Over the last couple of years, the customer experience landscape has drastically evolved. Customers have found themselves interacting with businesses across a wider range of platforms, and they expect more from each transaction with a company.
At the same time, businesses are dealing with an evolving workplace defined by remote and hybrid teams and changing regulatory requirements. The only way to survive in this complex CX environment, for most brands, is to invest in the right technology.
Automation represents one of the most powerful tools for the customer experience environment today. Not only do the right workflows and automations help companies to serve their customers faster, but they can also improve productivity and enhance customer satisfaction scores. Let’s look at some of the top reasons companies should be investing in automation for CX in 2022.
1. Improved Employee Productivity
McKinsey, Gartner, and countless other analysts looking at automation as a disruptive environment for the future of customer service highlight the benefits of automated workflows on productivity. In the modern contact center environment, employees are under huge amounts of pressure to handle a high number of tasks on a daily basis.
Automation can help to minimise or remove some of the repetitive tasks on an employee’s to-do list, so team members can focus more on the challenges which require their focus and expertise. For instance, in an outbound contact center, an automated system can dial numbers and only pass calls across to a sales professional when the phone is answered.
In an inbound call center, automated systems can support teams in a range of different tasks. For instance, you can set up an automated system to automatically record certain calls and store information in the CRM and customer database for later access. This reduces the amount of admin team members need to do each day.
2. Better Time to Resolution
Speed is crucial in any customer experience environment. Today’s customers want immediate, convenient responses to their questions, and fast solutions to their problems. In fact, according to Forrester, 77% of customers say showing their time value is the best thing brands can do to provide good service. Through automation, companies can provide their CX agents with the tools they need to become more efficient and deliver faster resolution times.
For instance, an automated system in a contact center could route a call to an agent based on their experience dealing with a certain topic, or automatically send a customer to an agent who has dealt with their case before. The same automated system could immediately surface information about a customer from the CRM and contact centre database to provide the agent with contextual information to help them respond accurately to the call.
Automated systems can even use things like natural language processing to detect keywords and phrases in a conversation and deliver relevant information from a company’s knowledge base straight to the CX agent, so they can reduce the amount of time they spend searching for solutions.
3. Enhanced Management and Organization
In a rapidly evolving business environment, organising and managing CX tasks is becoming increasingly complex. Not only do companies need a way to align and classify requests and calls from a range of different platforms and systems, but they need to keep track of hybrid employees distributed in a host of environments too.
Automation can be a valuable tool in boosting the productivity and performance of management teams, by allowing them to create more effective workflows for customer service. Automated data categorization tools take the guesswork out of what the customer needs and automatically assigns issue tags to incoming support requests. Automated systems can even assign a priority level to each ticket in a helpdesk to determine which issue should be addressed first.
At the same time, automated solutions can assist companies with keeping track of their workforce, helping with everything from managing shift patterns, to keeping business leaders aware of changes in the flow of work among hybrid employees.
4. Access to Self-Service Solutions
When the promise of automation first begun to emerge in the CX landscape, many CX team members were concerned that their roles would be wiped out by bots. However, in recent years, we’ve discovered adding automated elements to CX environments can actually improve experiences for both customers and employees alike.
With automated bots and IVR tools that can collect information for a customer and solve problems in seconds, customers have access to convenient self-service opportunities. Around 55% of customers today say they prefer to use a chatbot to provide support for specific issues. Automating the resolution of various issues will ensure your customers can get solutions to their problems faster.
At the same time, self-service solutions remove some of the extra pressure on your employees to deal with consistent and repetitive issues. This means team members can focus on the tasks which require the most creativity, empathy, and input from them. Self-service solutions simultaneously make your company more competitive and help your teams.
5. Improved Understanding of your Customers
Automation isn’t just a great way to deliver information to your customers or support your employees. The right tools can also power important business decisions too. For instance, with an automated system for collecting and managing data, you can gather a better understanding of your target audience, and how they interact with your brand through multiple channels.
Companies can use automation in omnichannel contact centers to gather insights into their customers and create more in-depth profiles for each client. These profiles make it easier to understand and improve the customer journey, while also allowing brands to offer more personalized experiences to clients. Data automation systems can even be aligned with AI tools which assess the patterns in your customer service strategy and provide insights on how to improve satisfaction levels.
With the right automated tools, companies can innovate faster, make more intelligent decisions, and even improve their compliance. While you’re automating the collection of information, you can also determine exactly where data is stored.
As a tool for productivity and customer satisfaction, automation is leading the way for CX initiatives in 2022.
