Help Desk Help vol. 1 – Call Deflection
This blog series highlights 4 Reasons to Use Speech Self-Service in Your Help Desk. The first volume looks at a simple yet common problem: when routine switchboard requests or general information inquiries come into the help desk.
4 Reasons to Use Speech Self-Service in Your Help Desk
Imagine you’re a customer of a company, a student of a university, patient of a hospital, etc. You need to speak with someone about your bill. You quickly Google the organization’s name, and select from one of the numbers shown in the search results with expectations that you’ll be able to reach the billing department in some manner. Congratulations! You’ve selected not the main switchboard number or billing center, but the help desk!
Meanwhile, imagine that help desk agents are struggling to stay on top of the call queue. A recent technology migration has scores of employees calling in to reset their passwords (despite the availability of an external reset service and “How-To” information in the organization’s online knowledge base). This has caused a spike in inbound call traffic that has increased hold times, and made for irate callers that agents must spend valuable time defusing before assisting.
At this nexus of customer, employee, and help desk, there are a few different ways speech self-service solutions could help deflect calls away from agents.
First, let’s take the customer, who is merely looking to speak with someone about their bill. If the help desk was using conversational AI, the caller could quickly be triaged and deflected to whatever billing department they require (customer billing, accounts payable, patient billing, financial aid, etc.). No holding for an agent. No dealing with annoying and time consuming IVRs. No roadblocks. Thus, within a few short seconds the customer rides off into the sunset of the billing department without ever having to enter the call queue or occupy an agent, and has expended very little effort to do so.
Second, let’s look at those employees calling in to reset their passwords. The IVA (intelligent virtual assistant) could identify them as an internal caller based on caller I.D. and ask the caller if they are calling to reset their password. The solution can then guide them through the external reset service processes or direct them to the online knowledge base to find the appropriate information. Once again, these calls are deflected away from agents, while the employee quickly receives the assistance or knowledge they require without wasing time on hold.
As demonstrated above, speech self-service solutions can deflect calls away from the help desk queue in a variety of ways to help accelerate and improve the caller experience, reduce hold queues, and make agents more available.
