Replicant: The Alternative to Call Center Outsourcing Solutions

By Replicant
December 7, 2022

For years, many organizations have tried call center outsourcing solutions to manage peak seasons, labor shortages, after-hour calls, and other call center volume issues. During the recent global pandemic, customer service representatives faced even more increased stress.

According to Fortune, “as frontline employees, working in a contact center isn’t easy. New research found that 96 percent of contact center agents feel stressed weekly and are taking more calls than ever. Calls rated as ‘difficult’ by customer service agents increased by 100% over the past two years. At the same time, contact center workers are plagued with stress, overwhelm, and a lack of engagement. It’s challenging to provide excellent customer service when the agents can barely keep their heads above water.”

Although call center outsourcing solutions have provided some level of relief, in today’s competitive market, it is no longer a long-term viable solution.

The staffing shortage that many call centers face today is affecting business process outsourcing providers as well. This usually means high turnover rates and lengthy training processes. The number of agents is frequently out of line with the volume of calls. Businesses may either be paying idle agents, or customers may experience long wait times if agents are not trained and available.

Providing an excellent alternative to outsourcing, Replicant provides a call center automation solution that can scale immediately to any volume.

What are the pros and cons of outsourcing a call center?

The main advantage of call center outsourcing companies is they may be able to provide additional agents to answer calls when your in-house agents are unavailable. However, disadvantages include the inability to scale the number of available agents to call volume perfectly as well as long training times and turnover issues.

What are the pros and cons of call center automation?

Call center automation, on the other hand, can automatically scale to the existing call center volume. It can answer any number of calls simultaneously, eliminating customer wait time and providing a better customer experience. A solution such as Replicant has been trained on millions of real customer service calls and continues to learn over time. There are very few disadvantages to call center automation.

What are the alternatives to call center outsourcing?

There are alternatives to call center outsourcing solutions, including hiring more internal agents and adding an automated call center. The current labor shortage can make the former alternative a challenge. By turning to call center automation, a business can easily handle the majority of repetitive, Tier One customer calls with no human interaction through machine learning.

Why is Replicant a better alternative to outsourcing?

Call center outsourcing companies are not the only options out there. Replicant is an excellent alternative. It has been trained on millions of real customer calls, which means it can be quickly and easily implemented. Over time, the solution will continue to learn about your organization, becoming a more valuable team member every day.

In addition, Replicant uses natural language processing, which means that questions and inquiries can often be handled automatically without human intervention. This frees your live agents to manage more complex questions that require human empathy. If this is the case, Replicant forwards a complete transcript to the agent so that customers do not need to repeat information.

Replicant’s Contact Center Automation solution is highly flexible and can be customized to meet individual call center needs. For example, our technology can be used in front of interactive voice response (IVR) as a “front desk” that handles the initial intake of every customer. Customers can state any number of requests and the Thinking Machine will either resolve them or collect the necessary preliminary information and efficiently pass off requests to appropriate agents.

It can also be used behind an IVR, triggered when a customer has a particular request that the Thinking Machine has been designated to handle. Many contact centers leverage Replicant to handle requests after normal business hours, on weekends, or during holidays as well.