The key to a successful contact center

Sep 14, 2022

3 minutes

A successful contact center improves customer satisfaction, customer experience (CX), and timely issue resolution. Contact center automation is key to optimizing and improving business processes and interactions. Together they represent a powerful combination.

Automation empowers contact centers to deliver better, faster, and more efficient customer service. Embracing automation to augment staff operations and improve agent performance is an important strategic priority. 

What exactly is contact center automation?

Automation is the new normal for handling many customer-facing engagements with limited or no human intervention, while delivering advanced decision support tools and analytics to agents and management. Automation goals include:

  • Reducing frustration and challenges for customers, making interactions easy
  • Providing a seamless customer journey to unlock customer experience and customer loyalty
  • Streamlining and enhancing business workflows and offload boring and repetitive tasks
  • Freeing up agent time, cutting costs, and saving customer time

In addition, the intelligent use of automation can add voice, new self-service options, AI-powered virtual agents and chatbots, and a comprehensive knowledge base for agents.

Contact center automation is no longer optional

The customer service and CX landscape is changing and evolving constantly. Digital and mobile channels have become a given and remote support is the norm. Work from home options and the rise of on-demand service have changed the expectations of both agents and customers, creating a shift in customer service strategy.

Once a “nice to have” functionality, automation in the contact center has become a necessity for operational efficiency and cost reduction. Customer-facing and back-office automation addresses this demand for convenience, value, and speed. For example, AI-powered virtual agents can handle routine activities and repetitive customer interactions, which can make up an incredible 60% of calls. And that frees up agent time to take more high-value calls.

What’s gained by automating your contact center?

By delivering call center automation, you can enhance customer experience by offering more channels for support, delivering higher quality service, and increasing efficiency and profitability. Automation improves metrics and reduces budget in multiple ways.

Time is money

Intelligent call routing handles calls more efficiently for faster responses, a key performance indicator for call centers. A report at Accenture indicates a time savings of up to 70% for contact centers with automation. (Accenture)

Wait not, want not

Automation reduces wait time, while virtual agents reduce talk time to a minimum, shortening the interactions from initial call to resolution. Higher first call resolution cuts costs, improves customer experience, and reduces churn and revenue loss.

Focus on employee happiness, too

Employees with leading edge tools provide better, personalized customer service. They are also more productive. What’s good for business can be good for employee retention in this age of The Great Resignation. Reducing tedious calls and repetitive tasks while equipping agents with better decision-making tools enables live agents to solve more complex customer issues, for greater job satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction

Automation cuts response times for a better customer experience. Successfully meeting customer expectations and rapid issue resolution increases retention – an average of two-thirds of customers say that poor customer service led to terminating their relationship with their provider.

Less friction, less hassle

Consumers demand easy and hassle-free interactions. Automation creates a seamless experience across every channel, removing obstacles and eliminating problems that a customer might encounter while interacting with the company saving time, reducing effort, and improving customer retention.

Interactions that require unnecessary effort led to frustration, dissatisfaction, and increased customer churn. Automation enables fast response times and simple interactions for customers to access information, receive support, and avoid the need for customers to repeat information across channels.

One company with a contact center automation solution is IntelePeer. Their focus is based on helping companies better engage their customers by creating modern customer experiences from the cloud that augment existing premise-based or limited contact center solutions. The platform is a communication workflow automation engine that provides management for voice, SMS/MMS, and chat automation. IntelePeer helps companies engage with customers and create customized customer experiences in minutes. Moreover, their contact center automation solution ensures optimal employee engagement and productivity, while continuing to provide the very best customer experience.

Are you ready to learn more about automating your contact center? Contact us now.

Do you want to learn more about modernizing your contact center and accelerating customer engagement with generative AI and automation? Schedule an AI and automation Customer Interaction Intent Study with IntelePeer now.  

Knowledge is power.

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