Back to School: Contact Center Automation 101

By Replicant
September 12, 2022

Now that fall is in the air, it’s officially back-to-school season! What a perfect opportunity to offer a quick refresher on Replicant’s area of expertise – Contact Center Automation. Replicant offers a variety of materials showing how this innovative approach is already revolutionizing customer service operations across industries.

For example, check out this recent video Replicant produced. In just over 2 minutes, it explains the nuts and bolts of Contact Center Automation and details how the service can be deployed to tackle many routine requests through natural human-to-machine conversations. This in turn helps customer service leaders address growing challenges like hold times and employee retention.

8 Key Features: How to Identify Contact Center Automation

So what exactly is Contact Center Automation? Replicant’s Harry Chang has created a trove of resources that helps explain this cutting-edge customer service innovation, including this piece that explores some core features:

🗣 Natural Conversations 🖥 Conversation Interface
📲 Omnichannel Support 🤝 Agent Collaboration
🎨 Conversation Design 🔌 Comprehensive Integrations
📊 Conversation Analytics 🔒 Secure Infrastructure

All of these key pillars of Contact Center Automation are explained in detail and Chang presents evidence for why each matters. But more importantly, he makes a strong case for why they’re all necessary in concert to create a valuable tool and a complete experience for contact center leaders. “As a unified solution, Contact Center Automation is a sum of its parts,” Chang writes. “Without strong horizontal features, the ability of the platform to effectively serve and scale with customers is hampered.”

15 Biggest Benefits of Contact Center Automation

Now that the features of Contact Center Automation have been presented, let’s talk about the tangible benefits of the service. Essentially, it boils down to resolving many common customer requests with automation through whatever channels customers prefer. This allows agents to focus on addressing more complex needs that still require a human touch. Contact centers, in turn, become more efficient – and more cost-effective. “Agent time is maximized, customers are offered self-service options they actually enjoy using, and contact centers receive never-before-seen efficiency,” Chang writes.

Indeed, Contact Center Automation can deliver a range of benefits for an organization’s customers, agents and the business itself. Chang identifies five critical improvements for each that can be achieved by integrating Contact Center Automation into customer service operations, providing insight and commentary about why this matters for all parties. He then dives deeper into the various benefits customers, agents and contact centers will enjoy after adopting this exciting new resource.

Contact Center Automation is Moving to the Mainstream

You may be wondering if there’s any useful data that further illustrates the power of Contact Center Automation and the value it can bring to customer service operations. In fact, Replicant and Demand Metric recently surveyed 300 enterprise contact center leaders across the country for a report titled “Automation in the Contact Center” – revealing a wide range of fascinating findings about the state of contact centers and the future of customer service.

“This survey confirms what we’ve seen in the market, that automation, especially natural sounding voice automation that resolves customer challenges, will soon be standard in every contact center,” said Gadi Shamia, CEO and co-founder at Replicant. “More and more companies are using automation to address chronic agent shortages and lower costs, while allowing their live agents to focus on more challenging and interesting customer issues,” said Shamia, who also recently wrote about this “Brave New World of Contact Center Automation” in Forbes, making the case that the technology will reshape how humans and machines can work together.

“Automation has the power to transform the industry, as evidenced by the accelerated adoption of the technology.
–Gadi Shamia”

Beyond showing that automation is clearly viewed as a critical investment, the survey also delves into the top challenges, strategies and trends important to contact center leaders representing a variety of businesses. The full “2022 Benchmark Report: Automation in the Contact Center” is free to download and contains important information that all customer service leaders will find valuable.