Sales are down, the competition is brutal, and we have zero chance of hitting our year-end profit target if we don’t bring down our costs. 

This is what your CEO tell you when you meet with him. He further adds the target for customer service is 20%. You have till tomorrow morning to come up with a plan and present. 

This wasn’t the first time the costs have been reduced. You did all the possible cost-saving measures and managed 20% savings with automation. You addressed it by not filling open positions, and nobody had to be fired. 

The Plan 

Within a few months, you are pressed to target another 20% cost reduction. This time it is going to hurt. The agents taking the calls are already stretched beyond capacity. You are 20% lower than your required strength. That’s what your CEO wants to reduce.  

You set out to look for more automation to reduce the costs by 20%. You spend the next few hours squeezing out the possibilities, and now you say, “Tada, the numbers seem to work out,” and you are ready with your presentation for your CEO. 

You leave for the day. 

New day

You get up in the morning, and you realize that all of your automation that you are attempting to do will make your customers wait longer to talk to your agents. You are already getting complaints about the existing system, and people are looking for ways to bypass the whole thing and get to an agent. 

You don’t provide that choice as you guess that many of your customers would choose to talk to the agent directly. 

You feel that the entire work you did the last evening was wrong. Your system is designed to make your customers spend more time and effort so that you wouldn’t require as many agents. 

You have heard some of your existing recordings, and you have figured how frustrated your customers are. 

Making your customers work harder and spend time to cut costs on your end is a death spiral. Your sales will go down, and you’ll again be in cost-cutting mode. 

So, you start to think, what if I ask my supervisors to take customer calls during peak periods. No way, they are all busy preparing reports. 

What if I cut out a lot of that stuff? This looks workable to you. Why don’t I automate the report generation? It’d make things easy for your supervisors. They would be available to take customer calls, and that’d make things easier for your customers. 

Read More: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and customer experience – the endless possibilities 

Everyone is happy 

Employees would be happy as they would be working less on mundane stuff like generating reports and work on actionable stuff like improving sales. Customers would be pleased to get the personal attention they constantly sought. The organization would be happy as they have achieved the necessary cost-cutting, while the outlook for improved sales looks promising.