This blog post was co-authored by Genesys technology partner, Shelf.

The percentage of difficult inquiries on customer service representatives has more than doubled since COVID-19 hit the global economy. Forcing companies to be remote places incredible pressure on your communications and support processes. An employee can’t just get up from his desk and ask a neighbor for an answer or flag down a supervisor. And, if the answer isn’t known or can’t be found, customers become frustrated when placed on hold for what feels like forever. Not having the right answer has become more expensive than ever.

Here are five ways to improve the efficiency and quality of your workforce.

Automated Deflection for Self-Service

Eighty-one percent of customers try to resolve an issue themselves before reaching out to customer support. However, most of the self-service portals have a limited search and an overload of content. This leads to clients giving up and filling out a “Contact us” form. And, while most customers expect businesses to respond to their email with hours, keeping up that level of service is very challenging.

However, with the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technology, you can seamlessly deflect inbound emails by having a powerful recommendation engine connected to your “Contact us” form. By surfacing the right information to your clients, you can successfully deflect up to 20% of your inbound interactions while providing a much better customer experience.

Integrate FAQs into Chatbots with Knowledge Automation

Although people prefer chatbots over other digital methods of communication, only around 16% have a positive experience with them. That’s because, just like real agents, virtual assistants need a reliable knowledge backbone to support them. As our search habits become more complex, standard chatbots fail to keep up with them.

However, new breakthroughs in knowledge automation enable your chatbot to connect to more robust FAQs and even full documents. Your chatbot can learn to suggest answers to more complex questions by simply using your existing content and connecting it to a knowledge automation technology. This offers another opportunity to eliminate the need for customers to connect with an agent.

Introduce a COVID-19 Bot

The new Rapid Response Virtual Agent by Genesys and Google is the latest tool to reduce the huge pressure on your contact center caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. The introduction of contact center AI enables 24/7 conversational self-service through various channels, including chat, phone, social and messages. Connecting the COVID-19 bot to a knowledge automation technology can improve its ability to answer complex questions — and make the backend management of the content more efficient.

Implement Agent-Assist

Innovative agent-assist enables agents to quickly access the information they need to do their job. As the name says, agent-assist aims to improve your agents’ performance by quickly surfacing the right knowledge at the right time and place. With AI-powered recommendations, agents can get real-time suggestions in Genesys CloudTM chats — without leaving the tab. It cuts the time to agent proficiency by 50% and can compensate for the absence of in-office help from colleagues and managers.

By corresponding with the needs of your employees, agent-assist ensures an effective 30% reduction of the average call handle time.

Connect Knowledge Automation to Your IVR

Automatically recommending answers to agents based on how customers came through your IVR is another easy and effective way to improve the efficiency of your contact center. By passing the caller’s intent to the knowledge automation platform, agents receive specific information or guided help.

Empower Your Distributed Workforce with AI to Improve Customer Experience

The goal of agent-assist and AI is to consistently surface the best answers to agents and customers. By using these five technologies, you can allow company knowledge to power the avenues that customers want to connect with you — without additional training or manpower. With these resources, you can get more out of your workforce.

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Shelf is the only end-to-end knowledge automation platform that bundles all five of these factors into a single solution. To learn more, please visit https://get.shelf.io/knowledge-automation/ and request a free consultation.