Have you ever tried to pay a bill over the phone? If so, you likely would struggle to determine which was more painful: handing over your money or dealing with the exasperating call center bot.
If you ask Kirby Miller, those contact center woes will soon be a thing of the past.
Miller, a senior sales director at Interactions, said that the company’s AI specialists have created a way to improve communication between companies and consumers: custom, intelligent virtual assistants.
And no, these intelligent virtual assistants, or IVAs, aren’t just another chatbot on the market, said Miller. Because they are built using a unique technology that blends conversational AI and human understanding, the IVAs actually understand and communicate at a human level, relieving some of the frustration found in a traditional contact center experience. IVAs are also continuously learning, and grow more intelligent with every interaction. What’s more is these assistants can be quickly tweaked to stay compliant with financial regulations and are easily scalable to ensure minimal wait times.
It takes a little more care to implement these solutions, said Miller, but that extra effort can be revolutionary.
“Building an intelligent virtual assistant requires a true partnership between Interactions and our clients,” Miller said. “It’s absolutely apparent when a customer’s leadership team realizes and commits to a cultural shift from the old way to the new way of digital transformation.”
To learn more about how Interactions is paving a new way forward for contact centers, Built In Boston connected with Miller. He outlined how IVAs provide stress-free experiences for consumers, how Interactions has become a trusted resource for enterprise companies and what’s next for the company.
First, tell us a bit more about the issues many contact centers face. What impact do these problems have on the industry and its users?
The common goal of all contact centers is to provide pleasant, accurate and efficient communication with customers who are requesting information regarding the services or products the company provides.
However, because humans are unique individuals, a one-size-fits-all model often proves unsuccessful. Additionally, financial services contact centers face the inability to properly staff to meet dynamic and unpredictable customer demand, and have rigid rules and regulations that obstruct the business from providing each consumer with a personally customized experience and full access to requested information.
These problems have evolved over time. Regulations around contacting consumers specifically for financial matters vary drastically by industry and location, as well as by the consumer and the contact center.
What solution does Interactions provide to solve these problems?
Interactions provides IVAs that combine conversational AI with human understanding to make it easier for businesses and their customers to communicate. Customers can speak or type naturally in their own words, just as they would with a human.
The customers are in control of the conversation and don’t have to conform to rigid technology, like when they’re asked to press 1 for billing or say, “make a payment.” This reduces the frustration commonly associated with typical automated solutions and results in a better customer experience.
Always being available at scale means no hold times for our clients’ customers, which is a remarkable accomplishment.”
Our IVA can easily scale to handle unpredicted or seasonal volume demands and allow for millions of customer interactions to take place concurrently. Always being available at scale means no hold times for our clients’ customers, which is a remarkable accomplishment for any inbound contact center.
When it comes to keeping up with the ever-changing financial services contact center rules and regulations, our IVA is programmed to follow business rules and scripts 100 percent of the time. Whenever there is a change, conversational flows and scripts can easily be edited to reflect these updates and ensure a compliant customer experience.
How does your team develop these IVAs?
Interactions has been a trailblazer of conversational AI for more than 15 years. We have more than 125 patents and a robust conversational AI suite, including machine learning, natural language processing and automated speech recognition.
Our Adaptive Understanding technology seamlessly blends artificial intelligence and human understanding to help us deliver human-like services across all customer care channels, ensuring that customers are always understood. Our platform is trained and tuned in real time through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We apply the wisdom we have gained from billions of utterances passing through our system to benefit our current and future custom conversational AI applications. We began by powering conversations through inbound and outbound voice phone calls, and we have expanded our breadth of expertise into an omnichannel solution including impressive text functionality.
Tight security is almost a universal hallmark of the financial services industry. How do you get buy-in when dealing with such sensitive data?
Data security and privacy is a major benefit to our solution. To be true to our mission of advancing AI technology, we strive to deliver our IVA in a secure, compliant and resilient manner. We are proud of the comprehensive and proprietary security model we have designed, and continue to improve and evolve this model in an ongoing effort to respond to the changing needs of the industry and our clients.
Some of the largest enterprises in the world have vetted and adopted our solution, proving we can handle the most challenging security requirements at scale.”
Some of the largest enterprises in the world have vetted and adopted our solution, proving we can handle the most challenging security requirements at scale. Having successfully passed the tests of our clients’ security, fraud and audit teams, we have gained their confidence that our solution platform is safe and secure.
What emerging trends in financial services is your team following closely?
Although it’s not necessarily an emerging trend, enriching the customer experience in billing and collection departments is an area of focus. In 2020, consumer debt in the United States far exceeded $14 trillion dollars. I believe consumers genuinely want to resolve their balances. Our clients and prospects are partnering with Interactions to help their clients get out of debt in an empathetic manner without compromising a delightful customer experience.
Within the past year, our innovative team launched our virtual collection agent (VCA), powered by conversational AI. The VCA can handle the entire inbound or outbound payment communication via voice, text and live chat. Out-of-the box functionality ranges from identifying and verifying the right party and playing a legal disclaimer to offering payment arrangement options and processing payments.
The VCA takes over data-driven transactions and allows traditional contact center agents to focus on tasks that require their expertise and training. From the customer’s perspective, automation on collection transactions allows them to resolve a sensitive issue with empathy while maintaining a level of anonymity.
