How to Improve Your Self-Service Containment Rates

Improving Containment is a Win-Win for your Customer, Brand and your Budget 

One of the greatest challenges facing brands today is attempting to personalize every customer experience without breaking the bank. 

It’s a balance that can be tricky to strike, but without advanced self service capabilities, your customers are more likely to ditch you for the competition and your agents are more likely to burn out. 

Containment via conversational AI and contextualization allows brands to go above and beyond with their customer experience without the need to double their workforce.

What is Containment and Contextualization? 

Containment is the successful resolution of a customer's query without needing to involve a human agent. While it’s unlikely that a contact center will ever achieve 100% containment, it is important to provide contextualization on every interaction.  

This means giving agents a single source of truth and full context into the customer’s self service attempts so they can seamlessly pick up where the customer left off without traditional and frustrating authentication methods followed by “how can I help you today?” 

How does Conversational AI & Contextualization improve the customer experience? 

Conversational AI via Virtual Agents streamlines the customer experience and makes it far more simple and intuitive for users to solve their own issues. 

Traditional service gets bogged down easily because customers have to explain themselves to multiple agents, get trapped in tedious phone trees, or get stuck on hold over the phone indefinitely. Leveraging conversational AI and contextualization, average handle times can decrease by more than 40 percent, leading to happier, more satisfied customers.

Conversational AI empowers customers by giving them more self-service options and greater accessibility to them. Customers can essentially choose their own adventure—be it voice, or digital channels — to find resolutions and not only feel in control of their service experience, but feel like their time is valued and respected.

What are the benefits of improving my containment rate? 

Improving containment helps businesses reduce costs and increase revenue by dramatically changing the way they provide service. 

By enabling easier self-service, queries that are low-hanging fruit—such as password changes and basic account questions—can be addressed by virtual agents or in the digital space, freeing up time for your human agents. When a customer does feel the need to reach out to a human agent, contextualization supplies that agent with full context to better address their needs.

Through contextualized digital channels like sms and chat, an agent can handle three interactions at once rather than having one conversation over the phone, which can be expensive and time consuming. This also means context is not lost when customers transfer between communication channels and their experience across mediums is fluid. 

How to Improve Your Containment Rate

Containment rate is a very important metric to measure, because it can tell you a lot about the kind of experience your customers are having with your business. 

Interactions that aren’t contained are frequently indicative of pain points that need to be addressed. But how do you get started addressing them? UJET is here to help!

UJET partners with customers to help them understand their current IVR experience and identify high-value opportunities to help move the needle on containment. 

Get a massive-scale analysis of your customers’ most common needs and requests using conversational AI, topic modeling, and machine learning, powered by Google’s CCAI Insights.  Next, UJET will help you build the ideal Virtual Agents via Google Dialogflow to resolve those needs – automated, but still with a conversational human touch. 

It’s AI-guided customer service operations – informed by large-scale AI insights on what your actual customers are telling you they need and want. For those interactions that do need to reach a human agent, UJET’s one of a kind contextualization & smart authentication methods will make your agents better, faster, stronger and HAPPIER all the while driving down handle times.

Learn more about how UJET can help you improve your containment rates.

Nate Welch has spent the last decade selling technology in the contact center industry and is passionate about helping enterprises of all shapes and sizes meet and exceed their operational and CX objectives. The consumer expectation landscape is rapidly evolving which is why he chose to take a role at UJET as he believes UJET's unique offering future proofs organizations for the modern and up and coming consumer. Connect with him on LinkedIn.