Whether customers or agents, contact centers look totally different for everyone now than they were before. Previously, it was a place where people used to call, by calling, I meant “Only Call”, and “No other forms of interaction”, and stay online for agents to respond after a long wait or once they were done with screen toggling and gathering information.
Flashback done! Now coming to the present scenario, today, a contact center means a few clicks and instant solutions, until and unless it’s not a critical issue. We have various mediums in place to connect with the brand and each platform is equally active when it comes to offering customer assistance. Have you ever thought about how that’s possible? It’s because of “contact center automation”. And, in this blog, we will cover the major aspects of how automation transformed the contact center industry.
What Is Contact Center Automation?
Reducing manual intervention and automating the day-to-day tasks in the contact center through tools and technologies is termed contact center automation. When regular human tasks like – initial chats, sharing a guide, minor troubleshooting, etc., are taken care of by AI-powered tools and innovative technologies, human efforts are used in other productive tasks. This improves contact center performance and the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.
Furthermore, today’s new generation doesn’t want to wait for someone to resolve their minor queries, they connect with the brand using different platforms and prefer self-service more. So, getting an instant response from the chatbot, downloading a brief guide, watching a video, etc., to get the solution is the best help for them. Therefore, automating the contact center is the need of the hour. Let’s read further to know how to automate the contact center.
Technologies Used to Automate Contact Centers
⦿ Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
An automated phone system used to provide information to callers and give options for further steps is called IVR. Callers can make requests using menu or voice inputs without connecting with live agents. With IVR in place, the need for human agents on basic queries has been reduced paving the way for agents to do other productive tasks.
| 💡Read more | 5 Benefits of Implementing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) |
⦿ Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbots and virtual assistants are designed to interact with customers, handle simple queries, provide basic information, and help them with minor tasks, like – balance inquiries, password reset, simple guides, etc. Virtual assistants and chatbots are getting more advanced with every passing day and now they can understand natural language, work on complex issues, and much more.
⦿ Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses software robots to automate repetitive tasks. It helps free up agents by handling repetitive manual tasks, such as – understanding what’s on a screen, identifying and extracting data, navigating systems, and more. This reduces agents’ workload and enhances their productivity.
⦿ Speech and Text Analytics
Speech and text analytics is another automation tool that provides insights into agent-customer interactions by leveraging sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP). It understands human speech and figures out patterns, such as the occurrence of phrases and keywords in the conversation. It detects customers’ emotions and sentiments and records agents’ performance. Insights gathered through speech and text analysis are used to curate improvement training programs, identify new opportunities, and improve service quality.
⦿ Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is a call routing system that directs incoming calls to highly suitable agents based on availability, skills, and customer requirements. This can reduce the Average Call Handling Time and wait time, along with improving agents’ productivity and customer experience.
Benefits of Contact center automation?
Incorporating these tools and automating contact centers come with numerous benefits. Some of these are discussed below.
⦿ Better Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Automation in some areas of the contact center helps businesses solve customer queries and complaints instantly leading to an increase in Service Level Agreements.
⦿ Improved KPIs
KPIs like First Call Resolution and Net Promoter Score improve after enabling automation in the contact center. It promotes detailed and quick responses which improve agents’ KPIs.
⦿ Reduce Repetitive Tasks
Technologies like – Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data, automate recurring tasks and reduce manual efforts and time consumed in managing the contact center.
| 💡Also Read | Why Should We Automate the Repetitive Tasks of an Agent in the Contact Center? |
⦿ Improved Agent Satisfaction and Retention
In automated contact centers, AI takes care of repetitive tasks freeing up agents to focus and engage in other productive tasks. This helps them grow professionally, and increase satisfaction, leading to higher retention.
How to Automate a Contact Center?
With all the information mentioned above, hope you have decided to automate your contact center. Now, the question arises, how to automate it successfully? This question might bother you or you may think contact center automation is a challenging task. But, there is nothing like that, you just need to consider some effective pointers noted below and give your agents a whole new work experience.
- Make sure to align your automation strategy with your ongoing customer service strategy.
- Improve automation using customer data, such as FCR rate and CSAT score to make interactions efficient and personalized.
- Ensure prioritizing customers’ needs so that you can give them the exceptional service experience they are looking for. This can be done by conducting satisfaction surveys, to understand what they liked and disliked, based on which you can make better decisions.
- Focus on better synchronization between automation tools and human agents so that agents can take charge of the call when needed without hampering customer experience.
- Make sure your automation tools are updated regularly so that you can meet your customers’ expectations and stay ahead of the ongoing trends in the market.
| 💡Get the Use case | Automate Contact Center Conversations |
Challenges of Implementing Contact Center Automation and How to Resolve Them
Automating a contact center is fruitful in many ways, but it comes with some challenges that we need to address while planning to automate a contact center.
Contact center automation improves both agents’ and customers’ experience. You just need to ensure the discussed key factors are taken into consideration. Furthermore, for better transition while automating the contact center, you can get in touch with top-notch contact center solution providers like NovelVox. We offer tools that seamlessly integrate and enhance the experiences with maximum customization.
