A proper call center flow

Website visitors are the first class citizens when it comes to customer service. UI/UX experts spend countless hours on optimizing the web design. Every pixel counts. A/B testing is done. The funnel is optimized to help the visitor find what he wants instantly.

Its not the same case when it comes to customers who call. They are played a welcome message and put in a queue :)

It need not be so. Both are customers who have the same green money. Both should have equal importance and that is understood by the best companies.

The other day my geyser malfunctioned and I called up the AO smith customer care. I was pleasently surprised by the experience. A call flow need not be complicated. It just needs to do the right thing.

1. Recognize the caller. The AO smith engineer greeted me by name and asked the problem. He verified my address and confirmed the ticket.

2. Give feedback. Immediately after the call, I received an SMS with ticket ID and phone number of the person going to attend the problem.

3. Follow up. I got regular calls from the engineer updating me where he was and when he will be reaching my house

4. Closure. Once the problem was resolved I got information about the ticket closure and feedback SMS.

One extra thing which could have been done was to automatically identify if the caller had a ticket and give info about the ticket.

There really is no need to treat your callers as second class customers, especially when you can use the same web development tools to develop your call flows using platform like KooKoo and solutions like Cloudagent

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures. While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE . Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive. Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Cloud Telephony Experiments

Search This Blog