At AudioCodes, we believe that every contact center platform, whether legacy or cloud, can be improved and modernized to harness the wealth of CX innovation tools to continuously improve customer service and personalization. By leveraging AudioCodes voice services for conversational AI, Breckland Council modernized their legacy contact center capabilities, improved their customer experience, and improved their overall efficiency and customer support operation.
The Customer
Breckland Council, catering to a diverse community of almost 140,000 individuals, encountered a significant customer service hurdle stemming from a surge in repetitive inquiries. Their populace, which encompasses a wide range of demographics, including many senior citizens and immigrants who favor verbal interactions, underscored the imperative for a voice-powered remedy. As a response, they embarked on a strategic initiative aimed at seamlessly integrating virtual agents into their existing on-site contact center infrastructure.
The Challenge
In today’s digital age, customer service is critical to successfully supporting online government information and self-services. Transforming customer support in the face of high volume and diverse communication preferences isn’t easy. Breckland Council faced the challenge of efficiently managing a high volume of calls on repetitive issues, alongside substantial communication barriers.
These challenges presented an excellent opportunity for a forward-thinking strategy that leveraged cutting-edge voicebot technology to provide automated responses to simple, repeat inquiries. Not only did the implementation of voicebots improve customer service by delivering rapid and accurate responses, but it also significantly reduced the workload on agents, allowing them to focus on more complex issues and optimize operational efficiency. This approach also offered a more inclusive solution compared to chatbots, benefiting all residents.
The Solution
To enhance accessibility, Breckland Council embarked on a transformative CX voice journey, partnering with AudioCodes to voice-enable chatbots to their existing Ubisend bot framework.
The chosen solution, AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect, acts as a connector to seamlessly integrate voice communication into the chatbot framework, the legacy contact center platform, and the telephony service. It facilitates natural voice conversations between residents and bots, enhancing the overall user experience. Additionally, AudioCodes’ session border controller (SBC) technology ensured voice quality, high availability, security and scalability.
The Results
Breckland Council’s voicebot project went live at the end of Q2, 2023, seamlessly integrating with existing systems. It aims to handle 15-20% of initial calls over the next 18 months, reducing the workload on contact center agents, shortening call times, and decreasing the waiting queue time for callers. The solution is set to grow to 30 channels, with future expansions in the pipeline.
The benefits of VoiceAI Connect include:
- Enhanced CX with voicebot services
- Increased contact center efficiency and reduced costs
- Seamlessly establish connections between SIP trunks from various contact center platforms and multiple service providers, bot frameworks and cognitive speech services
Breckland Council’s journey showcases how affordable, innovative technology and voice connectivity expertise can transform government contact centers, making them more accessible, efficient, and responsive to the diverse needs of a population.
“AudioCodes was a great advisor and partner for Breckland Council’s contact service automation project. The voicebot service was swiftly deployed without any glitches, staying within the budget, improving constituent service without having to replace our current contact center. The inherent scalability of the solution will allow us to introduce additional services as needed in the future.”
Adele Newsome, Customer Service Manager at Breckland Council
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