Village Roadshow’s investment in its contact centres allowed its contact centre agents to focus on higher value tasks that create a better experience for customers.
Michael Fagan, chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow told Digital Nation Australia that the organisation’s deployment of Amazon Lex and Amazon Poly machine learning and AI tools reduced the manual jobs for agents and improved accuracy to 100 percent.
“I don’t know who had a greater benefit for our contact centre whether it was the employee experience or the customer experience.”
For its cinemas, the software generates the times and locations for upcoming movies through automatic recording, removing 30 hours of manual work per week for the agent, Fagan said.
“Highly repetitive tasks are the ones that are most prone to be replaced by robots or replaced by digital.
“And they’re the kinds of things that contact centre agents don’t really like doing. They like the interactions with customers where there is more thinking required, more creative ability required, where there is a problem that is not easily solved which is why somebody is calling up.”
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While the cinemas were shut throughout the pandemic, many customers required their tickets to be deferred or certificates to be extended. According to Fagan, while some of these tasks are manual, and software can help to automate them, in some circumstances customers want to speak to a person, which is where agents can step in to deliver a smooth experience.
“We’ve wanted every single one of them to know that we’ve been closed. We haven’t been able to fulfil our customer’s desire. So we’ve been pretty lenient, and providing pretty great customer service, I have to say to extend a lot of them, but of course, a lot of that is either a manual or the interactions that we have with our customers can be time consuming or somebody just wants to talk to a human being to say, ‘Hey, this voucher that I had that looks like its expired is actually still valid.’”
According to Fagan, the future of contact centres will include more sentiment analysis where the AI can determine if a customer is unsatisfied with an interaction. This may alert the organisation to send a more senior staff member to intervene in order to assist the agent and the customers.
“It’s real-time feedback on the customer experience so that any interactions can be saved before they become irritating.”