Harshad Bajpai, Author at Skit

Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform Takes a Giant Leap with Generative AI

Posted on May 25, 2023January 18, 2024 by Harshad Bajpai

Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice AI Platform is now powered by Generative AI. With the incorporation of Generative AI, we are taking a giant step forward and boosting the capabilities of our Conversational Voice AI solution. The interactions with consumers are about to become more natural-sounding and complex, leading to an improvement in customer experience (CX) and better results for collection agencies using Voice AI.

At Skit.ai, we embrace the future and go beyond industry standards and expectations.

How Generative AI Impacts the Capabilities of Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform

With the ongoing application of large language models (LLMs), we are seeing a big jump in the conversational capabilities of our solution:

Higher Conversational Accuracy: LLMs are capable of understanding consumer interactions through an improved understanding of context, sentence parsing, and response accuracy, leading to significantly higher conversational accuracy.

Better Handling of Complex Conversations: Generative AI enables our voicebots to better handle more complex interactions that were earlier escalated to human agents. This improvement can reduce the percentage of call transfers from the Voice AI solution to the company’s human agents.

Out-of-scope Calls: The LLM’s ability to grasp a wide range of questions and topics enables our voicebots to better handle out-of-scope utterances and calls.

Natural Utterances: The Voice AI solution is able to express a wide variety of natural-sounding utterances that improve the quality of the interaction.

Faster Voicebot Creation: Incorporating Generative AI give a big boost to the speed at which new voicebots can be created as the inherent complexity and effort involved in the design, and creation is a fraction of earlier effort.

Massive Performance Gains with Generative AI Springboard

In addition to the massive gains we are seeing thanks to LLMs, we intend to take this exercise even further and enable our voicebots to outperform human agents and collectors.

Going Beyond Human Agent Performance

An agent’s performance rests on two things: the ability to communicate and technical skills. At Skit.ai, we’ve seen that, with current LLMs, we can achieve superlative communication skills, and by training extensively with end-user data, we can achieve a high degree of technical skills. Hence our solution can excel on both fronts.

To share a rough estimate: the best-performing agent finds success on 5% of the calls (out of all connected calls), while low performers convert about 2% of the calls.

With Generative AI, we take a big jump. From the current voicebot conversion capability of around 1-2%, we expect the performance to jump 3-4 folds. Beyond this, our Reinforcement Learning platform learns from outcomes to personalize the conversation to figure out the ideal strategies, learning from thousands of daily conversations.

Better and More Natural Spoken Conversations

Generative AI, with its unparalleled conversational capabilities, needs to be complemented with equally capable speech synthesis and understanding systems that produce the right speech given the output from LLMs. And that is one of the major areas from the many below:

A more natural-sounding TTS (text-to-speech) voice
Conversational context handling prosody of generated audio
Full duplex and backchannels in speech conversations

Ultimately, we will be able to deliver the most engaging conversations that delight consumers by solving their problems faster and better than human agents.

The Business Outcomes of Incorporating Generative AI

Below are five major impact areas we will move the needle on:

Higher Collection Rate, ~5%: This is a difficult number to quantify, but as the incorporation of Generative AI matures, we expect its collection capability to move beyond 5%, surpassing even the best of human agents.

Lower Agent Dependency, reduction by 50-80%: As the voicebot will be able to handle more complex queries, we expect a 50-80% reduction in agent touch points.

Higher Resolution Rate, ~100%: Better accuracy and conversations with higher engagement will help us achieve a conversational resolution rate close to 100%.

Creating New Voicebots: The effort to create new voicebots will see a significant dip, as the complexity will be remarkably lower.

Entering New Markets with Ease, 15X faster: Entering new markets and training for new use cases and applications will require less effort and resources. We are estimating the process to be 15X faster.

What’s Next

Though the improvements in our Augmented Voice Intelligent Platform are visible and clear, we will further our efforts to achieve greater performance gains and stay ahead of the curve.

To learn more about how Voice AI can help support your collection efforts through call automation, schedule a call with one of our experts using the chat tool below.

An Unbiased Look into the Positive Side of Voice AI

Posted on May 25, 2023August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Artificial intelligence is experiencing exponential innovation. Generative AI, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and other AI models have captured popular attention, but they have also raised serious questions about the issue of ethics in machine learning (ML).

AI can make several micro-decisions that impact such real-world macro-decisions as authorization for a bank loan or be accepted as a potential rental applicant. Because the consequences of AI can be far-reaching, its implementers must ensure that it works responsibly. While algorithmic models do not think like humans, humans can easily and even unintentionally introduce preferences (biases) into AI during development and updates.

Ethics and Bias in Voice AI

Voice AI shares the same core ethical concerns as AI in general, but because voice closely mimics human speech and experience, there is a higher potential for manipulation and misrepresentation. Also, people tend to trust things with a voice, including friendly interfaces like Alexa and Siri.

Call automation for call centers and businesses is not a new concept. Unlike computerized auto dealers (pre-recorded voice messages) like Robocall, Skit.ai’s Voice AI solution is capable of intelligent conversations with a real consumer in real-time. In other words, Voice AIs are your company representatives. And just like your human representatives, you want to ensure your AI is trained in and acts in line with company values and displays a professional code of conduct.

Human agents and AI systems at any given point should not treat consumers differently for reasons unrelated to their service. But depending on the dataset, the system might not provide a consistent experience. For example, more males calling a call center might result in a gender classifier biased against female speakers. And what happens when biases, including those against regional speech and slang, sneak into voice AI interactions?

In contrast to human agents, who might sometimes unintentionally display biases, Voice AI follows a predetermined, inclusive script while strictly adhering to guidelines that prioritize consumer satisfaction and compliance. This level of professionalism eliminates the potential for misbehavior and creates a positive consumer experience.

Our team is always potentially looking out for any potential bias that accidentally seeps in, as ‘biases’ as constantly evolving. One thing can be acceptable today, but may bee seen as a bias tomorrow. At Skit.ai our skilled team of dedicated designers meticulously construct the dialogue patterns to guarantee balanced responses. Following these predefined scripts allows our Voice AI solution to offer consistent, unbiased interactions, thus establishing an inclusive user experience. This emphasis on conversation design aids us in overcoming potential biases that may surface in human interactions, thus securing a more balanced and impartial user experience.

Consumer Convenience and the Growing Preference for Voice AI

Consumers increasingly prefer interacting with Voice AI rather than human agents due to the convenience it offers. Voice AI allows users to communicate naturally through voice commands, eliminating the need to type or navigate complex menus. This convenience aligns with the preferences of many individuals who find it easier and more natural to speak rather than type. Furthermore, Voice AI is available 24/7, providing round-the-clock support without the need to wait for human agents.

This instant access to information and assistance enhances consumer satisfaction and can lead to faster issue resolution. Additionally, voice interactions can be personalized and tailored to individual preferences, creating a more personalized and engaging consumer experience. The convenience and preference for voice-based interactions make Voice AI a valuable tool for meeting consumer expectations.

Building Ethical Voice AI

Empathetic conversational design eliminates bias. At Skit.ai, we’re dedicated to developing leading-edge Voice AI technology. Our mission is to facilitate communication that is equitable and devoid of bias. Through conversational design, biases are eliminated, ensuring fair and inclusive interactions. A significant part of our strategy involves refining the conversational capabilities of our systems, striving for a natural, seamless exchange of speech that ensures equal treatment for all and eradicates discriminatory tendencies. As we navigate the future of work, Voice AI stands as a valuable tool, empowering enhanced communication, fostering seamless consumer conversations, and further elevating customer satisfaction.

To learn more about how Voice AI can help support your human resources and scale their collection efforts with call automation, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

Entering a New Era of Debt Collections with Conversational Voice AI

Posted on February 7, 2023December 20, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Debt collection companies have been automating various parts of their operations, much like companies in other industries. However, one of their core problems—the inability to automate complex conversations with consumers—has impacted their ability to solve their core challenges.

Connecting with consumers to recover payments is at the core of what a debt collection company does. According to a new survey by TransUnion and Datos, communicating with consumers is a top priority for collection agencies. A growing number of agencies are exploring new methods of communication for debt collection, focusing primarily on AI-powered chatbots and voicebots, as well as text messaging.

Conversational Voice AI, with its capability to automate collection calls, solves all significant challenges and ushers in a new era of debt collections. In this blog post, we’ll learn how this technology is dramatically changing the landscape of collections.

How is Voice AI Changing Debt Collections Forever?

100% Account Penetration: A Voice AI solution can initiate and handle millions of calls within minutes, covering an agency’s entire debt portfolio in an impressively short amount of time. This level of automation has never been possible until recently; it’s important to note that over a third of an agency’s files often remain untouched.

Less Dependence on Human Agents: It is hard to recruit a skilled collector, and having a consistent team that can scale up when needed has been extremely challenging for agencies, especially the smaller ones. AI provides the benefit of instant and infinite scalability, making the issue of staffing less concerning. Thanks to end-to-end automation of consumer calls, agencies can scale up and down as needed.

Augmenting Agent Productivity: Voice AI enables live agents to focus on more complex and revenue-generating tasks. Without call automation with Conversational AI, this would be impossible, as live agents would have to spend a lot of time establishing right-party contacts (RPC) and handling time-consuming, repetitive tasks that should be automated.

File Segmentation for Better Recovery: For the first time, collectors can now see the entire picture of their portfolio. As the Voice AI solution goes through the entire portfolio, collectors can see the set of right-party contacts (RPCs), the propensity to pay, and other crucial data that can inform a more strategic and data-driven recovery strategy, ultimately improving collections.

Remarkably Lower Collection Costs: Calls handled by Voice AI cost approximately one-third of a traditional collection call handled by a human agent.

Voice AI Comes with Other Remarkable Benefits. Here Are a Few:

Lower Compliance and Legal Risk: Voice AI has the potential to improve compliance and reduce the risk of legal issues for agencies. The debt collection space is heavily regulated, and collectors must follow strict compliance rules. With our Augmented Voice Intelligence platform, compliance rules and guidelines such as call frequency, the Mini-Miranda, and other important regulations — both at the federal and state levels — are built into the technology to ensure the Voice AI solution follows them. Voice AI never goes off-script and never has a bad day, protecting both the consumers and the agencies.

Better Decision-making with Data Analytics: Artificial intelligence can analyze consumer data and make informed decisions on the best course of action. For example, Voice AI can use data on a consumer’s payment history, income, and expenses to determine the best payment plan for them. This data-driven approach can lead to more efficient and practical debt resolution outcomes and a better customer experience (CX).

Unprecedented Automation: One of the main benefits of Conversational Voice AI in debt collections is that it automates much of the manual work involved in the recovery process. Debt collectors can use Voice AI to automate tasks such as calling consumers, sending out payment reminders, and recording consumer interactions. This saves time and allows collectors to focus on more complex tasks, such as negotiating payment plans and resolving disputes.

How to Choose the Right Conversational Voice AI Solution Provider for Your Company

The most important thing to remember about a Voice AI solution is that it either works and satisfies the consumer, leading to positive outcomes and recovery, or it will lead to consumer frustration and significantly adverse outcomes. Hence the choice of vendor is highly vital. Here are a few things to consider:

Proven Track Record: To ensure a successful implementation, working with a Voice AI provider with a proven track record in the accounts receivables industry and who can provide a comprehensive and integrated solution is essential. Collection executives prefer to adopt solutions that have been in business in the accounts receivables industry for at least six months.

Ease of Integration: Another priority when implementing Voice AI in debt collections is ensuring the technology is integrated with existing systems and processes. The provider’s capability to integrate with existing systems and other vendors—such as payment gateways—is one of the significant factors that must be considered while selecting a Voice AI vendor.

Ease of Deployment and Use: One of the critical challenges in implementing Voice AI in debt collections is ensuring that the technology is user-friendly for debt collectors and consumers. Make sure that your vendor’s solution is easy to deploy and to use.

Speed of Deployment: The solution must be ready. No promise of building a solution in a few months should be considered, because no viable, working product is ready. Select a vendor who is ready to go live immediately after a series of well-defined tasks required on your end.

Positive Business Outcomes: Look at the results the AI vendors have been about to achieve in the recent past with companies similar to yours. See if these business outcomes and success metrics align with the outcomes you’re hoping to achieve.

Make the Right Choice

Conversational AI technology is remarkable and has proved its worth in our industry and beyond. The only thing left for debt collectors is the selection of the right Voice AI vendor. Select the right vendor, and it will help you gain a competitive edge and show your tangible positive outcomes in a matter of weeks.

Voice AI technology is about to change debt collections forever; don’t miss out!

To learn more about how Voice AI can help solve your staffing challenges and improve your recovery strategy, use the chat tool below to schedule a call with one of our experts.

Solving Collection Agent Attrition and Scalability Issues for Auto Finance Companies

Posted on December 23, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The rapid growth of the automotive finance market—CAGR of 6.5% [2022-2028] and the likelihood of reaching USD 385 bn with the rapid growth of 42 Billion in market size, indicates the opportunity ahead. But growth needs to be supported by resources, and the skilled workforce is the most scarce.

For decades auto financers have struggled with the shortage of skilled human support executives. Although various automation solutions helped them move closer to automating most of their workflows, it was far from getting realized.

With rapid advancements in voice technology by vertical Voice AI companies such as Skit.ai, we have reached a point of seamlessly automated customer conversations and significantly reduced the dependence on human agents.

We have deep-dived into various aspects of how Skit.ai’s voicebot impacts the Top and Bottom Line. In this piece, we will explore how Skit.ai’s AI-powered Digital Collections Agent will solve one of the most significant scalability problems arising from the skilled labor shortage.

The Challenge of Scalability and Seasonality in Auto Finance

Labor shortages and retaining a skilled workforce are big challenges in auto finance. Like other industries, the pandemic also affected automotive and finance companies, leading to employees’ reluctance to return to their jobs and re-evaluating their life priorities in the post-pandemic stage. As a result of the shortage of skilled human resources, the industry is riddled with the following:

Higher cost of recruiting, training, and retaining good performers
Inadequate debt portfolio coverage
Higher cost of collections or recovery
The limited scalability of the auto loan portfolio
Overworked human collectors or agents might lead to compliance breaches
The direct link between the auto loan recovery team and the number of accounts
Also, seasonality is a significant issue. For ex., during festive seasons, most collectors or agents are on holiday, so keeping the show running during that phase becomes highly challenging.

In addition, collection agents face many challenges that make their job highly challenging. Here are a few core challenges the agents and companies face while trying to ensure the consumer gets back to the payment schedule:

Disengagement: High volume of dull, low-value, and repetitious calls make it challenging for the agents to be motivated and carry excitement while on the job. Simplistic calls about FAQs, wrong numbers, calls not picked up, call-back again requests, and more create zero value but consume a lot of time for agents. This monotony is at the core of their disengagement from work.

Recruitment and Training: Finding the right person for the job, training them regularly, and giving perks and incentives to retain their cost dearly to the auto financing companies. This cost and management issue can be thoroughly minimized with the deployment of Skit.ai’s voicebot.

Compliance Adherence: Debt, even secured ones like auto loans, come under a regulatory framework, and sometimes overworked agents tend to use coercion or not stick to regulatory restrictions, leading to litigations and non-compliance.

Inadequate Portfolio Coverage: Agent team and bandwidth are limited, and they need to optimize the ones with the maximum probability to pay, and thus others get ignored. This is a loss because a fraction of others will also pay if followed.

Handling Call Spikes: Seasonal fluctuations in calls, inbound or need for processing debt portfolio expeditely, needs seamless scalability else it is a missed opportunity that affects the performance of the auto financer. To have scalability, auto financers have to manage a bigger team of agents, which will be an enormous cost for them, hence an unfeasible alternative.

How Skit.ai’s Digital Collection Agent Solves Skilled Agent Shortage

At present, tools at the disposal of auto financers involve dated technology such as IVRs, and telephony that can not decouple incoming calls from human agents. At best, the tech solutions just alleviate the core problem to the slightest.

Voice AI, the most cutting-edge voice technology, on the other hand, holds the most promise. There are various kinds of Voice AI solutions available in the market. Still, only voice-first Vertical Voice AI companies such as Skit.ai deliver voicebots that perform under the most testing of situations.

Here is how the Voicebot of Skit.ai empowers auto finance companies, solving 7 core challenges. You may also want to explore how Skit.ai’s Digital Collectors impact the top and bottom lines of auto finance companies.

As promised, let’s deep dive into how our voicebot will help your company solve the problem of a shortage of skilled human agents forever:

End-to-End Automation: Our voicebot is extensively trained in the domain of collections and is capable of answering over 70% of customer queries without escalating them to the human agent. These simplistic queries are mostly a waste of human agent time, and when the customer expresses the willingness to pay, the voicebot can enable on-call payment.
Potential for Much Higher Collections: Since the voicebot frees a significant amount of agent bandwidth, it can be used to process additional or new loan portfolios; thus, there is the possibility of a higher top line. In short, the same team of human agents can now deliver much higher collections revenue.
Reduction in Average Handling Time: The shorter the calls escalated to a human agent, the more productive they will be. Skit.ai’s Digital Collection Agent collects relevant information such as:
1. Seeks information to verify the identity of the consumer
2. Captures the disposition or the problem
3. Solves a part of the question and then escalates the complex part to the human agent
4. Improves the accuracy of information divulged by the agent as it already furnishes factual information pulled from the CRM and other systems.
Focus on Real Issues for Better Collections: The human agents can focus on the highest value and complex cases where they can use their expertise to troubleshoot and improve repayment rates.
No Call Volume Spike for a Balanced Work-life: Since Skit.ai’s AI-powered voicebot can answer any volume of calls, and since the voicebot entirely answers a majority of them, the actual increase in the workload is a fraction of the total increase. This improves the quality of work in real terms.
Lower Concerns for Compliance and Litigation: For auto finance companies that deploy Skit.ai’s voicebot, the possibility of entering into litigation is very low because
1. For one, the voicebot does not go off script.
2. The probability of a person filing a litigation being irked by a machine is very low. This is a big plus.
3. Thus when the voicebot engages a majority of calls, the chances of litigation are negligible.
Better Customer Relations: Customer relations are built on touch and connection. The human agents can use the voicebots to schedule interaction touchpoints that foster a deeper relationship. The result of this is better collections due to customer satisfaction.

Voicebot for Limiting Dependence on Human Agents

From the above list of unique benefits, it is clear that the voicebot, by answering a majority of calls and making outbound calls with end-to-end automation, reduces the dependence on human agents significantly.

Today, auto finance companies can deploy Skit.ai’s state-of-the-art voicebot in less than 45 minutes and see their collection outcomes improve within weeks, not months. Many debt collectors have realized our solution’s indispensability and gained a competitive leg up. It is time to change!

To learn more about how Voice AI can help support your human resources and scale their collection efforts with call automation, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

How Auto Finance Companies Can Improve Collections with Skit.ai’s Voicebot

Posted on December 21, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The economic volatility is affecting auto financers directly, and so do the inflation and other consumer behavioral trends, making it a genuinely complex space to be in.

Inflationary pressure is mounting significantly in the US economy, and the core inflation jumping to 6.6%, a 40-year high; on the other hand, the US economy is slowing down significantly, putting significant pressure on consumers to avoid delinquencies, which are now at historic highs.

Adding on top of these macroeconomic stresses for auto financers is the acute skilled labor shortage. The cumulative effect has made auto financers scout for automation solutions that can solve their challenges on all fronts.

Before Voice AI, no tech had such a capability that could automate collections and customer support calls without the need for agent intervention. Today, we are crossing the call automation rubicon with Voice AI solutions such as that offered by Skit.ai.

How Voice AI Can Empower an Auto Financing Company with Call Automation

A voicebot is a conversational Voice AI solution that can engage in meaningful conversation with the customers and understand what they are saying, having been trained extensively for particular business support issues. The design of the entire conversation is done, keeping in mind all the possible difficulties a customer can encounter and how best the collection process can be optimized.

So for every customer query, the voicebot has a ready answer as it pulls out relevant and accurate information from the client system and informs the customer, reducing the duration of the conversation remarkably.

Before we deep dive, here are a few salient points that must be borne in mind:

Our voicebots, also known as Digital Voice Agents, are trained extensively for specific business problems and hence are capable of engaging in intelligent conversations.
Our voicebot can handle all tier-I disputes, around 70% of customer queries.
The remainder of calls, nearly 30%, are escalated to the human collector after the voicebot has established and verified the person’s identity and captured disposition. Thus saving human agent time and helping them engage in high-value tasks.
The cost of a voicebot is less than 1/5th of the human agent cost. Thus, overall pure cost savings are humongous.
The voicebot can place thousands of calls concurrently, thus reducing the dependence on human agents considerably.
Our voicebot can be deployed within 45 minutes, making the results tangible and fast.

The impact of our voicebot on the top and bottom lines is well-documented and clear.

Extrapolating results from Skit.ai’s clients with similar use cases, an auto finance company can realize impressive recovery rates at a fraction of the cost.

Before we explain the nuances of our tech, you can take a minute to watch our voicebot in action.

Voice AI for Inbound/Support Calls

Inbound calls are gold mines because of these; a fraction of customers have called to pay and perhaps need assistance in processing their payment.

Present Status Quo or Before Voicebot Deployment: Unfortunately, most auto financers cannot answer a significant portion of incoming customer calls because of a lack of skilled human agents and due to the prohibitive costs. This a considerable opportunity miss.

After Skit.ai’s Voicebot: Every call gets answered, the intent gets captured, and willing consumers are facilitated to make on-call payments. Any query or dispute gets immediately noted or resolved. Also, details of any further follow-ups are recorded, and calls are scheduled.

Voice AI’s Impact:

All the clients of Skit.ai experienced the following:

Better collections as willing consumers were facilitated with payment options
Better disposition and intent capture
Improvements in their CSAT scores
Better customer experience as financiers can listen and record every customer query.

Voice AI for Outbound Calls

The capability to dial prompt and perfectly timed calls to reach out to overdue and delinquent accounts is perhaps the most significant capability an auto financer can have. The reason is that almost all auto financers with diverse portfolios have faced the problem of limited scalability and portfolio penetration.

The search for automation has always been, in essence, to ease the problem of limiting the scalability of dialing outbound or consumer reach-out calls. Outbound IVRs and other telephony solutions have eased the problem in their limited way. But only with Voice AI do auto financers experience call automation or intelligent automation of consumer calls.

Present Status Quo or Before Voicebot Deployment:

At present, auto finance has a limited number of agents that can place a call for collections. The process begins with an SMS reminder for payment, followed up in due course of time with a call made by an agent, and then depending upon the significance of the account, the subsequent follow-ups. Agent attrition and compliance breach always have auto financers wary of pushing things.

The diversity of auto loans in the portfolio increases the number of calls that need to be made. This leaves a significant part of the debt portfolio unattended.

After Skit.ai Voicebot:

Before you read further, listen to our voicebot in action and how easily it can help consumers pay.

Our voicebot addresses one of the most significant pain points of auto financers—scalability. We have empowered collectors to dial millions of calls within a week if they so desire. This means that reminders for every overdue or delinquent account will be reached out by our voicebot at the right time, at the desired frequency, and even help them make a payment or reschedule their payments if the need arises.

This means that simplistic calls such as reminders and notification calls can be done by the voicebot, which can even capture intent and help agents prioritize accounts.

This seamless scalability in outbound calls empowers collectors tremendously and can take their recovery rates and portfolio coverage intensity to new heights.

Voice AI’s Impact:

Repayment Rate at par with an average human agent
Better overall collections at a fraction of the cost
Human-Agent Bandwidth Optimization
Cost of Collections slashed to less than 1/5th
Portfolio Coverage of 100%
Seamless Scalability that leaves scope to increase portfolio with the same collections team
Better compliance as the voicebot sticks to the script

Summarizing the Overall Transformation

The distinct advantages of a Voice AI solution such as that of Skit.ai are conspicuous and indubitable, as many collectors have realized tangible benefits quickly. The impact of this technology is truly transformative and has begun to disrupt many businesses function, such as collection and customer support.

Though our solution can be incorporated in less than 45 minutes, the competitive leg up for early adopters is as significant and can impact long-term success.

If you found our technology relevant and exciting, feel free to schedule a meeting with one of our experts using the chat tool below.

Voice AI: The Biggest Contact Center Automation Trend of 2023

Posted on December 20, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The Ongoing Boom in Voice-led Technologies Across the Globe

Voice has always been the preferred means of communication for human beings. That’s why a shift toward voice-based technologies is making its way across generations and geographies, in particular when it comes to contact center automation trends.

In 2022, there were an estimated 123.5 million people using voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa in the United States. A survey conducted by Statista in early 2021 showed that nearly one in three (32%) U.S. consumers own a smart speaker. Consumers are using voice features for online searches, shopping, dictation, and more.

This phenomenon is noticeable across the globe. In India, for example, the number of people using voice queries on Google on a daily basis is nearly twice the global average. With higher consumer adoption of voice-led searches, the incorporation of voice technologies in CX strategies is now a business imperative.

A Deloitte study revealed that, by 2030, there will be a proliferation of voice-led technologies around the world, with 30% of sales happening via voice. Additionally, given the ongoing economic uncertainty, there is a risk in not investing in new technological capabilities during a downturn, as stressed by MIT research.

The Growing Challenges of Customer Support and CX

There is a growing demand for new voice-led solutions to deliver better customer experiences.

Until recently, IVR solutions and chatbots have played a central role while not excelling at CX. The traditional bottlenecks limit the ability of companies to properly serve their customers. Among these challenges, the scalability of support teams and cost issues are among the most pressing.

Given the plateaued capabilities of the legacy systems, companies have begun to pin their hopes on new technologies such as Voice AI, hoping to disrupt the status quo once and for all.

Here are some of the most common challenges contact centers are currently facing:

High attrition rates: Even the best contact centers are struggling to retain talent. Agents often quit due to frustration with their jobs or as soon as they are offered a better position elsewhere.

Scalability: Call volume fluctuates, going up and down depending on the season and demand for customer support. It’s very challenging for managers to scale their teams up and down according to these changes.

Weak Customer Experience (CX): The vast majority of consumers will confirm this — IVR is highly unpopular! IVR systems typically reroute customers through nightmarish flows, ending up with long wait times to speak with a live agent who can effectively solve the given problem.

High operational costs: Agent costs, infrastructure, talent hiring, training, and retention all add up, costing companies a fortune.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, that customer frustration is on the rise. Nearly 9 in 10 people say they prefer speaking to a live agent over the phone rather than navigating a pre-set menu (IVR), according to research by Clutch.

Contact Center Automation Trends: The Solutions Available Today

Here are the most prominent tech solutions available today for contact centers to automate their interactions with customers:

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Systems: IVRs may have been game-changers when they were first introduced decades ago. Today, not so much. Most IVR systems are created to reduce call volumes or prevent callers from reaching a live agent. They do not easily differentiate between customers and their intent, leading to time-consuming flows and frustrating results. Additionally, confusing navigation menus and poor integration capabilities can lead to a big mess for the company. This is not to say that IVRs do not add value, but they do not contribute to a positive customer experience.

Chatbots: For companies looking for a cost-efficient solution, and companies whose products or services have a less linear user journey, chatbots can be an effective solution. Chatbots are particularly popular now because of the increasing demand for self-service customer support solutions. Additionally, they are easier to train than voice-based solutions, and they provide 24/7 customer support at a low cost. Chatbots can also work with audio and visual media.

However, also chatbots have their shortcomings. First of all, they miss out on two core pillars of customer experience—emotions and ease of use. It is impossible to convey emotions over text. Also, it can be challenging for many users to type repeatedly, especially if the users are not tech-savvy, older, or in atypical situations.

Voicebots: This solution, powered by Voice AI, can handle countless, human-like interactions simultaneously, enabling users to reach a time-sensitive resolution without the need to interact with a live agent. Voice AI agents, also known as Digital Voice Agents, are capable of authenticating users, looking up relevant information, and quickly resolving customer queries in just a few minutes.

Voice AI can handle many different tasks and use cases across industries—from changing a flight itinerary to booking a table at a restaurant, from filing a complaint to making an on-call payment; users can get the support they need without waiting in line while having to listen to some hideous tune.

While many people might confuse the two technologies, it’s important to remember that IVR and Voice AI are different technologies.

Augmented Voice Intelligence vs. Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa

Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are considered to be the gold standard for voice automation; yet, it’s important to remember that these technologies are built for one-turn, simple and generic interactions. All they do is answer a question or a request by the user. That is why they are not suitable for customer support, as it requires reliance on context and the ability to handle several turns of conversation.

Digital Voice Agents, powered by Voice AI, are trained for thousands of hours on specific customer issues. They are trained to understand the vocabulary, the decision process, and the solutions to offer. Unlike voice assistants, which are designed to provide a single answer to the user’s question, Digital Voice Agents can handle multiple rounds of questions and answers. These are ideal solutions for customer-centric companies.

Listen to Skit.ai’s Voice AI Agent In Action

Why Voice-led Solutions Will Transform Contact Center Automation

A Stanford Study revealed that speech recognition software writes text messages more quickly than thumbs, stressing the ease of voice-led conversations over typed exchanges.

Chatbots bundled with Automated Speech Regognition (ASR) technology are able to transcribe the user’s speech, but they can’t handle an actual conversation. When it comes to voice interactions, only voice-led solutions can provide the ultimate customer experience.

As organizations pour millions into automated voice support, they want their virtual agents to understand the semantics of a conversation—even sarcasm. Those subtle nuances of human conversations get annihilated when we strap a readily-available ASR over a chatbot. A simple conversion of text to voice and vice-versa does not meet the standards of a voice conversation.

The attrition among call center employees is extremely high. Seamless collaboration of human and machine intelligence — as we call it at Skit.ai, Augmented Voice Intelligence — is the future of work. Voice AI is perfectly poised to augment live agents and enhance their capabilities.

Human beings prefer to do meaningful tasks that create value. By taking away a chunk of repetitive and low-value tasks, a Digital Voice Agent helps human agents focus on significant and complex tasks. Also, a Voice AI platform can provide live agents with the context of previous interactions, helping them perform remarkably better and feel engaged with their work.

Take Your First Step

How does the adoption of Voice AI impact the operations of a contact center? Here are a few examples:

Automation of up to 70% of phone interactions with customers
At least 50% reduction in operational costs
Over 4.5 CSAT
Up to 40% reduction in average handling time
Actionable insights and analytics to make data-driven, informed decisions

Now ask yourself these questions:

Are your live agents busy with zero-value, repetitive tasks?
Are you constantly facing challenges related to cost, compliance, or resources?
Do your agents feel that they could perform significantly better with the proper tech support?
Is customer experience a priority for your business?

If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, then it’s time for you to consider Voice AI for your contact center.

For more information about how Voice AI can impact your business, schedule a meeting with one of our experts using the chat tool below.

Voice AI Helps Auto Financers Reboot for Better Customer Loyalty and Retention

Posted on December 20, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Today, every CXO working in auto finance knows it takes just a few online searches and clicks to buy a vehicle. For an industry primarily focused on customer-centricity, auto finance companies are suddenly up against “seconds-to-minutes” worth of digital interactions to wow their customers for better engagement and retention.

Inflation in the U.S. is adding a new set of challenges, with rising interest rates, vehicle prices, loan delinquencies, and predatory competition, making the current landscape particularly complex.

Prospective car owners seek online financing options for the speed, convenience, and wealth of online information to make a decision. Their digital savviness intensifies the demand for fast-paced digital finance with seamless customer support. Auto finance companies must rethink every touchpoint and communication channel across the customer’s journey.

Ensuring customers stay satisfied throughout their auto lending journey is a complex task.

In this article, we’ll explain what Voice AI is and how it can add significant value to the customer experience (CX) in the auto finance industry. Skit.ai’s Voice AI solution can help auto finance companies automate various types of calls, starting with collection calls and payment reminders.

7 Auto Finance Use Cases with Voice AI for Better Customer Experience

Welcome Calling & Onboarding: Our Digital Voice Agents plug into contact centers to handle Tier-1 calls that are mundane and repetitive. These intelligent voice bots are tailored to send automated welcome messages, assist customer onboarding, and share loan-related information like interest rates, loan eligibility, loan approval, and payment details.
Payment Reminders: Auto loan providers can leverage Voice AI solution to set triggers for personalized, outbound payment reminder calls of any volume for loan payment, EMI dues, interest rate updates, and document submission.
DPD 30-60 Collection: (DPD).Voice AI helps place thousands of automated, proactive, and timely calls concurrently without requiring human intervention or needing to scale human support teams. This is useful for auto finance collection cases involving consumers who have missed EMIs for 30 to 60 Days Past Due. The prime customer gets a grace period; late payment fees are waived, and credit scores will not be affected. These are the benefits that customers experiences which make ultimately result in better CX.
Auto draft Signups: Auto draft is like enache. Prime customer who is of the age of 50 and above still pays with a cheque or visits the bank. For them, auto-pay setup is essential to avoid penalties. In turn, it contributes to the convenience essential in enhancing CX and increasing customer loyalty.
On-call Payment Assist: Digital Voice Agents can provide prompt on-call payment support to consumers by automating responses for Tier-1 calls and transferring only complex calls to human agents. The analytics and data on consumers’ loan accounts and payment histories also help collectors to have better insights for answering various consumer queries and providing on-call payment assistance.
After-Hour Business Services: Voice AI helps auto finance companies provide 24/7 live customer support services to answer consumers’ queries about payments, loans, due dates, and more at any time of the day. Especially useful for calls made after business hours and for handling simplistic queries, while the other issues, such as disputes and other issues, are captured and updated with relevant CTA.

11 Ways Voice AI Drives Up Customer Loyalty and Retention

The critical aspect of Voice AI in auto finance is to help companies against common operational pitfalls that can lead to potential and existing consumers slipping away to their competitors. Our Augmented Voice Intelligence platform allows auto finance companies’ contact centers to augment their support teams to unlock the best of its live collectors and Digital Voice Agents to serve many use cases, delivering superior CX. These further translate to customer retention and loyalty in the following ways:

Higher Customer Engagement: Digital Voice Agents call automation; up to 70% of calls help reach the right consumers at the right time and frequency. This helps auto finance companies supercharge their engagement rate with current customers and onboard potential customers.
Better Brand Advocacy: As per the 2022 J.D. Power study report on Consumer Financing Satisfaction, existing customer relations are the low-hanging fruits for auto loan providers to leverage. Captive lenders reportedly outperform non-captive lenders with higher NPS. Voice AI helps engage with existing customers who are twice as likely to consider their current lender for their next vehicle purchase.
Scalable Customer Support: Reminders at the right time and to the right person, with 1000s of concurrent calls, helps auto lending companies engage with thousands of callers across loan portfolios at a fraction of operational costs.
63% Faster Customer Query Resolution: Companies that implemented Voice AI in their contact centers were able to reduce 63 percent of the query processing time for better customer retention and satisfaction at 67 percent, as per a study by Ecosytm.
Proactive & Diverse Support: Voice AI is customized for various functions and call automation capabilities to help the customer support teams to cater to diverse customer queries like payment collections, customer signups, document verification, loan approval, and purchases.
Augmented Human Support: By leveraging call automation and intelligent voice bots’ ability to provide prompt resolutions to tier-1 calls, auto finance companies can empower their contact center agent teams to save time and resources, be productive, and focus on high-value tasks that need actual voice conversations with customers in times of their need, translating to better CX.
Self-service Capabilities: Voice AI’s 24/7 availability with prompt response to queries gives customers control over debt repayment or auto finance process.
Waitless Resolution: Digital Voice agents quickly disseminate information on products or loans, reducing wait time and elevating CX.
Personalized Responses: By delivering contextually accurate information specific to the use case, Voice AI ensures the responses are hyper-personalized with consistent call quality.
Better Customer Intelligence: Auto finance companies can make the customers feel heard by unlocking a treasure trove of customer insights from data and robust analytics dashboards to improve the overall customer experience and call quality.
Higher Compliance: Collectors in the auto finance industry must be aware of core federal laws relating to auto loans and consumer communication, including HIPPA, FDCPA, FCRA, TCPA, and more. Voice AI’s algorithms are trained to adhere to consumers’ laws on privacy and compliance best practices which are critical for building a positive brand image.

Voice AI Represents a Breakthrough in Auto Finance

The automotive industry is slowly evolving to build excellent customer journeys against the digital boom, rising consumer demands, and data ubiquity. A look into the future shows no signs of slow down in consumers’ expectations for digital and phygital experiences in auto retail and finance. Voice AI is poised to make contactless car buying a reality in the era of driverless cars!

To learn more about how Voice AI and Digital Voice Agents help reimagine customer support and collection in auto finance, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

Human Collectors vs. AI-powered Digital Collectors: An In-depth Comparison

Posted on December 8, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Voice AI is becoming mainstream in the ARM industry, and the days of chasing after customers for unrecovered debts in the most haphazard, manual fashion are nearly over. Additionally, thanks to the rising popularity of self-service channels and the ecosystem-led push involving regulatory changes like the Reg F that rewrite the expectations for debt recovery in the U.S. beyond simple automation.

Voice AI conveniently fits the bill for debt collection agencies by fixing the systemized inefficiencies with automation and analytics-driven voice communication outreach. In this article, we will explore why human-like voice interactions handled by AI-powered Digital Voice Agents help debt collection companies drive effective consumer interactions at better collection cost, performance, and efficiency ratio.

7 Ways Voice AI Helps Elevate Debt Collectors’ Productivity

At Skit.ai, we call it Augmented Voice Intelligence — the idea that Voice AI can augment, rather than substitute, the work of live agents and collectors. Let’s dive into the benefits of this strategy:

Human-like Conversations: Voice AI is purpose-built and modeled on human conversations. Digital Voice Agents can hold thousands of outbound customer outreach calls simultaneously, without the involvement of human collectors, helping collection agencies carry out human-like interactions at lesser cost and effort from their human resources.

Seamless Integrations: Voice AI’s integration features feed data from collection calls, such as right-party contact, call-back requests, no response, and more, into the collection management system to provide actionable insights for human collectors to be more proactive.

Higher Portfolio Coverage: Collection agencies can leverage Digital Voice Agents to scale collection outreach calls for different consumer accounts and across diverse portfolios with unique requests for payment alternatives, call-back options, or preferred time of contact.

Versatile and Accurate: Intelligent voice bots can be tailored according to the use case, offer profound insights for analytics on future actions, independently schedule automated triggers, auto call-back on request, and even make intelligent call transfers to human agents/live collectors for complex issues.

Better Compliance and Privacy: Voice AI’s algorithms can be trained to follow regulatory protocols on reaching customers, communication time, frequency or calls, and honoring their requests for discontinuing communication using APIs. It can be challenging to adhere to all the norms when done manually. Also, Voice AI’s strong encryption and consumers’ or cardholders’ data protection features comply with regulatory standards like HIPAA, PCI, FCRA, and more.

Lower Litigation: Voice AI lowers litigation risks compared to human agents, who are more likely to coerce consumers to pay with the hope of meeting targets and receiving higher commissions. Additionally, consumers are generally passive toward Voice AI and pin fewer expectations on the technology to understand their emotions or personal grief, reducing the odds of agencies ending up with lawsuits.

Better Insights and Analysis: Debt collection agencies can draw on the insights gathered by Digital Voice Agents to learn about consumers’ or callers’ experiences and conversations to design or augment debt collection processes for better collection campaigns, collectors’ experiences, and higher recovery rates.

How AI-powered Digital Collectors Can Outperform Live Collectors

While Voice AI embodies the promise of automation with a human touch, collection agencies don’t rely on anecdotal evidence. They look for value-creation and tenacity to transform traditional loan recovery practices with the technologies to a level that human resources alone cannot match. Skit.ai firmly believes in realizing the potential of voice communication in debt recovery by augmenting human support with AI for intelligent human-machine collaboration.

Here are the key differentiating features of Voice AI that match collection requirements and make processes more efficient in responding to various outbound debt collection use cases.

Collection Support Scalability: Voice AI can automate up to 70% of calls, helping curb hiring, recruitment, and training-related requirements in collection agencies. Additionally, Digital Voice Agents help leverage unlimited scalability by simultaneously handling multiple collection calls, which would otherwise be very time consuming and expensive when done manually.

Higher Cost Savings: Voice AI processes non-revenue generating calls at 1/5th of the cost of manual calls. Also, they are capable of decreasing operational costs by 50%.

24/7 Support: Digital Collectors can always be at the beck and call of consumers to offer 24/7 support. Delivering 24/7 support with human resources would be extremely costly and unrealistic.

Lower AHT: Voice AI guarantees better performance and can handle multi-turn conversations with prompt query resolution. It reduces average call handling time (AHT) by 40% and augments human agent teams’ efforts by transferring only complex queries and equipping them with real-time analytics and insights.

Higher Debt Collection and Recovery Rate: Skit.ai’s Digital Collectors have repeatedly demonstrated performance at par with average debt collectors while operating at less than 1/5th the cost of a human agent.

Better Account Classification: Unlike manual debt collection efforts, Voice AI’s ML classification models algorithms are trained to segregate consumers as per bankruptcy details, creditworthiness, outstanding loan amounts, blocked accounts, and do-not-call lists, to help collectors or accounts receivable managers respond appropriately.

Higher Accountability and Compliance: Digital Voice Agents are trained to comply with strict practices in debt collections (7/7/7 rule, TCPA, Mini-Miranda, etc.) and refrain from the usage of unsavory language or behavior that can later result in lawsuits to the agency, which would be challenging to regulate in manual collection use cases. Besides the analytics-driven insights on consumer responses and history, Digital Voice Agents guarantee higher accountability.

Complete Campaign Control: Digital Collectors can be turned on or off as per use case to match the call volume requirement or type of consumers’ requests and accounts, unlike calls by live collectors with efficiency issues and too much time, resources, and training.

Consistent Call Quality: Voice AI delivers consistent experiences at any scale and volume. It is humanly impossible to ensure the call experience remains the same and guarantees similar outcomes for all debtors’ conversations from manual collection campaigns.

The Bottom Line: Voice AI is the Key to Supercharge Debt Collections

It is time to embrace the reality that neither automation nor pure human intelligence can help debt collection agencies to master complex collection campaigns. Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence platforms like Skit.ai enable the collaboration between humans and AI-powered machines to respond to the mounting operational stresses in debt collection agencies. These solutions empower live collectors to perform consistently throughout the debt collection process at a better cost, productivity, and recovery rate.

To learn more about how Voice AI can help reimagine debt collection efforts with call automation, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

Tackle Agent Productivity in Debt Collection Agencies Using Voice AI

Posted on November 25, 2022February 5, 2024 by Harshad Bajpai

For debt collection agencies, debt recovery is a labor-intensive effort that typically relies more on human effort than capital investments. Even with the adoption of newer digital communication tools that promise to scale manual efforts, the ARM industry invariably struggles with one major issue — human resource turnover.

Across all industries, average attrition rates in contact centers vary between 30 to 40%.

It’s hard to know the exact attrition rate in the ARM industry. Agencies reported a monthly quit rate of 2.9% in 2021. Before the pandemic, in 2016, large collection agencies reported experiencing an average turnover rate of 75% to 100%, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The high attrition that characterizes the collections space makes third-party debt collection agencies vulnerable to several challenges, like loss of domain expertise, risk of non-compliance, lawsuits, and increased cost of hiring and training new talent. In the United States, with nearly one in four citizens having at least one debt in collections, recovery has become an increasingly costly endeavor.

Most Common Reasons for Collection Agent Attrition in the Debt Collection Industry

Here are some of the most common challenges that make it so difficult for agencies to retain collectors:

Too Many Accounts, Too Much Work: Given the growing debt delinquency in the U.S., one can only imagine the amount of verification and debt-related communication work that can drive collectors to overwork.
Collectors’ Commission is Dependent on Recovery: Third-party debt collection agencies are involved when credit card issuers or creditors’ collection representatives cannot recover overdue balances. Collection agencies face thinning profit margins, and human agents’ commissions for debt recovery further burn holes in their pockets. There is no set rule or guarantee on the time the human agents need to recover outstanding loans successfully.
The Great Resignation: While all contact centers face high attrition rates, many people have been rethinking their careers and seeking opportunities in new fields over the last two years. This also applies to the ARM industry, where collection agents face acute stress from chasing after customers over the phone while adhering to a wide array of regulations, making attrition an even bigger challenge.
Empty Promises to Pay: It is common to find consumers dodging debt-related interactions. When confronted directly, they are likely to make promises to pay that may only sometimes be honored, which is another detractor for collectors to stick to their roles.
Debt Shame: Debt collection calls are direct and can sometimes make the debtors uncomfortable delving into the details of their unpaid loans. According to a study by Webio, people can be much more honest when communicating via text messages than in voice interactions for difficult scenarios. In the case of debt collections, textual conversations can reduce stress for both debtor and collector.
Efforts Often Don’t Justify Conversion Rates: When it comes to debt, the devil is in the details. To invest too much attention and time in each customer who needs a detailed overview of their loans and debts is unrealistic. It is extremely costly and leads to operational overkill, another reason for collectors’ resignation.
Debt Collection is Not for Everyone: Employee turnover in any field results from the nature of the job/employer and the employee’s capabilities. Working conditions, perks, quality of work, and benefits will fix the collector’s morale. But employees’ capabilities for the job determine how much they are willing to stick to it.
Rapid Changes in Regulatory Framework: Many regulatory agencies like FTC and rules like Fair Debt Collection Practices Act dictate how collection agencies can approach consumers without violating consumer protection laws. It requires constant staff training and procedural approaches like obtaining debt verification requests, debt validation, forbearance, and foreclosures that rely on unique expertise. When agencies adopt a manual route or use restrictive debtor communication methods, errors and inaccuracies are expected.

The Rising Role of Voice AI in the Debt Collections Industry

These challenges highlight the urgency for digital transformation in collection agencies; in particular, agencies are looking at automation as the primary solution to their attrition crisis.

In our previous articles, we discussed the unique capabilities of Voice AI technology in reducing contact center agent labor costs via call automation. Concurrently, Gartner’s estimates from their survey also suggest that labor expenses represent 95% of contact center costs, and adopting Conversational AI helps cut expenses by $80 billion. The customer-facing side of ARM, particularly the debt collection agencies, can capitalize on this trend to reduce staff shortages, curb labor expenses and make human resources more efficient and effective.

Skit.ai’s Voice AI platform is at the forefront of transforming the ARM industry with its Digital Voice Agents and augmenting collection agencies’ workforce to focus on resolving complex use cases.

Voice AI’s value-adds are in areas that impact collectors’ productivity and bandwidth which further determine talent retention in this space. Here’s the rundown of its merits that help address agent attrition challenge in the debt collections industry:

End-to-end Call Automation: Voice AI helps automate 70% of calls (inbound and outbound), allowing prompt query resolution. Also, agencies can leverage automation to identify consumers, policy numbers, and other debt-related information. This reduces the effort and time it would take to call and follow up with each debtor manually.
Reduce High Cost of Collection by 1/5th: Digital Voice Agents that plug into contact centers and take over calls by holding human-like conversations can execute calls at less than 1/5th of the actual cost of manual calls. Collection agencies can lower operation costs with intelligent voice agents in lieu of collectors by concurrently calling over thousands of defaulters.
High Scalability: Agencies can scale their debt collection efforts and consumer outreach by leveraging call automation and Digital Voice Agents that can handle and answer tier-1 caller queries by automating up to 70% of calls, reducing dependency on human agents.
Higher Portfolio Coverage Intensity: Collectors can cover many more debt files when they leverage Voice AI’s ability to handle multiple calls simultaneously. With minimal effort, cost and time, agencies expand their scale of reach of debt collection practices with minimal human intervention.
Strict Adherence to Compliance: Fear of lawsuits or going off track by the debt collectors will be alleviated by the Voice AI platform, which is purpose-built and specific to the domain and use case. Digital Voice Agents can be tailored to hold and attend calls as per the laws governing consumers’ preference for call frequency, tone, language, and time to receive debt collection calls.
Solve Diverse Use Cases: The recovery process in the collection agencies involves rigorous reviews, checking outstanding balances, sending demand and acknowledgment letters, and arranging for telephone contact. It is humanly impossible to keep track of all details, numbers, and sensitive information about different types of debt and cases at their fingertips. Digital Voice Agents can be optimized to address various debt-related queries and use cases without time, cost, and human effort constraints, reducing work stress and dissatisfaction for debt collectors.
Enhance Human Agent Productivity: Debt collectors can experience higher and faster conversion levels by leveraging Voice AI’s analytics and caller data insights. The pre-call verification, call automation (inbound and outbound), and routing features enable real-time agent augmentation, boosting productivity and performance. Also, the Digital Voice Agents are capable of intelligent call transfers to human agents only for complex cases, allowing the human workforce to focus on efforts that help retrieve debts faster.
Voice AI Calls are Free of Human Biases: Holding debt recovery conversations is a sticky collection practice that most consumers tend to avoid out of pressure, discomfort, shame, and fear of judgment. Voice AI’s call automation capability eliminates direct voice interaction between defaulters and collection agents, making collection calls free of human biases. Also, Digital Voice Agents can hold persuasive, contextually accurate, and proactive conversations and keep interactions direct and objective. This way, collection agents can experience higher work quality without job stress, dissatisfaction, and the chances of misdemeanors while talking to consumers.

Collection agencies rely entirely on outstanding loan payments to survive. Voice AI helps collection agencies strike a balance between meeting their recovery targets and making debt collection efforts more intuitive in a way that doesn’t come at the cost of operational burnouts and resignations. Voice AI eliminates bottlenecks in debt recovery and improves the overall customer experience.

To learn more about how Voice AI can help you solve attrition challenges, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

How a Hotel Bookings Platform Transformed Customer Support with Voice AI

Posted on November 16, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Vaccine equity reopened the global tourism gates in 2021, reigniting the wanderlust of travelers, many of whom were keen on holidaying internationally.

Picture this; customer support of leading travel bookings and tourism companies began clocking over thousands of pre-booking queries and inbound calls. In addition to the chats, emails, and other contact touchpoints. The two possible ways to rise to the occasion—scale up contact center support or explore ‘novel automation areas’ beyond the scope of IVRs and Chatbots to help agents answer customers’ questions.

Travelers in the digital age prefer pre-booking research and planning over spontaneity. Even more so, customers simply desire to talk to voice support on the other side of the line, a study confirms.

While IVRs and Chatbots are excellent for very simplistic FAQs, tickets, and status handling, they need to catch up in meeting the expectations of potential travelers with generic discovery queries that can only be addressed effectively via voice conversations with contact center agents.

However, managing the entire inbound query process over calls is an overpromise that most contact centers can only live up to by draining their agent resources, time, and cost.

From the potential customer’s standpoint, booking during peak seasons, poor agent bandwidth, and long waits at the IVR loop can be frustrating. This ultimately leads to under-delivery of the promise of consistent and quality customer experience (CX), causing poor conversion and mid-call abandonment.

How AI-powered Contact Center Automation is Ideal for Travel Companies

Travel and tourism brands must factor in CX while offering a seamless flow of information on airfares, accommodations, destinations, booking and refund policies, travel safety, and guidelines over inbound voice calls. AI-powered voice automation helps intercept repetitive queries, taking away the lion’s share of the burden from the agents. This way, it augments contact center support teams to meticulously manage time and resources for solving complex customer queries while staying on top of their SLAs. Additionally, travel booking companies can leverage automation to offer more information over voice calls in their inbound support.

Voice AI, built on powerful AI and Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) algorithms, can guarantee this two-fold benefit for travel and tourism platforms looking to unlock new automation angles in inbound customer support for an impactful CX. In this blog, we will explore the journey of Southeast Asia’s leading hotel bookings and management platform with Voice AI for transforming their inbound CX through seamless voice conversations.

Explore how Voice AI Empowers Contact Center Agents

Automating Inbound Customer Support Call with Voice AI

Before adopting Voice AI, the hotel bookings company had an IVR system that was able to confirm only those customers with booking IDs before connecting them to the agents. The bots could not handle customers looking to fetch pre-booking and pricing details. Due to poor agent bandwidth, the company’s customer support hit its lowest point whenever the call volumes peaked, recording below-par FCR, call containment, and call abandonment rates.

After evaluating market-leading platforms, the travel bookings company chose Voice AI and predefined objectives to empower its customer support team to work across customer intents previously handled by bots. The platform’s powerful AI capabilities helped dive deeper and crystalize goals such as:

Automating inbound customer calls with simpler intents, like inquiries about booking status, to improve call containment rates.
Implement a solution that will allow the team to handle seasonal surges without hiring more agents.
Give customers a seamless experience that would reduce wait times and the likelihood of call abandonment.
Handle more query types, even involving customers without an active booking ID.

Discover How Voice AI Transforms Contact Center Automation

Reaching Customers Faster at Less Cost and Agent Workload

The transformation began with inbound query areas like reservation status inquiries, booking cancellation and modification information, account information, and policies. After Voice AI deployment, the travel bookings company also identified critical areas that can be managed by their bots; new booking, refund status, pricing inquiry, and location details. This made their bots proactive and prescriptive and seamlessly scaled up the query volumes within two weeks of going live!

In the second phase of implementing Voice AI, the call containment rates gradually increased by 75%, opening new avenues in customer self-service. This meant more inbound callers could get their answers faster without impacting the agent productivity and call center costs!

Voice Automation helped the company to save nearly $200,000 on the annual staffing and recruitment budget. They improved HR efficiency and adopted more competent staffing without the additional costs of recruiting agents just for managing calls during peak seasons for the following year.

Role of Voice AI for Insurance: Streamline Inbound Support

Voice-led Customer Support for Seamless Elasticity and Higher CX

Delivering elastic customer support is another driver for CX for digital brands and businesses. In the travel and tourism industry, especially during peak seasons when the customers are in the pre-booking phase, the bookings platforms and contact centers must be agile to keep up with their changing preferences and low attention spans. Elastic customer support means the platforms and their contact centers are scalable, and the customers do not face poor user experience from frozen applications or busy contact center lines.

To capitalize on the pre-booking queries that are not tied to booking IDs, the hotel bookings firm uncovered new automation angles within customer service and expanded customer support areas with Voice AI. This gave them the agility and flexibility to resolve over a hundred calls, of which the bots handled the majority. In turn, this increased agent productivity, allowing them to focus on answering questions over calls and improving customer loyalty and retention at the pre-booking stage. Local languages integration to the IVR was the additional enhancement using Voice AI that drove the platform’s net promoter score (NPS) up by 71% and reduced call abandonment rates by 54%.

Our Takeaway:

In today’s pure-play tech world, automating inbound customer support is vital for the judicious disbursement of pre-sales/booking activities. As customer expectations increase, the opportunities for automation are endless. However, travel and tourism firms must create a realistic roadmap and flow route on their platforms for better customer experience and engagement across the entire booking value chain. With AI at work, brands can unleash automation in the right places to drive ‘conversion through conversations’ even with a lean team.

Voice Intelligent platforms, like Voice AI, help join forces critical to customer support, allowing an absolute human and machine partnership.

Are you interested in contact center automation to chart unique customer experiences with our Digital Voice Agent? Use the chat tool to schedule a call with one of our experts.