Solutions
It’s time to treat Artificial Intelligence like what it is: here to augment human productivity, not replace it. The Sparkcentral Virtual Agent Framework considers chatbots “digital employees”, collaborating with your live agents.
Leading analysts estimate that by 2022, 70% of customer interactions will involve technology such as chatbots, with 20% of all being completely handled by AI.
However, they also estimate that 40% of interactions will still involve humans.
Customer service is sometimes about advising, consulting and providing guidance to customers. It can require a level of emotion, or empathy that can only be achieved by a human.
At Sparkcentral, we therefore believe that AI will have the role of working side-by-side with humans to augment, not replace them.
Virtual agents that help with serving your customers need the same capabilities as live agents to reach full productivity:
Lead a conversationThe core ability is of course to engage with customers on the channel of their choice. Any chatbots deployed on Sparkcentral can be deployed to have full conversations with customers on any channel you are managing through our platform. Adding a Virtual Agent to a new channel takes a click of a button.
Manage a conversationVirtual agents also need to be able to assign a conversation to other virtual agents, or back to live agents to take over. Furthermore, they need to be able to set key conversational attributes such as topics or tags, as well as leave notes for other agents. Sparkcentral enables all of the above, and more.
Conduct transactionsFinally, virtual agents need to be able to book rooms, look up balances, change a reservation, and do all the other things in your backend system that your live agents are doing. Virtual agents deployed on Sparkcentral retain all of these capabilities, for full productivity gain.
With Sparkcentral, you can easily configure simple chatbots for tasks such as asking pre-qualification questions or providing out-of-hours — similar to the job your tier 1 agents are doing today in your customer service organization.
Configuring your tier 1 chatbots is as easy as providing the questions you want them to ask, or the messages you want them to provide. Choose:
Sparkcentral lets you connect any AI-powered chatbot you create in any platform you choose to any messaging channel you want.
Sparkcentral recognizes that many organizations already have introduced virtual agents to their digital customer service operations. Rather than forcing you to re-build your chatbots on another proprietary platform, Sparkcentral integrates with any chatbot vendor through a versatile API.
Don’t have an AI partner yet? Talk to us, and get introduced to one of several chatbot partners specializing in different verticals and different regions of the world.
Sparkcentral lets you employ as many virtual agents as you need, for different uses cases and “skills”. The approach allows human handover at any point in the dialog, even during a conversation – so your customer always gets the best possible experience.
The Virtual Agent is assigned a new conversation. They can resolve the conversation or hand it over to a live agent at anytime.
Use cases:
During a conversation, a live agent can pass the interaction to a Virtual Agent to perform simple data collection and basic transactions, then claim the dialog back.
Use cases:
Once a live agent finishes a conversation, they can pass the interaction to a Virtual Agent for follow-up actions.
Use cases:
What will adding Virtual Agents do for your digital customer service operations?
Reduce cost
Support your live agents with automation that takes away the easy and repetitive side of customer service
Increase productivity
Free up live agents for matters that require human empathy, judgement, intelligence
Extend business hours
Use across all Messaging channels and extend your business hours to 24x7x365
Improve customer experience
Answer simple questions faster and with less customer effort — and no wait times
Chatbots in the contact center won’t replace live agents — our product manager gives two reasons:
1. Chatbot applications are only as good as the data they leverage
2. Importance of human interactions
Engage in a digital dialogue with your customers and resolve 100% of their questions and issues fast, securely, without ever overwhelming your agents. When you put Sparkcentral to use you receive more than a proven platform, you also get expert guidance to make your team the most productive it can get!
