How Kore.ai is Transforming Contact Center Experiences for Customers and Agents

Call centers are in a strenuous situation these days. With high attrition rates, difficulty recruiting, rising customer numbers, and higher customer expectations, there's little doubt call centers are under pressure. In response to that, many organizations are looking to integrate AI-powered intelligent virtual assistants to help ease the strain. But incorporating AI into your infrastructure isn't a switch you can simply flip and watch all your problems disappear. 

To reap the tangible benefits that AI can bring, you have to determine the use cases for your organization and create a roadmap. You can then choose the appropriate technology, choose the right provider and package it to provide your customers with engaging and meaningful experiences with your brand. 

But you don't need to go it alone. Kore.ai has built a proven process just for this. By building intelligent virtual assistants powered by their cutting-edge conversational AI platform, they're shaping the future of the contact center experience. When automating your contact center it's critical to get it right from the get-go. A great customer experience fosters loyalty and can turn customers into brand advocates. In contrast, bad experiences can frustrate customers and drive them to switch to a competing brand.

In this post, we'll provide you with a bird's eye view of what your journey could look like when you partner with Kore.ai. Taking America's largest credit union as a use case, we'll focus on two of Kore.ai's core technologies: SmartAssist and AgentAssist.

PSCU Credit Union Service Organization

Founded in 1977 in St. Petersburg, Florida, PSCU is the largest credit union service organization in the United States. Its mandate is to partner with credit unions to help them grow and meet the evolving needs of their members. PSCU actively supports over 1,800 financial institutions, totaling more than 6.9 billion transactions yearly.

PSCU's call volumes were so high that its agents just didn't have the time to provide value-added customer service. That negatively impacted the agents - edging them closer to burnout - and hurting the customer experience. To remedy the situation, PSCU partnered with Kore.ai with a three-point wishlist. It wanted to:

• Enhance the customer experience
• Create a space for more revenue-driving calls (upselling, offering new products & services)
• Reduce the burden on its live agents

Kore.ai Provided a Bank-specific Solution

Looking at PSCU's business model, Kore.ai was immediately able to hone in on the proper criteria for building its solution. It needed to be cost-effective and take into account existing budget constraints. PSCU also required a flexible implementation that was easy to learn and maintain by current staff. The intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) should also have customized bank-specific intents baked-in from the start. In other words, it should come pre-trained for the banking sector. And its integration should be seamless insofar as it should easily fit into existing infrastructure.

The solutions that ticked all those boxes were SmartAssist and AgentAssist. 

SmartAssist CCaaS

SmartAssist is at the core of Kore.ai's intelligent virtual assistant tech. It's an end-to-end AI-native contact center as a service (CCaaS). It can handle customer calls from start to finish and transfer the call to the appropriate live agent when required. Using natural speech and automation capabilities, SmartAssist provides customers with best-in-class support and allows your agents to focus on more compelling and revenue-driving tasks.

With SmartAssist, Kore.ai can provide your organization with a pre-trained assistant for a specific industry. With PSCU, BankAssist was the best solution, but Kore.ai also provides HealthAssist, for the healthcare industry and employee-focused assistants like IT Assist, HR Assist, and Work Assist.

BankAssist Virtual Assistant is Built for Banking Use Cases

BankAssist is built upon SmartAssist. It is a pre-trained intelligent virtual assistant specifically designed for the banking industry. It understands over 200 of the most common retail banking requests. BankAssist can handle anything from a single-turn question like a balance inquiry to a complex multi-pronged conversation like reporting fraudulent transactions or a stolen credit card.

AgentAssist Virtual Assistant for Contact Center Agents

Bundled with SmartAssist is AgentAssist. You can think of AgentAssist as your agents' personal intelligent virtual assistant. It uses AI to monitor the conversation taking place and looks for intents and sentiment - things like interest in a particular product or service, upsell opportunities, or customer frustration. Based on that, it will provide suggestions to the agents and automate specific tasks and fulfillment for agents during the call.

The Result

PSCU embraced Kore.ai's technology and implementation. What was the result?

• It fully automated its contact center
• It enhanced the productivity of its agents
• It now consistently provides a superior customer experience

If we look at PSCU's stated goals above, I think we can conclude that it's a win.

Case in point: PSCU's partnership with Kore.ai resulted in a 24% reduction in live agent calls and a whopping 70% containment rate (the percentage of calls handled end-to-end by the IVA). Those statistics are impressive but not surprising. Sophisticated tech thoughtfully implemented generally works out and makes things better. But this is just a single success story made possible by Kore.ai's solutions. There are many more. You could be the next contact center success story.

The future is vocal. It might be time for your organization to start talking about Voice.

Modev

Modev was founded in 2008 on the simple belief that human connection is vital in the era of digital transformation. Modev believes markets are made. From mobile to voice, Modev has helped develop ecosystems for new waves of technology. Today, Modev produces market-leading events such as VOICE Global, presented by Google Assistant, VOICE Summit the most important voice-tech conference globally, and the Webby award-winning VOICE Talks internet talk show. Modev staff, better known as "Modevators," include community building and transformation experts worldwide. To learn more about Modev, and the breadth of events and ecosystem services offered live, virtually, local and nationally - visit modev.com.