AI-enabled guide that is available suggests the next best action that can be taken by an agent for resolution. This would ensure that agents are able to maintain the average handle time even in the new setup keeping a check on operational costs as well.

While all of us try to fight this pandemic, every organization’s leadership must prepare immediate roadmaps to bring back business to normal. This also gives every leadership time to go back to the drawing board, and develop new capabilities, find better working tools that would make them ready for long-term operational challenges in the times to come.