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.