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Contact Center Automation Trends in 2022
Contact centers are constantly evolving, and with new technology appearing every year, keeping up with current contact center automation technology can be challenging. According to a study by McKinsey, the pandemic caused extreme digital acceleration for many businesses; five years of progress were made in about eight weeks.
“Digital laggards will be substantially disadvantaged during the recovery,” the article continues. Changing customer preferences and the abundant advantages of technology point to an ever-increasing level of automation. As a result, understanding contact center trends is always crucial to staying ahead of competitors and developing a top-notch contact center.
According to Fortune, the U.S. is facing an intense labor shortage; more than 38 million people quit their jobs during 2021. This shortage is a key driving factor for finding effective, reliable call center automation solutions that can help take up some of the resulting slack.
What is Contact Center Automation?
Contact center automation has been an emerging category that uses technology to automate Tier One customer service conversations, resolving them fully without human intervention. It recognizes natural language, “learns” from answering queries, and can route more complex questions to experienced live agents who can address nuanced customer challenges.
What is the Difference Between a Call Center and a Contact Center?
Contact centers and call centers essentially differ in versatility – contact centers may cover any number of communication channels, while call centers focus only on the phone. When customers communicate through a call center, they must do so by means of a phone call. On the other hand, a contact center accepts any channel customers choose, whether it’s an SMS text, web chat, phone call, or video meeting.
What are the Most Important Things to Know About Contact Center Automation?
The aim for contact center automation should not be to replace agents or avoid customer interaction. Rather, it uses a hybrid approach to resolve basic service requests using whatever communication channel the customer prefers. Agent time is thus primarily centered on those customer support conversations that require creativity and empathy.
Essentially, call automation technology offers a cost-effective and infinite supply of 5-star agents to answer simple and repetitive customer requests. Companies save on customer service outsourcing, employee training, and salaries while equipping agents with higher productivity and engagement, resulting in true long-term agent retention.
What Contact Center Automation is Not
With many automated contact choices available, it’s important to avoid confusing contact center automation with other solutions. It’s not merely an agent assistant tool; rather, it’s designed to entirely resolve Tier One requests. It’s also not a rip-and-replace solution – instead of requiring a company to completely revamp its computer systems, it is designed to function regardless of current technology. Customizable to any contact center model, contact center automation integrates into every existing CCaaS and UCaaS platform.
What are Benefits of Contact Center Automation?
Contact center automation trends and strategies will deliver a number of benefits to companies that take advantage of it. Among these are lower costs due to reduced hiring and training expenses and improved customer retention. Another advantage is the automation’s scalability – with an unlimited capacity, it handles spikes flawlessly and drastically reduces outages commonly experienced with customer service outsourcing.
For contact centers that struggle with temporary or seasonal hiring, contact center automation provides a reliable staffing solution that offers a consistent, personalized experience for customers.
Finally, contact center automation delivers analytics covering actionable insights, such as customer engagement.
Try Replicant’s Solution
You can learn more about call center automation trends by contacting our team here at Replicant. Discover more about our intelligent virtual agent and what it can do for your business now and in the future.
