Can businesses react to the current economic landscape and ‘do more with less’, while still minimising environmental impact, accelerating growth and delivering excellent customer service? We asked Tony Lorentzen (pictured), Nuance’s SVP of Intelligent Engagement…

How are modern technologies transforming the customer experience, especially within call centres?

Despite many consumers today preferring to communicate with brands online, we cannot disregard the importance of the ‘human touch’ when it comes to customer experience. As individuals, when we have a problem or even just a question, we all want to feel as if there is somebody listening to and helping us. During face-to-face interactions in the past, this was a given. However, when the interaction becomes digital it can be very easy to feel as if you are on your own. Often, those calling with an enquiry are either concerned or frustrated. The last thing they need is another barrier getting in the way of them accessing the right support quickly.

This is where modern technologies, such as biometric solutions, can help. For example, voice biometrics can use sophisticated algorithms to analyse many voice characteristics – from pronunciation and accent to size and shape of the nasal passage – to authenticate a user. Meanwhile, conversational biometrics can measure how a person uses language during messaging interactions such as live chat or email, analysing vocabulary, spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and other factors to build a model representing each person’s unique pattern of communication.

Both technologies can be used to validate whether someone is who they say they are immediately based on how they sound. This means that any interaction with a brand can be personalised from the offset, enabling individuals to feel as though they are a priority.

And how do these technologies help companies to protect their customers?

Whilst there will never be one single silver bullet for fighting fraud, using biometric technologies is a step in the right direction. This is because, by using them, customers don’t need to remember something specific and worry about that information being stolen. There is no longer even a need to be authenticated using specific passphrase such as ‘my voice is my password’. Instead, biometric technologies enable organisations to validate a person’s identity from the outset.

One company that has already witnessed some of the benefits of biometric technology – and is using it to protect its customers during this time of uncertainty – is HSBC.

In recent years banking interactions have seen a definite shift away from in-person visits. More people are now turning to digital channels and telephone banking. While this modern way of banking is more convenient for customers, it does introduce some additional risks as fraudsters may find it easier to attempt to impersonate customers by stealing or guessing personal information to pass security checks.

It’s much more difficult, however, to replicate someone’s voice, which is where HSBC UK’s voice biometrics come into play. The bank’s Voice ID system detects whether a person is legitimate by comparing their voice to the voiceprint stored for the known customer. HSBC also goes one step further by maintaining a library of fraudsters’ voiceprints to cross check incoming calls. Since the technology was introduced in the UK, over 43,000 fraudulent phone calls have been identified, with over £981 million of customers’ money protected. 

How do you think that businesses can react to the current economic landscape and ‘do more with less’ while still accelerating growth?

As customer-facing businesses start to feel the pinch, the focus will be on streamlining operations whilst still ensuring the highest levels of customer experience. Automation is likely to emerge as a primary strategy for getting this balance right. By automating customer interactions, organisations will be able to scale their services and guide customers toward lower-cost channels.

Take Swedbank as an example. At this retail bank, a virtual assistant now handles more than two million conversations a year and answers around 80% of customer questions. That’s a huge reduction in the number of routine inquiries agents have to handle, leaving them free to focus on higher value, profit making tasks.

For many call centres, automating manual workflows – such as post-call summarisation – is becoming a key part of doing business. This is because it helps to boost agent productivity and enable them to handle an increased number of customers in less time. Equally important is process automation, as organisations continue to use AI to automate backend processes, uncovering new efficiencies.

Moving forward, many contact centres will take it one step further – providing real-time AI coaching, including next best response recommendations and best practice guidance, so that new hires can perform from the outset. Meanwhile, AI-powered sentiment analysis will enable agents to offer more empathetic and efficient interactions, guiding the conversation through the fastest path to resolution.

Ultimately, widespread automation will help organisations identify and eliminate wasteful processes and duplicated effort, and optimise workflows to support greater efficiency – something which becomes even more important during challenging economic times.

Chat GPT has been grabbing media attention in recent months. How do you think this technology – and others like it will power the future of CX?

 The global public attention that greeted the launch of ChatGPT has highlighted that we’re at a pivotal moment in the development of AI. As contact volumes rise and contact centre costs face increasing scrutiny, customer engagement leaders are under pressure to do more with less, without compromising the customer experience. ChatGPT is a technology that, when implemented correctly, might be able to help with this.

This is why, Microsoft and Nuance have recently unveiled our brand new conversation boosters –  exciting GPT-powered capabilities for our contact centre AI solutions. By harnessing the power of Azure OpenAI, these have been designed to help customers to make the most of the latest advances in AI technology and create even more effective conversational experiences in Nuance Mix, our conversational AI tooling platform.

As part of this development, one of the capabilities we’ve introduced is Nuance Mix Builder – a Copilot feature in Nuance Mix – which will make it faster and easier than ever to create intelligent chatbots and voicebots that boost automation and customer satisfaction.

By utilising GPT-3 capabilities, this development will enable teams to build enterprise-grade bots and deliver conversational experiences to customers, without requiring any deep technical skills. All users will need to do is describe in their own words what they want the bot to do and Mix Builder will immediately create something relevant and meaningful. It means that this type of bot creation is no longer limited to those with a technical background. Anyone from citizen developers to speech scientists will share the same toolset, making collaboration simpler and enabling businesses to give their customer experience strategies a powerful boost.