Clickatell's announcement of its new Automated FAQ Response solution comes as contact centre operations struggle with maintaining consistent customer experience amidst support agents working remotely, consumer anxiety, lockdowns and social distancing measures.

"Businesses are experiencing ever-higher customer queries, while also having to decentralise their contact centre operations with thousands of frontline agents having to work from home," says Jeppe Dorff, Clickatell chief product and technology officer.

"Some businesses are contending with less staff and even shutting some contact centres down, making customer service challenges a critical area of need," adds Dorff.

Clickatell's solution, integrated with Clickatell's cloud-based workflow automation software, aims to enable enterprises to automate responses and provide immediate answers to customers' most frequently asked questions in WhatsApp. This will improve customer experience and reducing operating costs.

The cloud-based solution integrates into existing contact centre interactive voice response (IVR) systems with minimal configuration changes. It includes Clickatell's Flow, a visual workflow editor, to manage the questions and responses.

Clickatell enables this with a FAQ bot that gives customers instant answers to questions on WhatsApp. According to Clickatell, businesses will be able to 'significantly reduce their contact centre congestion'.

In addition to the solution for WhatsApp, businesses can also send out timely emergency text notifications through SMS using Clickatell's Campaign Manager, a free, no-code communication platform.

Campaign Manager makes SMS messages and campaigns simple to launch in minutes for time-critical alerts and notifications at scale.

"Our purpose at Clickatell is creating a better world through technology, and we have seen this amplified during several crises over our 20 years of leadership in mobile technology," says Dorff.

"We now find ourselves amidst a global public health crisis, and we're here to help our customers reach their audience through fast, reliable communications and digital commerce platforms," Dorff concludes.

To help businesses get started, Clickatell has indicated that it is providing businesses an offer that removes set-up fees and waives three months of software platform usage fees.

For details regarding its new contact center offer, individuals are encouraged to visit the Automated FAQ Response page here.

For more information, visit www.clickatell.com. You can also follow Clickatell on Facebook or on Twitter