In the last few years, demand for automation has increased dramatically in virtually every business environment. As companies look for ways to reduce costs, improve productivity, and streamline efficiency, automation has emerged as a valuable, multi-faceted tool.
In the contact center landscape, automation has the power to deliver phenomenal benefits. While every customer interactions can’t necessarily be automated, companies do have the power to streamline interactions, improve employee performance, and even eliminate repetitive tasks with automation. It’s little wonder countless CCaaS solutions and CRMs now come with their own automation tools already baked in.
The use cases for contact center automation are more versatile than most people would think. When many companies consider automating the contact center, they focus on concepts like self-service and bots. However, with new low-code and no-code workflow solutions rapidly entering the market, there’s virtually no limit to what companies can enhance and streamline.
Self-Service
Perhaps the most obvious use case for automation is to provide consumers with a way of addressing issues without agent support. Self-service has become a must-have for many brands in recent years, allowing companies to reduce the strain on agents while also serving customers in the quickest, most efficient manner. According to some studies, self-service channels can even deliver higher first-contact resolution rates than agent-assisted alternatives.
Automated tools, enhanced with AI, can walk customers through the process of troubleshooting and resolving problems or completing specific actions. Contact centers can use these solutions to simplify transactions, respond to common questions, and effectively optimize the human workforce.
With self-service, both customers and employees benefit. Clients can access the information they need faster through conversational bots and IVR systems built to respond to human language. At the same time, business leaders can deflect calls and queries related to common concerns, leaving human agents to focus on the tasks which require their unique skills.
Forecasting and Scheduling
To deliver an excellent quality of service, companies need to ensure they have not only the right number of staff members available at any given time but also scheduling agents with the correct skills. This means taking advantage of all the available data in the workforce to forecast changes in demand and adhere to customer expectations.
Automated tools with added AI elements can sort through information about call volumes, channel requests, and employee schedules to suggest the best possible strategy for companies. The same solutions can also automatically manage time-off requests, making changes to schedules and ensuring shifts are covered when people need time off.
An automated ecosystem can reduce the amount of time business leaders and supervisors spend examining their workflows and setting up appropriate schedules. The right tools can even send instant notifications to the correct professionals when a change in schedule is required. For instance, if there’s a sudden peak in demand, the system might suggest hiring outsourced help.
Agent Assistance
Customers aren’t the only people who occasionally need help from automated systems. Just as bots and virtual assistants can help guide clients through complex scenarios, they can also be used to support team members wherever they are. Automated bots capable of offering help with everything from troubleshooting to password changes and data retrieval are becoming increasingly common.
In an environment where many employees are now working in distributed locations, thanks to the rise of hybrid and remote work, they don’t always have access to immediate support. Employees dealing with technical difficulties and common workplace problems can often lose productivity when waiting for a staff member to be available to assist them.
With an AI-powered automated solution, companies can provide their team members with a streamlined way to address critical workflow concerns in seconds. Automated tools can even make it easier for employees to complete tasks. For instance, bots can automatically surface information about a client during a call to ensure a more personalized interaction. According to some studies, AI-powered agent assistance could improve productivity by 25% by 2040.
Training and Coaching
Aside from helping employees to deal with immediate problems in their workflow, automated tools can also contribute to their continued education and growth. Companies can set up automated courses and webinars to assist employees with learning new skills or discovering how to use different tools implemented into the contact center.
Bots can also leverage data from business resources at the moment to provide employees with real-time coaching during conversations. For instance, a bot with Natural Language Processing and Understanding capabilities can detect the sentiment in a customer’s voice as they speak to an agent. Using this information can guide how to continue the conversation in a way that inspires higher satisfaction levels.
Automated tools can also be used to monitor the performance of each agent, and provide supervisors and managers with insights when team members appear to need additional assistance or support. The right tool could instantly notify a specialist when they need to step in and help with a call.
Quality Management
Around 59% of customers will abandon a company after just a few bad experiences. Poor experiences in the contact center can be caused by a range of factors, but one of the most common problems is bad call quality. No-one wants to deal with dropped signals, lag, or jittery audio on a call.
To stay ahead of this problem, many companies commit to regular quality analysis and reporting. However, these processes can be time consuming and expensive. Speech analytics tools with built-in automation capabilities can reduce the cost and effort of managing call quality.
The tools available today can even monitor call quality in real time and notify supervisors and technical professionals when drops in service are detected.
Lead Generation
Contact centers don’t just deal with managing customer queries and concerns; they’re also an important tool in the lead generation process too. For companies investing in campaigns to attract more calls and requests from their target audience, automation can be a phenomenal way to boost leads and opportunities.
Countless companies already use automation in their marketing strategies to ensure social media posts are delivered at the right time to a specific audience or send email broadcasts. However, there are countless other options available too. Automated chatbots can proactively reach out to a customer when they’re browsing a website and ask them questions about their needs.
The same automated tools can also set up conversations between customers and sales agents, using schedules and calendars to determine when a professional can take a call. Automated tools can even call prospective clients on behalf of contact centers, only passing calls to agents when they’re answered by a lead, reducing wasted time.
Data Collection and Entry
Automation in the contact center is a fantastic way to reduce the number of repetitive tasks employees need to complete each day. Aside from dealing with customer queries, agents often spend a significant amount of time on call wrap-up processes and data entry.
The more time it takes for an employee to collect the right data and input it into a CRM system, the less time they have to focus on answering calls or queries quickly. Automated tools can minimize this problem. An IVR system can automatically ask questions to collect customer data at the end of a call or prior to a conversation between a client and an agent.
The same solution can then immediately transmit the data into the appropriate integrated system, so it can be accessed later for reporting purposes. Not only does this form of automation save employees time, but it can reduce the risk of errors and inconsistencies in the data landscape too.
Summarizing Calls
While new forms of communication are emerging in the contact center, voice data is still one of the most commonly collected forms of data in this landscape. For compliance purposes, as well as training requirements, many companies use automation tools to record each conversation.
However, automation tools can do more than just record. The right solutions can automatically transcribe information into written text, so it’s easy to search through during audits and evaluations. They can also summarize calls to add notes to the CRM system.
Automated solutions can even be set up to improve compliance by automatically eliminating any personally identifiable information from recordings which might be used for training purposes.
Reducing Call Abandonment
Contact centers around the world are constantly dealing with the issue of call abandonment. When a customer fails to complete a call, it means businesses miss out on potential opportunities. What’s more, the higher a company’s call abandonment rate, the lower their satisfaction scores are likely to be. Automation can help here.
First, automated systems and bots can provide customers with insights into how long they’re likely to wait for a response, so they can decide whether to call back later. They can also direct customers to self-service and alternative help routes to give them more options. Automated tools can also arrange for “callbacks” when customers will be available to respond to an agent.
If a customer doesn’t want to wait around for a call to be answered, they can request a call-back as soon as an agent becomes available.
Business Intelligence
Finally, one of the most impressive use cases for contact center automation tools is the ability to leverage these services for improved business intelligence. Many of today’s AI-infused automation tools can collect data from multiple points within an omnichannel contact center, to provide companies with better insights into customer journeys and profiles.
Automated systems can search for patterns in customer queries, monitor sentiment, and even predict future customer behavior based on historical data. Tools embedded with machine learning can even take the information gathered by the contact center over time and use it to improve customer service scripts and bot responses automatically.
With the right automation tools, businesses can get a behind-the-scenes insight into what it might take to improve their contact center, without spending a fortune on data analysis.
