Context

Customer Service

Although every organization is different, there are many common underlying issues facing customer service departments around the world today, all of which reduce operational performance and support satisfaction.

These common customer service problems include:

Handling volatile request volumes

Most organizations face fluctuating customer service request volumes across different hours of the day, days of the week, and weeks of the year. In general, there are two components of request volume volatility: daily or seasonal fluctuations.

The most common type of request volume fluctuation is intraday (volatility at different times of the day). This volatility occurs when customers are more likely to make requests at certain times of the day, like during peak business hours. Although this is a common issue, there is no easy solution. Employee shifts are generally longer than a few hours, making it difficult to solve with only a resource-based approach.

Alongside daily volatility, some organizations with seasonal operations face intramonth fluctuations (volatility across different months of the year). For example, Canadian campsites receive significantly more campsite booking requests in the summer than during the winter. As a result, they must manage this request volatility to provide good customer service. Similar to the daily fluctuations, there is no easy solution. Hiring people for only certain months or weeks of the year can be difficult, especially in unionized environments or regions with low unemployment.

Managing high-volume customer service ticket assignment and routing

When customer service departments receive large volumes of requests that require follow-up action and support teams expand in size, a bottleneck always occurs — managing task assignments to ensure the correct support agents are assigned the right tasks. At first glance, this issue seems simple; managers simply need to route incoming requests to the appropriate agent. However, with large volumes of request types and specialized support agents, this process is nowhere near being simple.

Keeping customers up-to-date on status changes.

Customer service agents update request statuses, add comments, and eventually close and resolve issues. However, despite these activities being common and frequent, customers are often left without knowing about the progress made towards their request. In worst-case scenarios, customers do not know when their service request is fulfilled and closed. This lack of notifications for customers reduces service experience and overall satisfaction.

Solution

How Symphona Helps 

Symphona’s products provide a complete customer service solution, including:

• Customer request collection and inquiry resolution using Converse
• Automatic follow-up task resolution through Flow and Serve
• Intelligent task assignment to human agents through Serve

Converse agents use natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI to speak organically and manage a large level of simple and complex requests. By leveraging Converse’s generative agents and its conversational capabilities:

• Your organization can more easily collect customer requests and answer inquiries, such as updating account information or booking appointments. 
• Your organization can handle a higher volume of requests while maintaining and enhancing customer satisfaction. 
• You also reduce strain on human support agents, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks. 

By using Flow’s automation and AI features to automate common low-complexity and high-frequency customer requests:

• Teams can automatically fulfill follow-up tasks, eliminating manual effort and freeing support agents to handle more complicated issues. 
• Automations can resolve customer issues faster than traditional manual methods, providing a better support experience.

Organizations can flexibly use Symphona for a complete customer service process overhaul or a longer-term phased approach. Since Symphona is modular, you can use any of our products on your own terms. 

Symphona for Customer Service Automation

Collect customer requests and fulfill inquiries in real-time by leveraging Converse's automated intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). 

• These advanced industry-leading IVAs harness the power of conversational AI and NLP to provide the best overall automated customer service experience on the market. 
• The agents are easily configurable, enabling your organization to get started right away with provided templates or to develop highly customized agents from scratch.

Reduce manual business processes and streamline service request fulfillment tasks with Flow. 

• No-code editors enable technical and non-technical team members to develop advanced workflows that automate entire request resolution processes. 
• Flow can also help you solve the customer notification problem by sending automatic status update notifications to keep your customers in the loop of resolution progress. 
• When business exceptions (fallouts) inevitably occur in workflows, easily manage and automatically handle them with Resolve.

When customers make requests with manual follow-up tasks, Serve makes resolution and management as easy as possible.

• Integrating directly with Converse and Flow, Serve enables in-depth tracking of customer service tickets from open to close. 
• Features such as automatic ticket assignment, which ensures the right people are assigned the right tasks, and advanced ticket visibility control, make Serve a powerful addition for customer service teams looking to improve their processes, management, and tracking.

Symphona also provides many other powerful features, including automatic email report generation and advanced dashboards for KPI tracking. Since Symphona is a cloud-based solution, it scales as your organization grows from 100 customers to 100 million customers without your teams worrying about technical constraints or details.

Symphona tools are no-code, allowing for people of any technical skill to use them. Furthermore, with Symphona operating on a usage-based system, your organization only pays based on how many automations you use.

Overall, Symphona enables organizations to configure end-to-end customer service automation using a single platform, from request collection to fulfillment processing to business exception management. The platform's integrated products enable anyone to create advanced automation solutions with ease.