Recently, information has become a valuable commodity. Customers want it and businesses should be able to provide it quickly. If not, customers will simply look out there.
To prevent this, you need call center automation that will make your operations and processes more efficient and your call center agents more productive. With that in mind, let’s look at what call center automation is and how it can help your business.
What is Call Center Automation?
Call center automation allows you to automate manual and repetitive call center tasks. As a result, these tasks don’t require any human interaction, which, in turn, makes your call center staff more efficient and productive. Flowing from this, they’re able to serve your customers better.
A perfect example of this is where you use an auto-attendant to answer calls and transfer to the right department or person.
How Your Business Benefits From an Automated Call Center
By this time, you probably know how automation can improve almost all of your business’s processes and call center KPIs. Let’s now look at its benefits from a call center perspective. Here, there are several key advantages to using call center automation:
Around-the-Clock Customer Service
With call center automation, you’ll be able to serve your customers, provide information, and solve their problems at all times, no matter how many agents you have or when they work.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
When you’re able to always serve your customers and answer their questions, they will be more satisfied. It goes further than this, however. Call center automation also means they hardly ever need to hold on to speak to someone, which saves their time and makes their interaction with your business more streamlined.
Better Resource Optimization
When you use call center automation, you’ll need fewer agents. And those agents you have can spend their time on more challenging and complex issues and problems. As a result, call center automation allows you to optimize your resources.
Higher First-Call Resolution (FCR) Rate
Call center automation allows you to provide relevant information to customers and solve their problems quicker without the need for being transferred to a human agent. As a result, it increases your FCR rate, which has a direct impact on your customer experience.
More Employee Satisfaction
Apart from increasing customer satisfaction, call centers can improve employee satisfaction. This is simply because it eliminates many boring and repetitive tasks and allows agents to focus on more complex issues.
Better Service Level Management
Most call centers must follow the best compliances, which involves contractual obligations and service levels. And they need to do this while still optimizing their operational costs. Here, call center automation is an invaluable tool as it allows them to scale their operations without the accompanying costs.
Type of Call Center Automation
Let’s now look at the different types of call center automations you can use in your business.
Automated Interactions
As the name suggests, automated interactions is where you use call center automation to automate various interactions with your customers. Although automated interactions usually take the form of a chatbot, they can include anything from online knowledge bases to auto-attendants.
No matter what their form, their purpose is to provide customers with the information they need to solve their problems quickly and easily.
Forecasting Automations
Forecasting automations give you the ability to analyze your data to identify trends and patterns. You’ll, for example, see how long it takes to solve a customer’s problems, how many call agents can effectively deal with, and more. By using these insights, you’re then able to optimize your process to serve your customers better.
Workflow Automations
Workflow automations allow your agents to automate manual and repetitive parts of their workflows. As a result, this simplifies their processes, improves their time management, and makes them more efficient and productive. In other words, they’ll get more done in less time.
The result is that they’ll save time, which they could then use by dealing with more complex or involved issues.
Automated Agent Guidance
When dealing with customers, agents need to also focus on several compliance aspects, from Payment Card Industry standards and best practices to data privacy regulations. Understandably, this can become quite complex.
Automated agent guidance can rescue the complexity by providing agents with real-time assistance and guidance. As such, agents will know how to deal with specific situations, and they’ll always act in accordance with the rules.
Sales Automations
Sales automation helps you automate many sales and marketing related tasks. This includes everything from sending emails to customers after they’ve made a purchase to executing marketing campaigns.
Ultimately, sales automation makes your sales and marketing process more efficient and effective which, in turn, increases your conversion rates and thus allows you to generate more revenue.
Scheduling Automations
To make the best use of your call center’s resources, you should ensure that it’s not understaffed or overstaffed. If it is, your customer service will suffer or your call center will be inefficient. Scheduling automation can prevent this by generating schedules for your team. It does this by using artificial intelligence and past data to ensure that every agent is used optimally.
Current Trends of Call Center Automation
Although the mentioned automation can serve to make your business’s communications more efficient and your agents more productive, automation is an ever-evolving industry, and as such, new trends constantly emerge. These include:
- More advanced chatbots. Due to technologies like natural language processing and machine learning, chatbots will become more advanced and will be able to conduct more complex conversations.
- Neural networks. An advanced form of machine learning, neural networks will become more popular, as they’re able to analyze, learn from, and improve the interactions with customers.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPAs can improve automation significantly, as they allow companies to develop complex workflows that make operations and processes more efficient.
Examples of Effective Call Center Automation Implementation
Let’s now look at some examples of effective call center automation implementations:
- Chatbots and live chat. By now, you should be familiar with chatbots and live chat, as many websites employ these tools to provide relevant information to their customers quickly and easily.
- Self-service portals and knowledge bases. These are especially valuable tools for companies that offer SaaS products, and they allow customers to solve many problems by themselves.
- Automated email replies. These automations can go a long way in helping teams become more efficient by answering questions and providing information automatically.
Conclusion
If you want to answer your customers’ questions and solve their problems quickly to improve your customer service, call center automation will be worth your while. Not only can they make your team more efficient and productive with their customer service skills, but they can also provide valuable insights into your call center operations, allowing you to improve even further.
To implement a call center in your business, get in touch with ULTATEL. Our Cloud Contact Center solution has all the automation features you need including auto attendants, interactive voice response, and more. In addition, it can help you lower your operating costs while, at the same time, making it easier to scale.
