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Contact Center Automation is quickly changing the way businesses engage with customers and how customers experience service. Using conversational AI, natural language processing, machine learning, and big data, Contact Center Automation enables machines and humans to converse in a human-like way, while relieving agents of monotonous tasks that have contributed to growing attrition rates.
The benefits of Contact Center Automation are experienced more and more every day as customers engage with effective machines that offer far better experiences than the Interactive Voice Responders (IVRs) of the early 2000s.
For contact centers, automation is changing the game when it comes to providing faster, more accurate, and more scalable service without having to add agents or contract with a business process outsourcing (BPO) provider. Contact Center Automation reduces total customer service costs while giving customers easy, fast, 24/7 access to customer service without having to wait on hold.
If you’re a contact center looking at adding Contact Center Automation to your roadmap, here’s a look at seven of the top benefits you can expect:
- Improved customer experience
- Automated scalability
- Reduced costs
- 24/7 accessibility
- Improved First Contact Resolution
- Increased agent engagement and productivity
- More powerful data
Improved customer experience
The most significant benefit of Contact Center Automation is improved customer experience — a core goal of every contact center.
More and more brands are losing customers by simply making them wait. Almost two-thirds of surveyed consumers are only willing to wait two minutes or less before hanging up. By deploying Contact Center Automation, contact centers reduce or eliminate wait times. This creates an immediate uptick in how fast customers receive service and delivers an easy, convenient option to solve their issue without having to rely on agent availability.
For complex issues, Contact Center Automation can transfer customers to an agent — serving up a complete transcript of the conversation to the agent, so customers don’t need to repeat themselves.
Although we’ve gotten used to speaking in keywords or selecting from a limited menu when interacting with self-service options, it’s not a great experience. Just think of the last time you interacted with an IVR. Contact Center Automation enables customers to talk or write in natural language, rather than feel like they’re “talking to a robot.”
Contact Center Automation also integrates with any CRM, allowing it to deliver a more personalized experience from the moment it responds to the customer. With over 60% of consumers saying they’ll likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience, personalization can help contact centers turn into revenue generators.
Automated scalability
Contact Center Automation gives leaders an unlimited capacity, which adds the ability to scale customer service up or down based on customer demand. This reduces contact centers’ need to add staff, increase shifts, or outsource — all expensive or slow ways of scaling.
Contact Center Automation responds to every customer immediately, no matter how many customer requests there are. Contact centers are afforded the ability to handle both anticipated and unpredictable spikes in customer demand. This elasticity is central to the modern contact center’s ability to respond in an unpredictable world and is a key component to business continuity.
Reduced costs
Another key benefit that contact centers get from Contact Center Automation is the ability to serve more customers than ever, while also lowering costs — an unprecedented opportunity in the customer service industry. Most Contact Center Automation solutions cost significantly less than outsourcing or adding staff. In fact, Contact Center Automation can cost just 45% of a highly optimized BPO provider. Additionally, you only pay for the service you use. When request volumes are slow, you don’t have to pay employee wages or BPO fees for unused agent capacity.
Contact Center Automation also has minimal training costs. And if you choose a Contact Center Automation provider that continuously improves its AI, you’ll be assured that your solution will evolve as the field of AI does too — further extending your ROI.
24/7 accessibility
Customers want to be able to contact brands when and where they choose, but staffing agents 24/7 is expensive. Contact Center Automation enables you to offer around-the-clock service globally, without needing to expand shifts or staff.
Because Contact Center Automation is capable of resolving over 90% of tier 1 issues (repetitive, common requests like “where is my order?”), it reduces the amount of issues that require an agent call-back. With Contact Center Automation, customers are able to resolve issues immediately over any channel and in any language, no matter what time of day or night the need arises.
Improved First Contact Resolution
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a key metric that’s used to determine how well businesses are meeting customer needs. Many contact centers use FCR as their primary performance indicator or track it as part of their customer experience metrics, and they’re constantly trying to improve their FCR.
Customers want their issues resolved in as few interactions as possible. If you can resolve a customer’s issue the first time they contact you, they’re more likely to feel positive about the experience. Contact Center Automation can increase your FCR since it fully resolves common issues and doesn’t deflect customers to an agent or another service channel like FAQ pages.
Increased agent engagement and productivity
Agents often handle the same call type hundreds of times per shift. Routine, transactional issues take up the majority of their time and, frankly, zap their enthusiasm for the job. In fact, repetitive work is one of the top three reasons for agent attrition. Contact Center Automation frees agents from the routine work and gives them more time to draw on their empathy, creativity, and problem-solving skills to address more complex issues.
Additionally, contact centers can refocus and retrain agents to perform higher-value activities. This includes upselling, cross-selling, and performing high-touch outbound proactive service, such as calling customers about late payments or notifying them of special discounts. Repositioning agents to perform higher value work can make their jobs more fulfilling, open them to better development opportunities, and improve retention.
More accurate data collection
Contact Center Automation can capture data more accurately and comprehensively than humans. By automatically tagging conversations and transcribing every word of voice and text conversations, Contact Center Automation unlocks an incredible amount of customer data and insights. Companies can use this data to identify trends and run targeted campaigns. Better data collection also translates to better customer experiences, as Contact Center Automation gives businesses the power to understand customer interactions in a deeper way.
The benefits of Contact Center Automation build a strong business case for why companies are rapidly adopting the solution in some capacity. The unique improvements in customer experience, first contact resolution, cost savings, and scalability can only be realized by adding Contact Center Automation to your contact center’s toolkit.
Try Replicant
If you are ready to automate your call center, reach out to Replicant today. Our team of experts has years of experience helping contact centers implement and integrate conversational AI platforms to improve their call center efficiency as well as customer and agent experience.
