Salmat Virtual Agent reduces costs and improves the productivity of the contact centre, ultimately creating better quality customer service
Today Salmat, the leader in integrated multi-channel customer engagement solutions has introduced a range of new services aimed at delivering reduced costs, higher customer satisfaction and improved productivity for contact centres. Named Virtual Agent, the service augments traditional contact centre functions – including identity verification, routing calls and automation of repetitive tasks; delivering a consistent customer experience every time, answering calls immediately and allowing real agents to focus on higher value, more productive functions. This helps to overcome a major challenge for organisations with high or growing customer call volumes.
To date, Salmat customers have already seen significant savings following the implementation of Salmat’s Virtual Agent technologies. Across Australia, organisations that have deployed Virtual Agent, including Government agencies, major banks and smaller bespoke contact centres have typically reduced handling times by between 30 seconds and 1 minute and reduced misdirected call rates to below 5%.
Dr Mike Banbrook, General Manager Salmat Speech Solutions said that across the country, even with the increase in multi-channel contact, the volume of inbound calls to company contact centres are as high as they have always been. According to Dr Banbrook, a key trend contributing to the call volumes is “failure demand”, where by the contact centre becomes the default channel when other channels fail to resolve a customer’s query satisfactorily.
“When customers call a company, they simply want their queries resolved with the minimum of effort and time. Yet they are often confounded by confusing menu options and kept on hold for lengthy periods.”
“Many business leaders are not aware of the advances that have been made which enable calls to be answered quickly and efficiently through Virtual Agents. The efficiency created lowers customer effort and decreases call handling time which means that contact centre agents can handle the calls quicker and reduce the dreaded hold times.”
“By introducing a “Virtual Agent” that never sleeps, takes a break or needs phone training time, businesses can achieve significant savings and quickly create a friendlier face for the brand,” Banbrook added.
Virtual Agent manages and automates a broad range of interactions such as (but not limited to) call routing, identification of callers, store location information, payments, delivery track and trace information, surveys and confirming and accepting terms and conditions. As a result, real agents are able to facilitate higher quality and more positive conversations with customers.
Large and smaller businesses alike can access these sophisticated call processing technologies, and Salmat has simplified the choice, set-up and ongoing servicing of its solution to make it more accessible and flexible. Companies can choose one or many solutions from the Virtual Agent suite and now have the option of an on-premise or hosted service – making it very flexible and adaptable for even smaller business. The service is delivered as an operational expenditure (OPEX) rather than a capital expenditure (CAPEX) to help realise further savings to operational budgets.
“The long term value is in the customer experience of the brand, especially as operational time and dollar savings can be invested in staff development to improve specialist knowledge and add value for the customer”, Banbrook added.
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About Salmat
Salmat is a leader in the provision of integrated multi-channel customer engagement solutions managing more than 6 billion interactions each year for Australia and New Zealand’s largest and most trusted brands. Salmat helps organisations generate revenue, decrease cost and improve the customer experience to ensure growth and competitive sustainability.
