Why should you do something manually when it can be automated? What do you get out of wasting your time doing something that software or AI can?
Yet, still many call centers don’t ignore automation like it’s just fluff. What actually ends up being fluff is their revenue, employee productivity, and customer conversion. Here is why!
The Need for Automation in Contact Centers
A lot of time is wasted doing simple things that can be easily automated such as ending one call and dialing the second from the list. Another example is looking up records of a customer manually after they bring up a query on call. All these procedures waste tons of time.
Also count the time that an agent will waste in switching the screen, searching the record, and waiting for it to load. In a 6-minute service call, 75 percent of the time is wasted in manual research.
What else? Your customer keeps waiting in a dialing queue or is waiting for the agent to bring up their history. That’s not it yet.
Don’t forget that your agent is also burning himself out in doing such a small task that apparently requires less mental energy but is still draining him out. Not automating your call center software can extract a heavy toll on your business performance.
This article talks about some of the important procedure automation that can increase your call center’s productivity.
Essential Automation in Contact Centers
Call Routing
More than 30 percent of the calls are misrouted if you don’t automate your call routing. A customer calls the contact center and the agent has to make the customer wait and find the right person who can resolve his problem.
This is enough to frustrate the customers and find a better service. Call routing takes input from the customer through an automated voice response and directs the call to the right agent so that the customer’s query can be addressed in just one effective call.
Not automating your call routing is not even a choice in a competitive call center business environment.
Virtual Queueing
Virtual queueing is a great feature to use in your call center solution if you experience a high number of inbound calls to the level that your agents are unavailable to answer.
The best way to avoid this and still maintain a good customer experience is to place them in a virtual queue and let an IVR interact with them for a short time while the customer enters the input on the type of query.
If an agent is still unavailable, the software saves the information so that the caller can be contacted again as soon as the agent is free. This provides a more personalized experience for the customer and helps them avoid waiting in the queue while they carry their normal daily tasks.
Conversational AI and IVR
This feature works best with automated call routing. Integrating Interactive Voice Response (IVR) means that when a customer calls your contact center, they are confronted by your IVR which helps route the call to the right agent based on the customer’s preferences and the type of issue they are facing.
Especially if you are also integrating virtual queuing, Conversational AI and IVR can keep the customer occupied for a short time until an agent is free to take the call so the customer gets their query answered before hanging up.
Automated Emails
Writing lengthy emails or SMS telling the customer that their issue has been resolved is pointless. Every company is using an automated email feature right now which automatically takes the complaint id and relevant message and automatically sends an email or SMS to the user briefing them about the status of their request.
This saves a lot of mental energy and time for agents.
CRM Integration in Workflow
Integrating Customer Relationship Management software with your call center solution holds more benefits than you can imagine. This is one of the most important automation-related decisions that a call center can take.
Why? CRM software holds all the information about the past activity of the customer’s interaction with the company. Whether it involves previous complaints, purchase history, or other demographic information, CRM houses all the information.
Especially if your business offers omnichannel support, CRM is likely to also hold data of customer interactions via other channels of communication. When this is integrated with the call center solution, agents are able to view filtered information about the customer through a dashboard on their screens.
Proper Team
From automated emails to forecasting automation you can automate anything in a call center company. You can do automated scheduling, automated call routing, and many more. However, you should have a proper team for call centers.
You should ensure that the team has proper knowledge about automating the process. It is the best bet for the company. Customers’ satisfaction depends on it. More than 57 percent of people are comfortable talking to a computer.
