Contact centre automation offers an opportunity for organisations to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging innovations in customer experience technology to simplify workflows, reduce administration, and improve the accuracy and quality of interactions.
Innovations in Customer Experience technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are reshaping existing contact centre processes, so it is crucial organisations adopt contact centre automation technology or risk falling behind.
This article will provide you with insights into the core aspects of contact centre automation, the array of benefits and how you can start to implement automation technology today.
What is the Process of Automation?
Automation is the process of using technology to perform a task without the need for human intervention. In a contact centre, tasks that are automated are generally repetitive, time-consuming or mundane in nature, so there is an opportunity to use technology to perform these, freeing agents to concentrate on more complex tasks.
Why is Call Centre Automation Important?
Automating call centre processes can assist in improving the performance of a contact centre and help reduce costs, automate mundane tasks and create opportunities for customer self service.
The benefits of automation can be measured through key contact centre metrics such as:
- Average Handle Time
- First Call Resolution
- Grade of Service
- Customer Satisfaction
Benefits of Call Center Automation
If you’re looking to achieve automation across your call centre processes, here are several benefits:
Measure and Improve Customer Satisfaction
In an increasingly competitive business landscape, it is more important than ever to not just satisfy the needs of your customer, but to exceed them. To understand how your contact centre is performing, you can implement IVR workflow automations to measure and capture customer feedback. Call Centre automation workflows such as a post-call NPS survey can be triggered in an IVR workflow once a call with an agent has finished.
A customer can be asked to type in a rating on the dial pad between 1-10 to reflect their satisfaction and this is captured in the call centre reports. For ratings below a certain threshold, a customer can be asked to provide further feedback through a short voice message.
A call can then be automatically triggered in the contact centre dialler to give an agent a chance to improve the experience through customer engagement.
Reduce Operational Costs
For high volume contact centres, automation provides the opportunity to create customer self-service opportunities to reduce costs to serve.
Virtual agents are a powerful AI customer experience tool to serve customers at scale. In the call workflow, you can use Web Services Connectors to integrate information from your CRM or outage management platform into the IVR. When a call is made to the organisation, the customer’s identity can be verified, the Virtual agent can communicate the status of the delivery or service status and a personalised customer experience can be provided – all without the need for human intervention.
Provide 24/7 Customer Service
Human agents are generally rostered on for a limited number of hours throughout the day. Call Centre Automation presents the opportunity to service customers 24/7 without managing overtime payments and complex rostering arrangements.
Virtual Agents provide a cost-effective way of serving customers with information they need to self-serve without the need for human interaction. Advances in AI customer experience has resulted in improvement to the quality of Virtual Agents who now use natural language and possess synthetic voices that sound human-like to ensure the customer experience isn’t compromised.
Employee Engagement
Performing the same routine tasks everyday can result in an unmotivated workforce. Automating repetitive tasks through AI and robotic process automation can not only help you retain your skilled workers, but also elevate employee engagement. Outbound dialler technology can also be used to automate making phone calls to engage customers. Instead of manually typing in numbers, a dialler can be used to trigger a call and even automate call backs. Answering machine technology that automatically detects if a human has answered or a voicemail can also improve contact centre performance and enhance employee engagement so agents can spend more time talking to customers rather than listening to voicemail messages.
Minimise Human Error
There are many consequences that can eventuate from human error such as incurring costs, allocating resources to resolve the mistake and even customer churn. Human error can often be the result of a lack of agent training, ineffective procedures or boredom from performing repetitive tasks. Contact centre automation assists in fine-tuning internal processes and empowers more efficient operations. An example of this is using AI Summarisation to automatically record, transcribe and summarise customer calls. Once a call is completed, AI machine learning tools can ensure an accurate summary of the conversation is automatically updated in the CRM such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk or Microsoft Dynamics 365. AI technology such as this can lead to improved efficiencies and reduced human error.
Achieve a Higher First Call Resolution Rate
First Call Resolution (FCR) is a metric that indicates the effectiveness of your call centre agents in resolving customer enquiries the first time customers call. The common questions that customers call about that are resolved easily and quickly, should be automated through implementing self service. This approach contributes to a higher FCR and allows agents to have more time to solve complex customer issues and deliver a better customer experience.
Core aspects of call centre Automation
At the heart of it, call centre automation is designed to simplify and streamline various aspects of a business’s contact centre. If you’re looking to automate your contact centre operations, here are some of the common areas businesses choose to cover:
Call Scheduling Automation
Call centres can operate more efficiently through leveraging call scheduling automation tools. When customers request to receive a call back on a designated time and date, agents can select the disposition code ‘Call back’. Contact centre technology automates the process of calling the customer at the specified time and date selected by the agent.
Forecasting Automation
Contact centre technology collects data that forms insights into call centre performance and using innovations in ML, managers can automate and enhance the process of predicting future call centre activity. ML continuously learns from the data, recognises specific call patterns, and predicts smarter and faster than humans. Using ML to forecast future call activity will save management hours per week completing this manual task as part of the overall workforce management process.
Customer Interaction Automation
Automating customer interactions across multiple touchpoints based on pre-configured triggers will reduce manual efforts call centre agents are required to complete and improve operational efficiencies. For example, when agents are making outbound phone calls and cannot connect with a customer after a pre-determined number of times, an automated text or email is sent to the customer in a means to make contact. Moreover, if a customer is browsing your website, leverage the latest innovations in NLP and ML to create a chatbot that is configured to engage with a web visitor as they browse your website.
Workflow Operations Automation
Operational workflows can be prone to human agent error and often are time-consuming. Call Centre automation software such as Webhooks and triggers can be used to initiate an action and reduce manual handling. An example is automatically triggering an email to be sent after a call with a customer is completed. This could be sending an informational brochure after a sales call, or a confirmation email after a payment is made.
Sales and Marketing Automation
Contact centre software is often used by Sales and Marketing teams to perform tasks that are integral to their sales cycle. Automation capabilities extend to the seamless delivery of promotional emails and texts, along with other touchpoints throughout the customer journey including onboarding, upselling and after-purchase follow-ups.
Virtual Queuing Automation
Virtual queues are an alternative to physical lines. Virtual queuing technology alleviates any frustration customers can encounter when they are required to wait to be connected with an available service representative. Companies that implement virtual queues provide customers with freedom and flexibility to end the phone call and maintain their position within the queue, receiving an automatic call back when an agent is available to answer their enquiry.
SMS Automation
Automating outbound messaging is achievable by creating tailored SMS templates in response to certain customer actions. For example, a template can be designed to send customers an SMS after completing contact form on the website to inform the customer they can expect to receive a phone call shortly, helping to enhance the customer experience.
Pros and Cons of Automating Customer Interactions
Automation of customer interactions can help your organisation meet its service-level agreements (SLAs). If customers are required to be responded to within a set timeframe according to the SLAs, you can use automation to acknowledge a message has been received and even leverage automation to triage the enquiry to the right person.
A simple way of achieving this is through email and ticketing automation where an automated response can be triggered based on keywords or a ticket type.
AI can further enhance your automation capabilities. Many organisations are leveraging ML (machine-learning) powered chatbots to service customers or help with sales. The chatbot can be trained with specific industry data to ensure it provides accurate responses. Overtime, the chatbot learns more about customers and becomes more proficient at resolving issues or directing customer queries.
The challenge with AI automation tools is to ensure they are tuned for your operational needs and are maintained to meet customer expectations.
How to Integrate Call Center Automation
Call centre automation tools are incredibly helpful and can support businesses to improve their customer experiences. ipSCAPE enables businesses to operationalise AI and integrate automation across every step of their customer journey to improve efficiencies, elevate customer satisfaction and empower stronger agent performance.
Steps to Implement Call Center Automation:
Embrace a new era of innovation across your contact centre operations through leveraging ipSCAPE’s leading automation tools. You can seamlessly implement automation across your call centre with these tools that are natively available in the ipSCAPE Contact Centre platform:
Intelligent Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system:
Create an Intelligent IVR that understands who your customer is, what they might be enquiring about and serve them with personalised information. You can do this easily with ipSCAPE, which has integration capabilities such as APIs to bring customer information from your CRM platform into your contact centre.
Coupled with the power of AI Neural Voices, customers can effectively self-serve and receive a fast, personalised experience. As an example, customers can check their account balance, track their order status and resolve other standard queries without the need for human intervention.
Auto outbound dialler:
Say goodbye to spending unnecessary time manually dialling. ipSCAPE’s advanced outbound dialler automates the outreach process through alleviating any manual effort to dial a customer’s phone number. When an agent is available, ipSCAPE’s outbound dialler will automatically dial the contact number and call the customer, which helps increase the volume of completed calls and improve agent productivity.
Call transcription & summarisation:
Harness the power of AI to transcribe and summarise customer conversations. When evaluating the efficiency of your contact centre, post-call administrative tasks are often identified as an area for improvement. ipSCAPE’s post-call summarisation feature improves agent productivity by automatically transcribing, summarising and synchronising call details into the customer’s record in the CRM. AI summarisation is available for popular CRM platforms including Salesforce and ServiceNow. This automation tool leverages Microsoft’s Azure AI services for accurate summary generation, eliminating the need for agents to take manual notes throughout each interaction.
Automatic SMS and Email:
Automate the process of sending customers an email or SMS using ipSCAPE’s smart wrap codes. Managers can create email and SMS templates for different customer communications such as a welcome message, promotional offer, or to follow-up. Call centre agents can simply select the relevant wrap code which will trigger the SMS or email to be delivered to the customer. This function automates post-call actions and reduces administration for agents, removing repetitive tasks and thereby increasing job satisfaction.
Automation in cloud contact centre software is constantly evolving and sometimes it can be difficult to keep up. If you’d like to discover how you can leverage the latest innovations in contact centre automation into your customer experiences, contact us to find out how ipSCAPE’s award-winning software can help.
ipSCAPE enables organisations to create incredible customer experiences through a powerful, easy-to-use platform that provides access to the communication channels of today and the future.
AI technology is embedded within the application to make it accessible for all organisations to create customer journeys that better serve customers, increase sales and deliver operational efficiencies.
Organisations use ipSCAPE’s communication technology platform to unlock growth by building personalised communication with customers at scale, through their channel of choice.