Customers expect to be able to:
Customers also expect this to happen 24x7 (for the most part), with automated systems that know who they are and why they’re reaching out.
Remember my power outage last night? Well to continue the story, I called and went through the following sequence of events:
Of course, I called again and went through all steps of the same process again. The system didn’t even remember my phone number—seriously? Note: To the utility’s credit, they did update the restoration time.
Recently, C1 worked with a power company to modernize their business hour inbound voice calls. They had a cloud system—an IVR—that would provide a menu of options and send callers to various groups or other automated systems (like payment) to handle their needs.
While we were in testing for one of their locations, the current cloud-based IVR system went down. It went down hard. In other words, nothing was coming in except for a trickle of calls. The question remains, what do you do when things go down?
Issue #1: The current system wasn’t designed to failover in the case of an attack.
Issue #2: Time to restoration wasn’t available due to the attack.
The financial consequences of this could have been devastating. Oh, and this happened during an outage due to weather (increased traffic).
Luckily, the customer was modernizing their inbound systems with us and made the quick decision to begin turning voice traffic to an IVA that’s fully redundant as a SaaS based service. The customer experienced less than a week of these negative issues.
As a result:
This did turn out to be a good news story, but I still think about what happens when systems go down and the vendor you’re working with isn’t able to accommodate your needs.
How can you mitigate your exposure so that you don’t end up in this situation? Decide on options that help. Create a contingency plan for each step of the communication:
In all industries, meeting customer demands for personalized and efficient service is crucial. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers significant benefits to achieve this, ensuring compliance, reliability, 24/7 automated support options and redundancy in the contact center and overall customer experience. These advantages include reduced wait times, improved accuracy, increased customer satisfaction, and enhanced compliance.
Join me for an on-demand webinar, where I explore how leveraging AI technologies can enhance your business securely and compliantly.