Why Natural Language Processing is the biggest development in the Contact Centre Industry within the last decade

For those that don’t know, natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between computers and humans using the natural language. To put it simply, NLP, reads, deciphers, understands, and makes sense of the human language in a manner that is valuable. When assessing NLP’s applicability, the use-cases are endless, but none more impacting than the positive and game-changing effect it can have on customer and agent experience. Why is this the biggest development the market has seen in the last decade? Because of the value it delivers. Although voice traffic has declined over the years, it isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. For more emotive and complex enquiries, customers will always opt to phone in. And whilst this is still the case, NLP can help augment the customer experience, automate where necessary, and route complex enquiries to the correct resource pool.

For most customers, phoning into a contact centre is a familiar and often daunting process, a series of often complex and multi-level DTMF IVR menus, “press 1 to speak to our customer service team”, “press 2 to speak to our claims team” etc. Although on the face of it, this age-old routing process has proved successful, it is fundamentally flawed. For one, it restricts a customer’s decision, what if my option is not listed? Then the customer is forced to go down an inadequate route that will result in their enquiry being serviced by an agent not best equipped to handle the request. This adds unnecessary call-time, reduces first contact resolution and impacts agent and customer satisfaction alike. Perhaps most crucially, it restricts self-service and automation opportunity. With traditional DTMF IVR menus, organisations are limited on how many self-service options they can logically present your customers. By offering too many, it creates complexity and frustration in the eyes of the customer, negatively affecting CSAT.

NLP on the other hand lets customers state the reason for their enquiry using unstructured spoken language. Suddenly a caller’s enquiry can be routed based on key words, key phrases and whether the language used by the customer relates to a positive or negative sentiment. What does this mean? Well firstly, keywords and key phrases can be linked to a specific outcome, for example if I want to speak to an agent about purchasing a certain product, my call can be routed to the agent who knows the most about this particular product, resulting in higher conversion rates. Let’s say I want to find out some additional information about the returns policy, why not ask whether you would like to receive an SMS with a link to the relevant article in the knowledge base, resulting in low-value calls being deflected. Let’s say I phone in to make a payment, why not offer me the option to pay using an automated IVR or online? Finally, being able to route negative enquiries quickly and efficiently to an agent skilled in dispute resolution will result in more unhappy customers leaving happy.

The most powerful thing about NLP is that it is constantly evolving. You as an organisation gain unparalleled insight into previously unharnessed unstructured data, such as your customers buying habits, reasons they contact you, and requests that could be self-served that you didn’t even know about. Of course, all organisations will profess to have a deep understanding of their customers already, but how can you truly know why your customer is phoning in if you’re pushing them down a static, programmatic IVR flow? Once you gain these new insights you can tailor a journey specific to that customer or customer demographic. Once you start to combine the data you already know about that customer, e.g. from a CRM platform, you can start personalising the experience and even predict the reason they might be calling.

Whatever technology you are looking at investing in during 2020 and 2021, make sure it includes NLP, it’s a real gamechanger.