Considerations When Optimizing Your Operations with Contact Center Automation

In a world and time where a customer’s perception of your company can make or break its entire image, it is paramount to work towards providing them with a phenomenal experience. More and more companies are thinking along the lines of contact center automation to optimize their operations. New technologies like voice biometrics, interactive voice response (IVR and IVA), chatbots, desktop automation, and speech and data analytics powered by AI are being leveraged by front-line customer support teams.

By integrating these emerging innovations into their voice process, companies may reevaluate how they give customer support, ensuring that they are doing it at the highest level possible while making better use of all their available resources, including live operators.

What Is Contact Center Automation?

Automation is becoming essential for managing direct interactions with customers successfully, and for improving decision support tools for your agents. Contact center automation manages calls more effectively, improves average answering speed, boosts FCR (First Call Resolution) while reducing customer effort, and manages other crucial contact center metrics. This ultimately aids call centers in automating time-consuming and repetitive processes and enhancing customer experience.

Things to Consider Before Automating Your Contact Center

Let’s look at five approaches when optimizing your operations with an automated call center.

Set Achievable Goals

It is imperative to fully sort out what you ultimately aim to achieve through automation, especially if you are looking to optimize relationship-building or tactical work. Some organizations may wish to achieve superior quality with fewer financial mistakes with regard to phone calls or other tasks. Others may want to accelerate production while reducing costs and providing their employees with more time to build strong relationships with their customers.

Ensure Employees Have Suitable Skill Sets

It is essential that you don’t overlook your staff or how technology affects them, even though you might be preoccupied with expenses, production, quality, and speed. Decide whether automation may make their tasks easier or more complicated. This may require modifications in the job descriptions for new employees as well as training on how to use the automation to improve your contact center services and customer experience. Many people are unfamiliar with automation, so it’s crucial to explain to your front-line personnel its advantages and how it improves customer experience as well as improves their quality, time to serve, etc.

Simplify Complex Tasks

Process automation and outsourcing business partners can help you take the processes one step at a time. For example, when receiving a phone call from a customer a few elements may occur throughout that contact. If you dissected the process, it may be possible to automate at least one phase. You don’t have to resolve the entire issue before you can go on. By automating certain phases in a process, you can begin to reduce expenses and experience productivity increases.

Choose the Appropriate Tools and Programs

To make optimization work for you, you will be collaborating with various engineers and designers when creating your AI software. Irrespective of if it is a single channel or omnichannel contact center, they must be equipped with the knowledge of your industry, market, business, and its operations, and the purpose or end goal you want to achieve. They must also be provided with all the supporting documents and given time to review them all in detail. All your desired goals are achievable, however, the decision to choose a certain automated call center software depends on the nature of your business and goals.

Conclusion

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, automation was adopted as something nice to have. The pandemic exposed the gaps in digital transformation and businesses realized that the existing resources were insufficient. The processes could not scale to cater to the surging customer demand.

It is now apparent that contact center automation and digital intelligence are the only solutions. If you want to expand your market share, improve operational efficiency, and increase profitability, for a long term. Today, BPO services are already going through a digital revolution – from data entry to full customer relationship management – with the capacity to coordinate and customize the end-to-end user experience during any time and on any platform. Now, investment in AI has become essential going from a need-based project to a full-fledged commercial necessity.