Over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX, according to Gartner research. This means that having an effective contact center is your primary tool in achieving and sustaining a long-term competitive advantage.
And the key to a winning contact center is transforming the agent and supervisor experience to empower these roles to service your customers more effectively.
While there are many techniques that can be used to make your contact center more efficient, one of the most powerful of these is contact center automation.
What Is Contact Center Automation?
Contact center automation refers to the use of technology, such as AI and machine learning, to streamline and enhance customer service operations, reducing the need for human intervention.
It includes features like automated call routing, chatbots, and voice recognition systems to improve efficiency and customer experience.
Perhaps more critically, it includes internal automations – that empowers contact center employees across onboarding, engagement, training, and retention.
How Do Contact Centers Use Automation?
Contact centers use automation in a variety of ways. Looking at how contact center automation can be applied to your organization, the following can be extremely valuable:
- Automating repetitive tasks
Automation can execute tasks such as data entry, generating reports, and creating tickets. This frees up your contact center team to focus on more important tasks that require a higher level of human attention. - Provide managers with employee performance insights
With AI-driven manager insights, managers can effortlessly prioritize who to coach, reward, and recognize. - Agent training and onboarding
A major component of frontline team success is training. Microlearning uses AI-powered automation to create “bite-size” learning activities that can be triggered based on individual performance and knowledge gaps, making it timely and relevant to every employee’s unique needs. - Data analysis
AI-powered automated analytics dashboards provide in-depth insights into agent performance, customer feedback, and overall call center operations. Generating reports and analyzing data helps you identify trends, patterns, and areas of improvement within the contact center. - Prediction-based software
Prediction-based software can help read trends in past data (such as customer interest peaks) and make predictions automatically for future demand. This can help your call center to operate more efficiently with more agents assigned automatically to times of greater need. - Real-time performance management
Contact center automation provides the opportunity to implement real-time performance management, which can include improved KPI visibility, smart segmentation, performance boats and coaching, and advanced gamification – all personalized, and all automated at scale.
The Benefits of Using Contact Center Automation
There are many benefits of using contact center automation, including:
- Answering customer questions faster
Using tech such as smart call routing lets you route customer calls to specific agents who are trained to solve those specific types of queries. That means your customers get what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. - Helping your customers around the world
Different time zones and budgets mean that your human contact center agents are not always available to answer customer queries after hours. By automating some of the customer query processes, you can help customers get the information they need from AI bots, without needing human-to-human interaction. - Improving your first-call resolution
It’s estimated that customer satisfaction drops by 15% every time a customer has to call back about the same issue. - Boosting customer service
By analyzing automated interactions and generating reports from them, you can gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling better decision-making and targeted customer service initiatives.
How Contact Center Automation Benefits Your Team
Contact center automation benefits your team in many ways – below are a few things you can do with automated processes:
- Improve your team’s performance
Using real-time, personalized and connected performance management software, managers can constantly monitor and help their teams improve their performance, allowing them to reach their KPIs. - Coach your employees more holistically
Using an AI-powered coaching solution, your employees get access to a digital coach, which guides them on how to become more competent and confident agents. - Improve knowledge retention
Microlearning can be used to drive knowledge retention and improve time to proficiency. It’s no wonder that 94% of learners say they prefer microlearning. - Keep your agents engaged and interested
Mundane tasks can become boring, which demotivates even high-performing agents.
By automating repetitive tasks that require little thinking, you allow your contact center agents to put their minds to more complex tasks, which often require a higher level of creativity and awareness. Motivated employees are a sure way to improve your bottom line and overall employee satisfaction. - Reduce your operational costs
Automation streamlines processes, minimizes errors, and reduces overall contact center costs.
When And How Should You Automate Your Contact Center Processes?
The question of when and how to automate contact center processes is a common one. Below are a few points to consider:
- If you have bottlenecks to clear
Analyze your contact center operations and identify areas where automation can address bottlenecks or improve efficiency. For example, automated QA can help managers avoid having to manually analyze every agent call. - If you have the right training structure
Your contact center agents need consistent and up-to-date training on how to use the automation software correctly to maximize its capabilities. Find out how the correct training structure helped Microsoft improve their call center employee productivity. - Automate once you’ve found the right software
Use sites such as Microsoft AppSource to read reviews about the various options available so that you can make an informed decision when selecting your software partner. - Implement the technology in a gradual and monitored manner
If you want to monitor how beneficial a particular performance management software is, consider creating a pilot study within your organization.
Put together a control group, allow one half to utilize the performance management tech, and track both groups’ engagement using a frontline employee performance engagement index.
Meet Centrical, The #1 AI-Powered Employee Performance Experience Platform
Centrical is the world’s leading gamification-based employee performance experience platform, used by leading organizations to significantly enhance team performance and turbocharge contact center efficiency.
Centrical’s employee-centric technology gives agents and managers an AI-powered, personalized, and gamified experience that unifies real-time performance management, continuous feedback, microlearning, and employee engagement while supporting managers with interactive coaching and tools.
Organizations worldwide are leveraging Centrical’s contact center automation capabilities to:
- Drive efficiencies
- Hit and exceed KPIs
- Engage and motivate employees
- Achieve a 50% faster time to proficiency
- Drive down attrition by 23%
- Lower average issue resolution times by 20%
- Enable personalized coaching at scale
Summary
Contact center automation is key to a modern, competitive, and efficient organization. A few key takeaways:
- CX is expected to be the battleground where the fight for customers is won or lost, and it’s contact centers that are at the front lines
- While this may sound dramatic, it’s backed up by data: including Gartner’s findings that 80% of companies expect CX to be their main competitive differentiator
- While contact center automation encompasses multiple areas, it’s the automation around empowering and engaging agents and managers where the biggest multiplier effect can be felt
- Benefits of contact center automation go beyond more efficient processes, and include crucial elements such as employee motivation, retaining learnings, upskilling agents, and enabling personalized performance management, quality assurance and coaching at scale
For over a decade, Centrical has partnered with leading organizations across industries and around the world to boost contact center efficiency with its advanced automation capabilities.
Watch the platform in action with a sneak preview, or request your personalized demo today.
