Contact centres can overcome some of the challenges they face by tapping into the power of Watson, an IBM-powered supercomputer.
That was the word from Debbie Botha, senior managing consultant at IBM, who presented yesterday at ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit 2015 in Midrand.
Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language.
According to Botha, Watson presents opportunity for contact centres in a world where clients are sharing more information on social media platforms.
"Clients expect to be served wherever, whenever and however they choose to interact, and they are growing frustrated with the lack of personalised interaction from contact centres, yet companies are still struggling to take advantage of the changing opportunities presented by big data."
Traditional approaches to engaging with customers come up short today, said Botha, adding globally 270 billion calls are made annually to call centres, costing $600 billion.
One in two incoming calls require escalation or go unresolved; 61% of all calls could have been resolved with better access to information; and a business can get a 4.6% market value gain from a single point customer satisfaction gain, she pointed out.
Describing the challenges call centres face, Botha said high staff churn is one of the biggest. Agents use call centres as an entry point, she noted; most of them have only three months' experience.
"The agents are also overwhelmed by too many systems - good or bad - to access when assisting the client, meaning there's too much to remember and the research takes too long. The agent has just completed training and just started working; all the systems are available but the agent can't always remember the rules and where to look for the policies."
Contact centres also suffer decreased productivity because of agents asking other agents questions while assisting a customer, said Botha.
"With all these challenges, agents wish they could have an expert beside them all the time."
We have entered the world of cognitive computing and Watson can act as an expert next to the call centre agent all the time with a 360-degree view of the customer, she stated.
Botha noted with Watson's cognitive computing and learning capabilities, ability to use analytics, and big data, agents get the customer's profile, history and what the next best action is to advise the customer.
"The agent has the ability to focus on communication skills, problem solving, reading people, tenacity and resilience. They also get to be positive as they have the ability to add value and assist customers with confidence; as well as getting instant access to all the systems and policies without lengthy research."
With Watson, more agents handle multiple types of service, and shared services are enabled because agents are able to ask questions and get the right answers while assisting a customer.
So far, only Metropolitan Health is using Watson in a South African contact centre.
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