Contact centers support customer interactions across various channels, including phone calls, email, webchat, and interactive voice response (IVR). An organization’s plans to increase sales, service standards, customer satisfaction, and the company’s bottom line require them to be ahead in applying technology and operational strategy.
Today’s consumers want more convenience and speed to call resolution and outcome. It’s time to streamline the processes and service model to offer that to the customer by leveraging Hyperauomation and advanced capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Hyperautomation and AI-driven chatbots enables contact centers to provide optimal customer service while shifting human agents to assist with more complex situations
Self-service options remain one of the top opportunity areas for contact center automation. According to Forrester, the average cost of a live agent chat is $6-$12 per interaction vs. automated interactions costing around $0.25. With the right level of self-service offerings, businesses have now freed up those agents to provide value to a customer that only a human can provide.. Having humans and computers working in tandem is the Workforce of the Future, and results in reducing operational costs, improving customer experience, and enhancing the employee experience.
1. How Contact Center Automation and AI can be Leveraged AI-Powered Agent Dashboard: Instead of navigating multiple systems to look up the caller’s details, provide your agents with an AI-powered customer data and insights dashboard. This will help lay a good foundation for agents to work intelligently and provide personalized service to the customer during the call. Doing so will create a positive impact on your brand and bottom line.
2. AI-Powered Call Routing: Conversational AI does a better job routing the calls than a traditional IVR as it understands the reason for the call, collects required information, and then routes it to the right agent. This allows the agents to have more data on the basis for customers’ calls which is very important as the majority of the customers expect agents to know who they are by the time they answer the call. This improves the first contact resolution rate, creates fewer transfers, increases agent productivity, and increases customer experience.
3. AI-Powered IVR Software: Complicated and time-consuming IVR menus don’t work well with today’s customer base. AI-powered IVR systems enable natural interaction and provide a better experience to the customer.
4. RPA-Powered Contact Center Agents: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can assist contact center agents in helping reduce errors, improve compliance, speed up the work, and improve customer experience. Attended RPA is launched by agents during their workflow of activities and is primarily targeted towards front office activities. At the same time, unattended RPA runs scheduled back-office activities that are highly manual and repetitive, such as invoice processing, claim processing, etc. RPA is a powerful tool to optimize the headcount and make agents more effective.
5. Embrace Omni-Channel: A strong omnichannel offering is highly recommended to serve a wide range of customer bases. It is vital to ensure that the voice channel is consistent with other channels such as chatbot, social, web, mobile, etc., to break the siloed approach and provide an integrated experience to the agent and customer.
Meet the Customer where they are: Customers want to engage with companies in the method that best works for them. Some customers want to use a mobile-friendly chatbot while sitting on a couch at home, others want to engage on social media, and all of these customers are expecting the same level of service regardless of the channel. Ensure the human-to-human channel’s voices are the same as the other digital channels, breaking the siloed approach and providing a world-class experience to both the customer and the agent.
Overall, automation and AI can be effectively leveraged in modernizing the contact center activities so agents can focus on higher-value activities creating a more personalized experience for the customer. Learn more about Contact Center Automation by watching the webinar, “Choose your Path to Hyperation: Contact Center Edition.”
