Reducing soft costs
The interfacing of other AWS services gives Connect the ability to reduce soft costs in your organization. In the User experience section, we touched on several capabilities that also decrease your soft costs. Before we start reviewing these savings opportunities, let's review a comment made earlier that soft costs are more qualitative and harder to use for financial decisions. Since soft costs are items such as reducing employee efforts and reducing staff, they become harder to quantify. Employees are different. They work at different speeds, have different career objectives, different skill sets, and so on. Therefore, whenever you estimate these soft costs, there is always some amount of doubt. This doubt is what makes crafting a financial decision based on them much more difficult.
To demonstrate this, let's take a look at this scenario. You have designed your Connect implementation and have created an AI bot that allows your customers to use self-service. Your customers can now call in and check their last order's status without speaking to an agent. You have chosen this self-service option because you spoke to the call center staff and asked them the most frequent question. You then asked the staff how long they would spend on the phone with a client looking up their order and letting them know the status. After you gathered all of the information, you took the average hourly cost of a call center agent and calculated the savings based on the estimated number of calls. In total, you have figured that the new self-service AI bot will save the company $124,546 in employee time.
Based on this scenario, you should be able to see how Connect can save you a significant amount of money. Unfortunately, soft cost savings are more of a bonus when seeking financial and project approval. If you were to base the entire project on the merits of the $124,546 alone, you would run into a lot of questions, such as the following:
- Do you have exact numbers on how many times this question was asked of staff?
- Are the time savings are based on an average of employees, efficient employees, or poor performers?
- Does the volume of this question ebb and flow based on the time of year?
There's almost an infinite number of permutations of the questions you will be asked. You won't have answers for all of them. That is why I suggest building your solid foundation for approval on hard costs first, and make the soft cost savings the icing on the cake.
We have already covered how an AI bot may potentially save you money by reducing staff commitments. This reduction is probably one of the biggest contributors to saving you cash with Connect. The possibilities for self-service using bots are nearly endless. Some possible options to think about are as follows:
- Order status
- Shipping status
- Last paycheck deposit amount
- Current vacation balance
- Repeating a customer's last order
- Pausing a standing order
- Canceling an order
- Getting test results
These are some examples of what can be automated with self-service. Of course, this is highly dependent on the industry that you are engaged in. The only way that you will be able to extract what these automations might look like would be to communicate with the call center team. They will be able to provide the required insight as to what would be most effective to implement. If you are implementing a new call center, you might extract information from the business unit requesting the call center. However, I would suggest a follow-up post-implementation after a few months to revisit and see what improvements can be made. All of these self-service automations are reliant on a very important concept. This concept is the interfacing of Connect with enterprise applications. We will cover these interfaces in depth in the next chapter.