Automation has emerged as one of the most valuable tools in any contact centre.
Capable of improving employee productivity (and engagement), reducing inefficiencies in the workplace, and boosting customer experience; automation can offer phenomenal value.
As such, it is no surprise that call centre automation is the third most common AI use case across the enterprise – according to a 2021 Mckinsey & Company study.
Yet, there are many ways to automate the call centre. It is not only chatbots and simplifying desktop processes for agents.
With this in mind, here are ten top-notch contact centre automation tactics to consider.
1. Contact Automation
Contact automation is one of the most common ways to leverage automation in the contact centre. Essentially, it involves using chatbots and voicebots to interact with consumers across a variety of different channels. A modern, AI-enhanced bot can detect customer sentiment, understand intent, and use its understanding of customer needs to guide consumers towards the right self-service solution or human agent.
Businesses can build these self-service solutions into the bot itself, delivering self-service functionality to consumers, speeding the path to resolution, and reducing the overall strain on team members.
2. Pre-Call Automation
Knowledge is power in the contact centre. The more information an agent has about a customer, their previous purchases, and even the conversations they’ve already had with the service team, the better. Automation tools in the IVR – or embedded into a voicebot – can collect information about a client for the agent as the customer waits to be served.
As a result, by the time the agent answers a call or message, they’ll have all the contextual data they need to handle the query and personalise the service experience, as well as removing duplication questioning – such as ‘how may I help you today?’ – as the agent already has the answer.
3. Desktop Automation
A significant percentage of a contact centre agent’s time is spent performing various actions on a desktop. They need to copy-paste information from one environment, such as a screen or an additional piece of technology/software, to another, launch applications like CRM systems to check into customer profiles, and run troubleshooting tasks.
Implementing automated workflows to tackle these tasks on the behalf of agents has a number of benefits. It streamlines the process of serving a customer, allowing for faster issue resolution, while also allowing agents to focus on the conversation at hand.
4. Agent Assistance
Most companies look at automation as a tool for improving customer experience, but it is often a valuable factor in enhancing employee experiences too.
Agent-assist technologies are an excellent example, acting as a personal assistant to employees, performing tasks in the background to make human agents more efficient and productive.
Effectively, they are bots designed to support the agent experience. If integrated with tools throughout the CX ecosystem, they can dive into various applications to proactively feed information to agents in real-time.
In doing so, the tool may automatically surface information about a product when its name is mentioned or provide next-step suggestions to employees dealing with complex issues. This enhances agent productivity and enables them to focus on the call itself.
5. Post-Call Automation
Part of running a successful contact centre is making sure agents can focus the majority of their time on serving customers, rather than dealing with administrative work. However, every contact centre has a certain level of “after call work” to complete. They need to create call summaries, add information to CRM profiles, and enter contact dispositions.
Automating this work ensures agents can more rapidly move from one call to the next, cutting down call queues and agent handling times. It can also reduce the number of errors made in administrative tasks as staff members often attempt to rush through data input processes. An example being AI being used to identify call themes and topics and then pre-fill call reason codes, and with more detail than would reasonably be required for an agent.
6. Automated Outreach
Finding the time to perform customer outreach activities is difficult as contact volumes continue to rise. Yet, dropping them altogether leads to lost opportunities.
Luckily, AI tools can handle some of the outreach tasks on an employee’s behalf. One example, perhaps, is when an agent must send a confirmation email after a customer conversation. Contact centres can automate this, so they can fulfil the task in a matter of clicks, instead of typing out an entire email. Another use case could be around fault fixing, with AI being adapted to qualify the contact before connecting to an agent.
Such use cases provide customers with the information they need, while employees have more time to focus on other tasks.
7. Quality Assurance Automation
As CX continues to stand out as a key differentiator for any brand, business leaders need to ensure their teams are offering a consistent quality of experience across every channel. Quality assurance automation tools can assist with ensuring the business is living up to expectations.
These tools harness speech analytics to score the value of a call for each agent across all customer conversations and can also check for compliance and/or regulatory statements. In doing so, supervisors can immediately determine which employees are delivering the best service experiences, and which may need additional training.
8. Coaching Automation
Customer expectations are evolving all the time, meaning employees need regular training and support to continue delighting clients. Contact centre automation tools can help ensure each employee gets the support they need. For instance, they can collect valuable performance statistics from each employee and feed them back to supervisors to guide training decisions.
Some tools can even use machine learning and voice analytics to provide agents with advice on how to manage complex issues in calls in real-time, reducing the risk of customer churn.
9. WFM Automation
Using various algorithms and artificial intelligence tools, companies can use automation to make their workplace more productive and efficient. WFM tools are an excellent example, using historical information to predict changes in contact volumes, and automate schedule changes in line with the latest forecasting data.
10. Reporting Automation
Finally, to consistently optimise and improve customer service, business leaders need to consistently collect information about their consumers and employees. Automation tools can assist with collecting and curating all the right information for better decision-making.
Such information includes everything from customer sentiment to trends in customer requests, so companies can determine how they need to adapt and improve their service strategies. Some tools can even convert complex data into easy-to-follow visual reports.
Visit Sabio Group’s website if you’re eager to learn more about contact centre AI and automation technologies.
