AI-enabled Contact Center-as-a-Service offering enhances customer and agent experience
Today, organizations understand the pressing need to expand and improve their digital sales and support solutions to meet new customer needs. Consumers demand services anytime, anywhere. Although many companies have strengthened their web and mobile presence, customers still turn to the contact center when they need additional support. Because of this trend, businesses must modernize and improve their contact center capabilities.
Five9 recently held a joint analyst call with some of its customers to share how different companies are improving their contact centers. Each company offered specific insight into the many ways Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and artificial intelligence (AI) are helping their organizations deliver better agent and customer experiences. CCaaS is a SaaS-based application that enables customer service organizations to support multichannel customer interactions, including the use of self- and assisted-services.
Transitioning from legacy services to modern contact center solutions requires a willingness to rethink existing workflows, create a change management process and embrace new technologies. Marsh McLennan, a leading professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy and people, highlights some of these challenges and opportunities.
It has multiple lines of business to integrate into an overall customer service strategy. It has more than 4,000 agents and has converted 103 of its Five 9 contact centers worldwide. Due to the size of the company and its growth through acquisitions, Marshall McLellan wanted to work with a vendor that offered professional services capability to support a significant transition. It shared that working with a vendor willing to co-invent and act as a partner is essential. Marsh McLellan said its business executives meet regularly with Five 9 to understand the future of technology and plan for any changes.
On the technology side, the location of Five 9’s data centers and multiple voice Points of Presence were two main reasons why Marsh McLennan chose Five 9. From a business perspective, Marsh McLennan wanted to use Interactive Virtual Assistants (IVAs), chatbots, and agent technologies help to drive organizational efficiency.
IVAs help companies deploy self-service support that delivers a more conversational and engaging experience across voice and digital channels. It allows companies to automate routine tasks. Today, Marsh McLennan has deployed chatbots that allow employees to ask HR representatives questions in the language of their choice. The bots translate the question into English for the representatives to answer in English, but the responses are translated back into the employee’s preferred language. McLennan looks at Five 9’s Agent Assist AI technology to help agents in real-time with data, tools and insights to improve customer engagement results and productivity. It also integrates Five9 with other applications such as ServiceNow to improve IT services requests and is interested in designing solutions to provide proactive support.
On the financial side, moving to CCaaS allows the company to have consistent, favorable rates regardless of the size of any individual contact center. Marsh McLennan expects a 26 to 50% reduction in contact center costs depending on what solution it replaces.
Overall, Marsh McLennan wanted to move beyond the systems it had in the past to create a more dynamic and AI-assisted employee and customer experience.
AI automation enables McKesson to extend support
Meanwhile, no industry has seen more change than healthcare over the past few years. McKesson Corporation distributes pharmaceuticals and provides health information technology, medical supplies, and care management tools. The company supplies a third of all pharmaceuticals used in North America and employs more than 78,000 employees. This requires newer systems to support flexibility, seasonality and increased contact center demand. McKesson supports over 200 individual pharmaceutical customers with multiple drugs and unique requirements for each of their programs. When McKesson began its journey in 2012, it had to scale to support the addition of 700-1,000 agents during its verification period. Now, it needs 2,000 agents to support the three-month seasonal burst for enrollment.
McKesson considers engagement services a mission-critical product because it supports patient medicine. The company has several goals for refreshing its contact center. At the beginning of the project, McKesson had to quickly onboard agents. Going forward, it sees tremendous value in adding IVAs to the existing call flow. Instead of recreating a process in advance, it plans to insert IVA at the beginning of specific processes to help hundreds of programs without disrupting the business. IVAs will automate use cases, such as prescription refills, and assist customers in signing up for renewal and shipping services. This is a big win for the business as half of the calls within specific groups are for prescription refills.
The company also noted that how it communicates information is critical. Inbound call oversight is important because McKesson operates in a world where it needs a scripted answer for every question, such as how to manage adverse medical events (side effects) such as numbness or headaches. It must report any issues to pharmaceutical manufacturers within 24 hours.
Employee retention is difficult but using the latest CCaaS offerings helps McKesson deliver flexible work policies. This new technology makes the office a choice, not a fixed destination. McKesson agents consider themselves healthcare professionals. The next step for McKesson is to use Agent Assist to help new agents understand their job more quickly. By using AI to automate simple routine items, agents can focus on experiences that matter.
The IVA allows McKesson to service patients outside of its regular business hours. Reports from Five 9 show that customers have wholeheartedly embraced this benefit. McKesson said reports revealed a significant increase in patients performing customer care tasks on weekends or after hours when McKesson is closed. Prior to using Five 9, McKesson could only service demand during business hours.
Key takeaways
Several themes are clear from the discussion. First, CCaaS is ready for prime time, and large enterprises are embracing it. Second, merging companies and business units is challenging but provides an opportunity to rethink the contact center experience. Third, artificial intelligence offers many practical ways for companies to improve the agent experience, from automating routine processes to guiding agents and analyzing customer sentiment.