Contact Center Automation transforms every side of the customer service journey

Contact Center Automation is ushering in a new era of customer service. It is a quickly emerging category that leverages AI-powered technology to automate tier-1 customer service conversations, while simultaneously empowering agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer challenges.

Instead of displacing agents or deflecting customers, Contact Center Automation uses a hybrid approach to resolve as many customer service requests as needed through automation, by whatever channel the customer prefers. In doing so, agent time is maximized, customers are offered self-service options they actually enjoy using, and contact centers receive never-before-seen efficiency.

Here’s how Contact Center Automation benefits each party:

Customer Benefits

What drives spikes in contact center demand? Traditionally, isolated events like seasonality, holidays, service outages, and product recalls result in outsized customer requests. But when we look at the data of the last two years, we see a new culture-based customer service driver entering the fray. 

Consumers have grown accustomed to a new marketplace where meals are delivered at the touch of a finger and refunds are issued with no questions asked. They expect tremendous service from every brand they interact with and they’ll quickly hit “unsubscribe” until they get it.

At the heart of contact center automation is the new customer persona. Customers win with automation because it eliminates the causes that put “A Nation on Hold” in 2021. Wait times become a thing of the past no matter what channel customers choose, including the phone.

Simple requests are resolved immediately by intelligent machines that can achieve the same – or better – customer satisfaction scores as human agents. Meanwhile, agents become more accessible for customers who truly need human assistance. 

1. 24/7 Service Contact Center Automation is always on, so customers can get their issues resolved whenever it’s most convenient.
2. First Contact Resolution Full resolution to unlimited tier-1 requests, with no wait times and 30-50% faster average handle times than agents.
3. Consistent Experiences A branded, personalized experience that can start in any channel, and move seamlessly between several.
4. Faster Escalations Full conversation summaries, logged and generated in real-time, eliminate the need for customers to repeat their problem multiple times if transferred to an agent.
5. Happier Agent Interactions Escalated calls are met with live agents who aren’t bogged down by repetitive calls and instead focused on providing high-touch service.

Agent Benefits

The pandemic led customer service agents to rethink what they want out of a job. It drove a mass exodus of talent away from contact centers as they sought more engaging work and less monotony. 

Whereas agent assist solutions and support tools help service reps execute their roles more efficiently, contact center automation transforms their job responsibilities entirely by automating tier-1 requests. It represents the next generation of customer service operations where human time is maximized to focus on conversations that require high empathy and creativity. 

With automation, agents rely on machines to fully resolve high-volume requests like order updates and account authentication, as well as back-office and after-call work like data entry and conversation analysis. 

Contact center automation opens the door for customer service agents to learn new skills, earn higher wages, and find long-term engagement in their jobs. 

1. Increased Engagement Less time spent on monotonous requests, more time spent on enriching customer conversations that require creativity, empathy, and human connection.
2. Intelligent Routing Highly effective conversational AI results in more accurate virtual routing and delivers happier customers to agents during escalations.
3. Contextual Pass-off Transcripts, call intelligence, and automatically generated summaries at agents’ fingertips for even less time spent on repetitive tasks.
4. Better Data More accurate, actionable customer information that requires zero manual data entry and zero after-call work.
5. Improved Productivity Happier agents who value their responsibilities more and have the bandwidth to pursue professional development.

Contact Center Benefits

Unpredictability in the contact center isn’t going anywhere, and will likely increase further.

There’s no better way to address it – not agent assist tools, not expanded self-service resources, not Business Process Outsourcing – than to automate every single inbound or outbound tier-1 customer interaction, 24/7/365, at unlimited scale.

Contact center automation solutions can be deployed and answering phone calls and chat messages in weeks with integrations into virtually any CMS, CCaaS, or telephony system. Once implemented, it can provide accurate data and intelligent insights into what additional call flows it can automate. 

Contact centers essentially get a cost-effective, infinite supply of 5-star agents for tier-1 customer requests. Downstream, they can slash training and hiring costs, promise greater productivity and engagement to their agents, and focus on true long-term agent retention. 

And for the next decade-plus, as data becomes the ultimate resource, contact centers can lean on a library of auto-transcribed customer interactions that help surface insights and improve their automation via machine learning.

It is a complete transformation wherein customers, agents, and operations receive permanent relief to the demand, labor, and forecasting challenges long associated with contact centers. 

1. Lower Costs Short and long-term ROI that can save millions of dollars while improving customer retention rates and upselling/cross-selling opportunities, and reducing hiring and training costs.
2. Unlimited Scale A true first line of defense for contact centers that provides an unlimited capacity and fail-safe redundancies to guard against spikes and outages.
3. Consistent Branding Automated engagement across both traditional and emerging channels that offers a consistent, personalized experience for your brand.
4. Immediate WFM Reliable staffing solutions for contact centers who struggle with temporary hiring, seasonal hiring, and expensive BPOs.
5. Actionable Analytics Advanced analytics delivered in simple dashboards that include customer engagement metrics and actionable insights.

Jill Accardo

Office Depot

Vice President Customer Service and Order Managment

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