In the contact centre sector, the objective is to make the customer experience positive. Technology-enabled BPO Bayview goes one step further: “Our primary goal is to make sure customers don’t need to contact Bayview in the first place. Good CX is our customers being pleased that they don’t have to get in touch,” says Nigel Mansfield, contact centre strategic lead at Bayview.
To achieve this, Bayview is transforming its contact centre from a series of siloed technologies that weren’t working optimally together and transitioning it over to the Avaya Experience Platform.
Insights and AI help achieve goal
Previously, Bayview only had insight into its chat interactions, but with Avaya Experience Platform, the company can tap into different media streams – chat, email, voice, social – and analyse them to discover where customer journeys break off. This means the company can proactively fix customer pain points so that there is no longer any need for calls about that issue.
The platform’s AI capability is also helping transform CX. Firstly, real-time speech recognition means Bayview learns in real time, across all touchpoints, if its customers are reporting on a specific part of the tech stack that has gone wrong. Previously, issues were only discovered the next day. Secondly, Bayview uses historical data to examine past customer journeys, identify trends over time, work out what’s been going wrong, and what can be fixed and improved upon, so customers don’t have to contact about them anymore.
“It’s the Avaya CCaaS architecture that allows us to pass parameters and conversations through to the AI engine and allows us to make decisions in a very tidy and clear way,” says Mansfield.
Cloud capability
Avaya Experience Platform also enables Bayview to benefit from intelligent, attribute-based routing to contextualise interactions. “Attribute-based routing is key for us as it uses the adjunct routing step to enable us to understand what a customer has been experiencing on their journey,” explains Mansfield.
Having an open cloud-based platform has also allowed Bayview to build some of its own solutions quickly. For example, when the contact centre was challenged by a massive explosion in voice, it was able to build chat bots in three different languages in just four weeks, to help alleviate call volumes.
Reaping results
Bayview would like to maintain current agent levels whilst its customer-base continues to grow so is working to enable the CCaaS platform to assist with efficient ways to answer queries. A new AI engine will rely on unsupervised learning and facilitate the use of suggest text, speeding up agent interactions and improving quality due to greater accuracy.
Agents are currently supported using knowledge articles, but with the new AI engine, they can be guided in real time through interactions. For example, when specific regulations must be complied with, agents can be prompted to tick off on a checklist all the steps required from requesting the correct document, to when the information has been provided.
Because the fulfilment industry is time critical, with expiry times on product offerings driving customers to complete their transactions within a certain timeframe, another goal is to minimise the number of abandoned calls. “It’s working,” says Mansfield. “Call handling time is down 50 per cent over the last three years and the abandon-rate most months is under 1 per cent and we are also enjoying a 50 per cent enhancement in efficiency through cost reduction. We are heading in the right direction.”