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Contact center operating expenses are estimated at an annual 200 billion dollars in the US. Agents and supervisors account for 75% or more of this spend. Initiatives to reduce costs have become particularly pressing in these uncertain times—but increasing the bottom line of a business via higher sales is equally—if not more—important.

Many consumer company executives are actively working to reduce their operational expenses within their contact center operations. They may:

1. Set up new programs to push for greater digital adoption and fewer interactions
2. Try to shorten interaction time
3. Consolidate technology systems
4. Reduce agent turn-over
5. Establish a faster onboarding process for new agents

The most forward-looking contact center executives are also focused on improving the bottom line of their business. They’re looking for ways to improve their customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion funnels, conversion rates, and conversion volumes across web, self-service, voice, and digital channels.

Customer experience executives are challenged to reduce spending, and at the same time help drive top-line growth.

Pierre Zum Buttel

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However, balancing opex reduction initiatives with top-line growth ambitions can be a complex undertaking. In this pursuit companies often assemble a set of fragmented solutions, which results in inefficiencies because the various technologies were never designed to operate together in an optimal fashion. The mismash of systems can cause unexpected internal costs, poorer experience for both customers and agents, and lots of frustration on everyone’s part—including the executives who are eager to see meaningful results.

ASAPP offers a different approach

At ASAPP we help companies meet both cost savings and revenue growth goals with an AI Native® platform that augments agents—driving better results in both service and sales contact centers. The platform provides a wealth of capabilities, streamlining operations. And, with machine learning at the core it delivers outcomes that far exceed what’s possible with a hodge-podge of systems.

Companies using ASAPP realize millions of dollars in real, measurable value as the ASAPP platform helps their agents be more efficient and more effective in their day-to-day job activities on both voice and digital channels. The self-learning technology enables them to address customer needs faster and with more accuracy by predicting what they need to say and do—in real time—throughout every interaction.

A few examples of real results

Support agents are able to resolve issues faster, increasing overall productivity, while sharply improving first call resolution rates. Meanwhile sales agents increase both close rates and order size, using AI-driven insights to personalize each interaction and make the right offers.

What’s more, customer satisfaction scores rise at the same time. Agents are happier, too—which reduces churn that runs as high as 50% in many contact centers. There is far less frustration (and fewer unhappy customers for agents to deal with) when they are able to serve customer needs well.

Customers get proven value

Through numerous implementations in my years at ASAPP, I have seen customers double down on ASAPP with an incredible level of commitment, engagement, and enthusiasm. Generating value is at the core of the ASAPP platform, and customers really see it in their day-to-day operations.

Part 2: Technology and Workforce Management’s Role in Driving Higher Concurrency and Throughput

In our last post we discussed how the ASAPP self-learning platform augments your agents and automates micro-processes, enabling agents to focus on the truly value-adding parts of their job. This substantially reduces the cognitive load (amount of your agents’ focus and attention) required to resolve any customer issue.

The result is more efficient conversations (shorter handle times) and freed up agent mental capacity. This increased capacity can be thought of as slack in the system—allowing for additional conversations to be handled by the same number of agents, all while improving the customer experience and reducing wait times. Taking advantage of this slack in the system by driving higher concurrency requires the alignment of both technology and workforce management.

Let’s define two terms for this discussion:

• Agent capacity: The number of customer conversations each agent can handle in a given time period
• Volume: The number of inbound messaging conversations each agent receives in a given time period
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Once you’ve increased agent capacity, you must have a plan to drive additional conversation volume to dramatically increase concurrency.

Mike Friedman

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If we increase agents’ capacity (by freeing-up their focus), and don’t increase the volume, we’ve missed one whole side of the equation. There will be increased slack in the system, though agents will still handle one conversation at a time. Only with greater volume can we increase concurrency and savings.

We have to take operational action to increase the volume of conversations per agent. This action can take two forms:

1. Drive volume from calls to messaging—resulting in additional interactions at $0 cost
2. Give your customers a digital option everywhere they might engage to call you—and provide them with delightful digital experiences and you’ll drive customers from phone to digital. With more customers using messaging, agents will more frequently engage in two conversations at once.
3. Rightsize staffing—resulting in the same same number of interactions for less cost
4. Many common and outdated models for workforce management, such as Erlang-C, are based on agents having a concurrency of one. This assumption results in over-staffing and agents frequently interacting with only one customer at a time. Contact center managers must re-examine staffing models given agents’ increased capacity. With fewer agents, agents would more frequently engage in two conversations at once driving meaningful throughput improvements and savings.

In the absence of either measure above, we’ll increase each agent’s capacity only to find they’re still working with only one customer at a time. But if we increase the ratio of customer conversations to agents (after increasing their capacity), there will be enough conversations to ensure agents are handling several messages at once, resulting in massive concurrency improvements, higher throughput, and meaningful savings.

Today, after spending almost 25 years running customer service and experience teams for large brands like Apple, Samsung, and EA, I joined ASAPP, a truly amazing company transforming customer experiences and innovating contact center operations with next generation, AI-powered software.

Why join an enterprise software provider after being a practitioner for so long? It’s an interesting next step in my own personal journey starting at Apple where I realized that the role of an agent is one of the most important jobs at any company, as they are the voice of your brand.

ASAPP

I met ASAPP CEO Gustavo Sapoznik and the team at ASAPP late last year, and was genuinely shocked to find a company that delivers on the promise of transforming customer experience. What other companies said they were working on or thinking about, ASAPP had already built. And not just built…but built well, paying attention to every last detail of the experience for both customers and agents, bringing true innovation to the technology that powers this industry in a way that I have not seen in 25 years.

It turns out that helping enable other companies to deliver best-in-class experiences vs. leading an operation directly is two sides of the same coin. Plus the people, the culture, and the product here at ASAPP speaks to the heart of a company and what truly matters. It’s why I am here.

I look forward to helping companies deliver best-in-class customer experiences.

Michael Lawder

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I’m excited for this next part of the journey into the customer experience. While these remain uncertain and challenging times for people—including everyone in the customer experience industry—it’s an opportunity for change and growth in these moments of truth. This new normal is forcing all of us to think differently and businesses have the opportunity to address underlying challenges and build strategies and plans to survive and thrive through these times. I joined ASAPP because I’ve seen how powerful its artificial intelligence capabilities are in driving innovative and new customer experiences—including remote agents—and how critical this technology will become in transforming the way customer service and experience operate, now and in the future.

As ASAPP is a fundamental research-driven organization, I’ll be tackling opportunities to combine the best ingredients businesses will need in the future to build a best-in-class customer experience team that allows them to outpace their competitors.

For the first time, companies don’t have to sacrifice high-quality experiences in the name of reducing costs and I’ve been inspired by the leadership and team here at ASAPP. We’re on a journey to help every company deliver awesome customer experiences and radically increase agent productivity.

Let’s get started!

Making Conversations Easier for Agents

There are a number of levers you can pull to drive dramatic cost savings in your digital messaging program while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. One of the most impactful is concurrency—the ability for agents to manage multiple conversations at once. Concurrency can substantially reduce labor costs by empowering agents to manage up to 6 conversations at once. But isn’t that overly ambitious, demanding for the agent, and challenging to staff? All of these factors are easily solvable in pursuit of massive customer care cost savings.

Your agents can manage multiple conversations at once—and keep your customers happy—when you use AI to support them well.

Mike Friedman

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Achieving high concurrency is all about managing the cognitive load—the amount of your agents’ focus and attention—required by a conversation at any given time. The truth is, most interactions don’t require your agents’ full focus and attention. That means there is an opportunity to productively engage your agents’ remaining brainpower. Further, by reducing the cognitive load of each interaction, you can enable your agents to manage multiple conversations concurrently—all while preserving quality.

At ASAPP, we’ve designed our platform to support your agents and enable high concurrency. We do this through four tactics that substantially reduce cognitive load:

• Micro-Process Automation
• The ASAPP platform exchanges information with your customers, drafts messages and summary notes, predicts needed content, and writes updates to other systems of record (like your CRM).
• Flex-Concurrency AI
• Through machine learning, we’re able to monitor conversations to understand the level of engagement required by the agent based on many factors to dynamically shift concurrency up or down.
• AI-Driven Intelligent Routing
• Sophisticated routing models match your customers with the best agents to meet their needs; agents who’ve solved similar problems before and are more efficient.
• Highly Instrumented and Researched User Interface
• Optimized user interface designed to manage agents’ focus, reduce swivel-chair behavior, and help agents engage in concurrent conversations without missing a beat.

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By applying the tactics and technologies above, we can drastically reduce the cognitive load of each customer conversation and free up their attention to handle multiple conversations at once.

Technology and Workforce Management’s Role in Driving Higher Concurrency and Throughput—Part 2