Recommendations for the Use of Voice Bots in Call Centers of the German Automotive Industry

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Market research, grade: 1,0, Westfälische Hochschule Gelsenkirchen, Bocholt, Recklinghausen, language: English, abstract: Due to the changed conditions for companies and users, voice bots are becoming more and more relevant across industries. They offer a solution to the problem of ever-increasing customer expectations and also show a solution for companies to deal with the increasing number of channels while maintaining the same budget. Both, the places of integration and the application areas for voice bots are diverse. Especially for the channel call center, which is often under cost pressure due to increasing customer expectations. Using the example of the German automotive industry, the aim of the work is to find out, how far the use of voice bots in call centers has already progressed and which tasks voice bots can take over from human agents. Exemplary use cases (which are the equivalent from the company's point of view to the term "touchpoint" used from the customer's point of view) for voice bots in the call center should be elaborated and tested for their voice bot suitability and universal evaluation criteria for the selection of further use cases should be developed. This should enable each automotive manufacturer to individually assess their own use cases in the channel call center in terms of the voice bot suitability. Finally, a guideline has to be drawn to guide the German automobile manufacturers in promoting voice bots' use in their call centers. To find out which general framework conditions, prerequisites, and potentials voice bots have, the focus has to be put on these items at the beginning of the work. Based on this, the topic of call centers along the customer journey will be developed to get an impression of the importance and the areas of application for call centers in the different journey phases. Dealing with the exemplarily selected automotive industry, industry-specific peculiarities are thematized to design an expert survey and a further call center study to find out whether and for what purpose voice bots are already being used in the call centers and where further applications may be. In addition, current implementation barriers and success factors are identified to explain the status quo. For the expert surveys, various automotive industry experts, the voice bot technology supplying industry, and independent call center and technology experts will be interviewed for an objective view of the questions. Based on the results obtained, influencing factors for voice bot suitability and a procedural guideline is developed.