When it comes to automating processes within a contact centre, the direct impact on business results and key deliverables cannot be overstated.
More than 67 percent of contact centres plan to implement automated processes into their business models within the next year, citing significant improvements in customer satisfaction rates, lead generation, and overall revenue opportunities as their main reasons for adopting AI and automation.
Customer satisfaction is dependent on multiple factors, with hundreds of variables to account for. With contact centre software and AI features having undergone an extensive yet sophisticated development in recent years, this has positively improved CSAT scores for companies adopting CX automation and Customer Service Automation strategies.
How automation is improving the contact centre market
According to a study conducted by Grand View Research, the global robotic process automation market size is anticipated to reach $30.85 billion by 2030. The market has largely been driven by the need to improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs. With improved business processes achieved through increased automation, an overall market growth of contact centres has been experienced across the globe.
As automation continues to advance, contact centres are presented with more opportunities to effectively improve operations at a rapid rate. The power of automation is leading the significant advancements of AI powered language processing, with constant updating voice bots, which in turn ensures that no time is wasted when a call comes in.
How does contact centre automation work?
What contact centre automation aims to do, is to successfully handle customer contact interactions through the use of intelligent algorithms without the interference of a human agent. AI is all about making our machines think and act like humans, in order to best benefit the business and enhance agent’s capabilities to transform the way that we work. Forbes found that AI can save the majority of Fortune 500 companies as much as $4.7 million per year through automation of processes.
At Connex One, we have streamlined hundreds of clients’ contact centre processes and empowered their capabilities through AI optimization tools. To see how businesses can easily improve results, let’s take a look at some quick wins to optimise performance through contact centre automation.
1. IVR processes
By replacing overworked regular IVR systems with automated IVR with bots, customers are able to answer simple questions through a self-service automated platform.
IVR bots are also able to assist in supporting agents when more complicated questions come in play, by prequalifying enquiries as well as providing the agents with additional needed information all in real time. This in turn ensures higher rates of customer satisfaction by enabling the customer agent to effectively answer queries and not waste valuable time by first having to redirect the call.
2. Live Chat / Chat Bots / Virtual Assistants
Live AI Chat Bots work similarly to live agents but utilise conversational AI technology to handle conversations with customers and answer their queries without the need for human agents.
Valuable agent time is saved by making use of virtual assistants instead, enabling your agent teams to instead focus on high-level conversations that may need more of a human touch. Frequently asked questions are often best answered by virtual assistants.
At Connex One, our live chat function can prompt outbound questions and be used to nudge customers down a sales funnel, as well as manage inbound customer service queries. By utilising automated templates, the AI algorithms help improve responses, adapting to customer and agents needs. Templates such as welcome messages, topic filtering, as well as automating scheduling of appointments and bookings are some of the leading AI empowered live chat features being currently used.
3. Canned Responses
Canned responses are pre-written responses that are designed to help automate conversations in the customer engagement process. This means that you don’t have to spend your valuable time writing the same response over and over again, but can instead build responses that are specifically tailored to the type of question that is being asked.
Canned Responses can also be linked to conversational AI like Connex One’s Athena, to analyse customers messages in realtime and provide the best response options automatically. This saves time and allows your agent to focus on the more complex conversations instead. Canned responses can also be used to automate the process of moving down a sales funnel, which is often the hardest part of the sales process to automate.
4. Automated rewards (Gamification)
Automated rewards tech such as Gamification by Connex One is used to automate prizes and rewards for your contact centre agents productivity. By using a leaderboard and/or points system, your team can automatically earn certain rewards if they have reached their stipulated targets.
By using this type of reward system, a fun workplace culture which helps in recognizing employees for their behaviour can be created. Automated rewards processes can help motivate teams to produce results and remove the uncertainty of waiting to be noticed for their output, ultimately driving better productivity and improved business results.
5. Sentiment analysis and CSAT scores
Sentiment analysis is used for monitoring and analysing people’s emotions and interests in different ways by pulling data from previous interactions, comments or even online sources about products and services.
This automated process detects the different opinions of customers through their feedback and provides your business with important feedback and satisfaction reports for understanding your customers preferences and needs. Speech analytics AI, where automated bots can analyse the tone of voice of the customer and use the information to help understand the nature of the query, is used as part of Sentiment Analysis.
Live versions of sentiment analysis AI can provide live insights for agents, which can assist them with prompts to escalate calls with upset customers and troubleshooting uncomfortable interactions to better-equipped agents, as well as allowing agents to preempt further annoying customers and turning around interactions to become more positive.
6. Scheduling AI
Contact centre AI can be also used for more wider-business processes such as scheduling, as well as collecting real time information that can benefit or impact schedule adherence. By analysing internal or outside commitments being picked up by AI, managers can utilise automated scheduling features to find the preferred and optimal shift times for agents, as well as spotting negative trends that will impact the business.
Automating your contact centre
Automation by utilisation of Artificial Intelligence has developed vastly over the past couple of years, and contact centres need to quickly adapt to new and efficient processes to stay ahead of the game.
Not only are businesses seeing an improvement in customer experience but a steady increase in revenue is largely due to improved efficiencies by automation processes.
To learn more about how Connex One is helping contact centre teams to succeed, get in touch with our team at hello@connexone.co.uk or request a free demo of our platform here.
