Are you looking to improve customer experience at your contact centre? Or perhaps you want to better support agents in handling large volumes of customer enquiries and maximise their time? An automated answering service could help.
While an automated answering system can’t replace your agents, it can help you grow your contact centre business through increased capacity, better management of customer relations and improved processes. Here’s RingCentral’s guide to using automatic answering systems in contact centres.
An automated answering system allows your contact centre to answer phone calls without a customer service agent on the line. Instead of your team answering calls, an automated phone answering machine uses self-service and advanced automated AI to answer.
An automated answering system is different to an automated calling service or an automated phone call service as it manages inbound calls rather than outbound calls.
An automated phone answering system can be set up to manage the needs of your specific business – whether you need to take payments or direct calls across teams.
Your business could use an automated answering system simply as a digital receptionist or for automated telephone order taking. Larger businesses could use an automated answering system to guide customers through a series of menus directing them to a specific agent.
Most automated phone answering systems work the same way, by:
The system can then provide information as requested, transfer the caller or use call deflection to manage call volumes.
An automated system uses AI digital routing – or machine learning – which automatically understands a message’s intent and routes the customer. AI routing can recognise different languages as well as customer intent, text semantics for different options, and other information provided by the customer.
The automated phone answering system can be programmed to provide alternate digital ways of communicating instead of waiting in a queue.
A mobile automated system, or an automated answering service app, can also include chatbots to manage simple or common questions, and to gather information upfront such as order numbers, contact details and contact history. This allows the call to be transferred to your agent with the full information required to handle the call.
By using an automated voice answering system your business can save on customer service costs, speed up response times, and manage more calls. The benefits of automated voice answering systems include:
An automated answering system does have some potential weaknesses that are worth keeping in mind. These include:
However, the benefits of using an automated phone answering system outweigh any issues you may find. IVR is improving its voice recognition all the time, and chatbots can now replicate human contact. Your automated system will be designed to direct customers through your contact centre to an agent as quickly and as simply as possible, significantly reducing the potential for customers to be frustrated and calls lost.
An automated answering system won’t replace your agents in the contact centre. However, automation can make it much easier for you to grow your business. If you’re considering going further and using a business phone answering service, RingCentral can help. Find out more about our inbound customer contact centre.
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