Innovation Challenge - Call Center Volume Management

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, enterprises’ call centers are under huge pressure as the number of customer calls about finances, insurance etc. grow dramatically every day. Meanwhile, enterprises face contact center staff shortages, due to a decrease in human agents available. According to Pindrop, in certain instances the overall call volume to contact centers jumped over 600% from normal levels, while agent call capacity dropped by 20%.¹

The outcome of this massive demand is that call centers have increased wait times dramatically. The median call duration has doubled to 3 minutes and the maximum call duration increased by 62% to 55 minutes as a result of high volume and low capacity.² In these difficult times of financial and health crises, enterprises are facing extreme difficulty in providing a positive experience for their customers via contact centers.

The current situation has led to the conclusion – you can’t scale with humans. Enterprises are looking to embrace ML and AI solutions to provide support to existing teams with peak loads, frequent changes in workforce capacity, and future crisis around the corner. By using advanced solutions, enterprises want the ability to address any customer request and enable their workers to focus on tasks that require specialized skills and attention.

[1] https://www.pindrop.com/blog/flash-report-five-insights-of-covid-19-in-the-contact-center/

[2] https://www.pindrop.com/blog/flash-report-five-insights-of-covid-19-in-the-contact-center/

For the challenge of managing call center volume, we identified two major use cases:

1) The Proliferation of FAQs Bots – Enterprises implement many bots but the truth is that bots should work much better. Bots seldom answer the customer’s request, can't understand more than a few specific intents and don't offer personalized FAQ answers based on a user profile, time of day, location, history, etc. Moreover, enterprises can't leverage their existing bots to work at scale.

The Challenge: Empower business users to create scalable FAQ bots that are easy to train, effectively manage FAQ content at scale and can be personalized by user.

2) Effective Collections – Deloitte helps its clients to build voice virtual assistants that deliver a more efficient and engaging customer experience to increase overall collections efficiency. With COVID-19 debt looming over consumers and businesses, the demand for collections agents is about to skyrocket. Onboarding collections agents is a costly and time-consuming process that often leads to ineffective results, being capable of reaching out to a small portion of indebted parties.

The Challenge: Create an omni-channel outbound collections virtual agent that effectively structures the existing alternatives for the parties. The agent should use data insights to offer a more personal connection, provide tools to deal with the debts, and provide detailed accounts of every interaction for the business users to monitor the success rate and the overall effectiveness of the virtual agent.

The Challenge Leadership

Sherry Comes,

Managing Director, Leader, Conversational AI Practice

Deloitte, US

Alex Halper,

Senior Manager, COO, Conversational AI Practice 

Deloitte, US

About Sherry Comes
Sherry Comes is a Managing Director at Deloitte, in the Applied AI Practice. She specializes in the areas of voice solutions, AI, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, analytics, data science, and machine learning. Her innovative approach has won her innovation awards and has helped her lead, and be an integral part of, many ground-breaking advancements. She has done extensive work around creating voice virtual assistants in financial services and has also received a number of patents.

About Alex Halper
Alex leads Conversational AI Strategy & Operations for Deloitte. Alex brings over ten years of experience supporting CEOs and CIOs drive digital transformations across industries. He is an expert in AI, Cognitive, and RPA technologies, and has delivers impactful solutions that improve customer experience, reduce operating cost, and increase digital capabilities.

About The Conversational AI Practice
Deloitte Consulting partners with clients to design, build, implement, and operate new capabilities, technologies, and services. Together with a variety of tech partners, the Applied AI practice in Deloitte brings a vision and best practices to help our clients scale Conversational AI capability effectively and sustainably. The practice serves tens of Fortune 500 clients in the financial, insurance, telecommunication and healthcare industries. The practice leverages vast experience in credit and collections to build voice virtual assistants and smart chatbots for the largest enterprises in the world (e.g. build solutions for clients with upwards of $750M in annual collections).