Know What Your Contact Center is Looking For 

A 2021 McKinsey survey indicated that AI adoption is experiencing a rapid rise, with 56% of all respondents reporting AI solutions in at least one function last year, up from 50% in 2020. The second-most common application of AI in 2021? Contact Center Automation.

Contact centers have traditionally had narrow options of software tools available, forcing them to patch together disjointed systems that never truly satisfy customers and relieve agents.

Contact Center Automation has changed that, however, with a unified, omnichannel platform that uses conversational AI to fully resolve hundreds of the most common customer service requests. As Contact Center Automation continues to earn widespread adoption, learning how to evaluate a solution will be critical

Here’s what to look for:

Core Features of Contact Center Automation

Contact Center Automation leverages a suite of technologies that are tailored to customer service and designed specifically for contact center use cases.

While individual Contact Center Automation solutions may take varied approaches to underlying components like conversational AI, integrations, multi-channel support, and analytics, a comprehensive solution should have a number a few core pillars: 

Natural Conversations. A Natural Language Understanding (NLU) brain that can quickly and accurately comprehend and converse in natural language to resolve customer issues in any language.

Omnichannel Support. Multichannel support for voice, SMS, VIVR, webchat, social, email, in-app, and business messaging to resolve customer issues anywhere with seamless context switching.

Conversation Design. A user-friendly conversation design studio to design, deploy, and update autonomous conversation scripts across use-cases with pre-built conversation components.

Conversation Analytics. Out-of-the-box, customizable analytics that provide insights into conversation performance, A/B testing outcomes, and KPIs like call volume, average handle time, and trending support issues.

Conversation Interface. Full visibility into conversation transcripts for reviewing, monitoring, and searching live and past conversations; auto-tagged metrics including disposition, sentiment, and timestamps.

Agent Collaboration. Built-in workflow capabilities including smart agent handoff, automated after-call work, intelligent routing, and agent assist for increased productivity and hybrid-working models.

Comprehensive Integrations. Out-of-the-box platform-agnostic integrations to deploy autonomous conversations across existing contact center, CRM, and internal system workflows

Secure Infrastructure. Scalable and redundant infrastructure that can handle millions of autonomous conversations concurrently with enterprise-grade security that is SOCII, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI compliant.

Why they matter

As a unified solution, Contact Center Automation is a sum of its parts. Without strong horizontal features, the ability of the platform to effectively serve and scale with customers is hampered.

Without artfully crafted conversations, customers will get frustrated. Without omnichannel support, customer experiences will be disjointed. Without a clear interface and strong pass-off tools, agents are left disadvantaged. And without a strong infrastructure and out-of-the-box integrations, it may take months to years to fully deploy a solution.

Learn more about how Contact Center Automation differs from traditional solutions and what a roadmap to automation looks like.

Or, download the comprehensive guide to learn everything you need to know about Contact Center Automation.

Jill Accardo

Office Depot

Vice President Customer Service and Order Managment

LinkedIn