What Is Contact Center Automation?
Contact center automation uses advanced technologies such as chatbots, interactive voice response and speech recognition to automate and execute routine customer interaction and support processes. Streamlining processes with automation reduces costs, improves efficiency and enhances customer satisfaction. Contact center automation can help you provide excellent support with quick, helpful and personalized service.
Benefits Of Contact Center Automation
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Automation has the power to transform the customer experience. When you respond to your customer's questions quickly and efficiently, you can change their perception of your business.
Here’s how:
Quick Resolution: Contact center automation can make your workflows more effective. It reduces the need for manual processing, which decreases hold times. Automated systems can work with interactive voice response systems (IVR) to collect information. This speeds up the process before the agent interacts with the customer.
Offer 24/7 Support: Your automated systems can work around the clock without human intervention. Customers located in different time zones or needing support outside working hours can access the support they need with automated support.
Consistent Support: A consistent customer experience allows you to build greater trust. Whenever clients contact you, they will receive the same level of support. Automated systems follow specific rules and protocols and eliminate the risk of human error. This ensures the same level of service for every customer.
Increased Agent Productivity
Routine inquiries, questions and tasks often take valuable time away from your contact center agents. By automating routine tasks like data entry or authentication, you can reduce agent workload. Thus, they can focus on tasks that require a human touch, such as problem-solving and empathy.
Increase Employee Satisfaction
Agent work can be demanding, but automation can make their roles easier. Customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and increased access to tools make agent work easier. This ensures more pleasant interactions, consistent call volumes, and reduced call handling times.
Automated Scalability
Things can change quickly within a contact center, and automation can help you adapt. Cloud-based contact center solutions allow you to scale up or down easily to meet your contact center demands. With automation, you can rapidly adjust IVR scripts or integrate new automation technology, such as chatbots or speech recognition. Operational disruptions are minimal.
Accurate Data Collection
Capturing data is essential in using it to derive insights and make strategic decisions. However, you want this data to be as accurate as possible. Compared to humans, automation can capture data more precisely and thoroughly. This can include gathering customer data, measuring results, transcribing conversations, etc.
Technologies Used In Contact Center Automation
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): IVR is a technology that answers incoming calls. It interacts with the caller to understand the reason for the call. It does this through voice prompts and touch-tone responses.
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD): After the caller has interacted with the IVR system, ACD technology will distribute the call. ACD is a telephony technology that automatically routes callers to the right department or agent based on predefined criteria.
Call Queuing: Once the ACD distributes the call, call queuing takes place. Call queue technology places inbound callers into a queue or virtual line. This automation ensures that caller's queries are answered quickly and effectively with minimal wait times.
Chatbots: Chatbots are computer programs that simulate conversations with users. Chatbots can understand your client's intentions and perform tasks they were programmed to do.
7 Key Types of Call Center Automation
Automated Customer Interactions
Customers today want to have quick responses that are efficient and helpful. Automating responses to routine inquiries and enabling self-service through IVR and chatbots can free up agents. This allows them to focus on complex tasks that require human interaction. With this, you increase customer satisfaction, increase agent satisfaction and decrease costs.
Forecasting Automation
Your contact center has accumulated lots of current and historical data. Forecasting automation uses trends from that data to predict your contact center activities and performance. For instance, forecasts can predict call volumes during specific periods and allow you to prepare better.
Workflow Automation
Routine tasks and activities can consume a lot of valuable time, and repetitive work is more prone to human error. Workflow automation can automatically perform those repetitive tasks without error or human involvement. Workflow automation can eliminate tasks such as entering data, sending emails and notifications, generating routine reports, and more.
Sales and Marketing Automation
Automating parts of your sales and making process can benefit your business. It allows you to build stronger relationships with customers, shorten the sales cycle, and ultimately drive more revenue. You can automate routine tasks such as SMS or email campaign with sales offers, follow-up with prospects, and more. Automated tasks enable you to accomplish these tasks quickly and contact more people than if you were to do them manually.
Scheduling Automation
Proper time management, scheduling and planning are essential for contact centers. And no matter the size of your contact center, scheduling can be complex and time-consuming. Automating schedules and calendars can increase time management efficiency. This can prevent double bookings and the need for more skilled agents.
SMS Automation
Take advantage of the quick and efficient nature of SMS. SMS automation can engage with customers after they’ve performed an action. For instance, if reaches out for support, an SMS message can be automated to determine if they are satisfied with the support they received. This can also be used to send appointment reminders, account balances, promotional offers and more.
What Is The ROI Of Contact Center Automation?
The ROI of contact center automation will vary depending on what processes you implement and how. But without a doubt, significant savings and revenue growth can be achieved by implementing automation your contact center.
Reduction of Operating Costs
Automation of contact center processes and operations, self-service options, and chatbots can reduce operating costs by 30-60%.
Reduced Labor Costs
Automating manual tasks and processes reduces the need for human intervention and, in turn, your labor costs. You can use automation to handle things like data entry. You can also use chatbots and automated email responses to handle routine inquiries reducing the need for staff.
Reduction of Customer Churn
Automation is an incredibly useful tool to reduce churn. Automated notifications, reminders, promotions, and more can help prevent customer issues and retain a loyal customer base. By offering a better customer experience, you will have higher levels of satisfied customers who are less likely to churn.
Increase In Sales
Automation has the power to take over repetitive and manual processes, so you can redirect agents' efforts to revenue-generating opportunities. They can also be used to automate and push large-scale marketing and sales efforts.
