Contact Center Automation is the biggest necessity for every business. In short, every business which doesn't want to fall behind the competition needs it. Here, we will talk about contact center automation and its importance. Besides, we will talk about the key trends in contact center automation technology. So, let’s dig deeper.
If you want to see your business growing leaps and bounds, then contact center automation can help you. It is the first necessity of today’s businesses. Gone are the days, when people were skeptical about using automation. Now, everyone has better understood its usability and importance.
What is Contact Center Automation?
The ever-evolving technology is bringing huge changes in businesses. Also, technology has revolutionized the businesses’ approach to the customers. Customer Satisfaction is the priority of every business. And they need to do it with scale. And this can be achieved using contact center automation.
Contact Center Automation means using technology advances that will automate the process and lead to providing exceptional customer service. For example, brands may use voice biometrics, AI-driven conversational tools like voice bots and chatbots, smart IVRs, speech analytics for in-call and post-call analysis, and forecasting tools. These form an integral part of an excellent customer service team.
Potential Uses of Automation in Contact Centers
The use of automation in contact centers has increased rapidly. It has several potential uses in call centers and contact centers. For Example,
- Companies offer interactive outbound dialers and voice responses using automation.
- Smart IVR and CRM integrations to provide personalization and a higher IVR containment rate.
- Smart routing of inbound interactions with automatic call distribution.
- Agent assistant provides the best response to the query and helps the agent in up-selling and cross-selling too
Contact centers are implementing this technology rapidly and we observe a growing trend. Without any doubt, they are getting the best results. Some of its best results to businesses include:
- Automation functionality in Contact centers reduces customers’ wait times.
- It resolves customers’ issues faster.
- Plus, it improves KPIs in call centers, average handle time, queue time, and response time.
- As a result, companies get satisfied and loyal customers indicated by CSAT scores.
Benefits of Contact Center Automation
Providing improved services at the lowest cost is the driving force behind accelerated investments in automation. So, increasing efficiency at a lower cost is one of the main benefits. Besides, some of its other significant benefits include: -
1 Provides Loyal Customers:
Customers get immediate responses to their queries through automation. Hence, it builds trust for your services among customers. As a result, customers preference and customer advocacy build up.
2 Offer Revenue Opportunities:
Every business wants to earn more revenue. Besides, it also wants to lower the cost. Here, AI-driven automation makes your services efficient. In turn, it enhances customer satisfaction and that too without increasing the overall costs. Consequently, your business gets huge opportunities to earn revenue and profit. For example, if customers have to wait for long hours to get their queries solved, it damages your reputation. Further, such customers don’t come again to your business which results in revenue losses. Another use case of increasing revenue opportunity is using bots for collection calls. Lending companies and subscription-based businesses need to regularly follow up with their clients for payments. Voice bots solutions are very efficient as they can repeatedly follow up with clients and nudge them towards payment and increase the revenue!
3 Boost Contact Center Efficiency:
Automation can boost the efficiency of the contact center on a large scale. For example, it reduces average handle time that brings efficiency to your business. Here, AHT, or average handle time means the time taken by a human agent to handle a customer’s query. More than that, smart IVRs can improve the IVR containment rate and reduce the calls getting connected to agents.
4 Enhance Customer Satisfaction:
Contact center automation technology uses a combination of smart processes and natural language processing to handle customer queries. It links backend data/systems and customers to provide an immediate solution. Also, automation with omnichannel integration provides the customer access to their preferred channels and agents the understanding of the customer journey. Undoubtedly, it helps contact centers to enhance customer satisfaction and get more customers.
Key Trends in Contact Center Automation Technology in 2022
The implementation of automation technology in contact centers is accelerating. Moreover, it is going to be implemented even more rapidly in 2022. Contact centers use a variety of technologies to provide cost-effective and valuable support to their customers.
We have mentioned the key trends in contact center automation that businesses will be adopted in 2022:
1 Use of Machine Learning:
Today, businesses are striving hard to build deep learning systems by tapping into customers’ data. It will enable them to create personalized products and services based on their customers’ preferences. As a result, it will help them to get customers for a lifetime. A study says that almost 57 percent of consumers like to share personal data with businesses that send personalized discounts, products, and offers.
This is possible by analyzing the customer data and then running various ML models to create the right recommendation. However, there is more usage of ML in contact centers.
Call forecasting is a very useful application as it helps the supervisor / Team lead to be aware of the agent's requirement factoring on shrinkage. To know more you can read our blog
2 More Use of Conversational AI:
Nowadays, almost every major tech company is investing significantly in advancing natural language generation (NLG) and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies. Even many promising startups are investing in these technologies. The reason is only to automate conversations easily and make them more natural a.k.a Conversational AI.
Conversation AI has reduced waiting time for customers. Besides, they get more done in less time. For example, an intelligent virtual agent helps customers file any claim effortlessly, allowing them to talk, text, and tap along with uploading the documents. It is very important to know the context of the discussion and switch within the context. For example, the customer is inquiring about his travel dates and when he asks about the travel documents, the bot should understand that it is in the context of the travel dates and not ask again about the travel dates.
3 Robotic Process Automation:
Robotic process automation is delivering cost-saving and effective solutions to companies associated with customer services. Also, it is solving technological challenges. For example, RPA is playing a vital role in automating a variety of small and everyday tasks. These tasks may include checking order status, opening cases, record updates, set disposition, etc.
RPA has a zero percent error rate. Plus, it enables the customer service agent to integrate data into all associated systems and fields with only one entry. As a result, it reduces handle times significantly and enhances overall customer satisfaction.
4 Real-time Conversational Analytics:
Real-time conversational analytics is helpful for organizations to assess agents’ performance and customer feedback. It helps them to collect real-time insights into customers’ preferences and experiences. Such analytics are able to provide insights about the customer behavior and potential customer churn
5 Intelligent Call Routing:
While the classical way of call routing is rule-based and designed to connect the call with the right skilled agent. With the power of AI, the future of call routing is not limited to the reason of call but matching the right agent with several other parameters like call complexity, agents score, customers accent (not just language), lifetime value, and other parameters as relevant to the business. So, with efficient matchmaking, the right agent can bring out the best experience for the customer and significantly improve the CSAT.
6 Agent Assistant:
The entire workforces fielding the customer request need an assistant to help them. The knowledge base contains most of the FAQs. But that is not enough. The agent assistant can understand the intent of the call or mail and is able to provide suggestions that can help the agent quickly get the links or proper canned response that the agent can use during the conversation.
Conclusion:
Overall, the wide use of automation technology in the contact centers is going to establish new service models. Besides, it reshapes the definition of customer experience by transforming it. Moreover, the stress on the employee will reduce. It enables them to focus solely on customer issues.
