How has COVID-19 affected your Contact Centre Operation? Just a few years ago, considering automation for processing emails would have led you to consider adopting one of the specialist solutions, such as eGain or Eptica, probably resulting in a considerable on-premise investment with the siloed solution being used by specialist team(s) outside the contact centre, alongside other workloads in the back office. It’s also important to consider the agents when looking to implement a new automated system as they will be the ones using the technology on a daily basis. Automation of Responses to Customer Complaints and Queries. Automatic call distributor (ACD) technology made it possible to filter and route calls to the right agent at the right time, dramatically reducing call waiting times. Maybe it’s assumed that volumes will organically disappear sometime soon, or perhaps there’s an assumption that there isn’t an affordable fix. Alongside continued efforts to remove and deflect the need for email communications into the business, the ability to consistently and efficiently process the remaining emails, plus voice and other digital back-office interactions, is crucial to a successful customer experience strategy these days. Digital workers also work best when handling structed data and using clear decision logic. This collaboration between software bots and humans is called attended automation. Contact center automation needs to deal with the fuzziness of human communication to maximize the number of successful journeys and minimize friction. contact center: A contact center -- also referred to as a customer interaction center or e-contact center -- is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Steve Murray is Solutions Director at IPI. Picking the right processes and thinking about the end goal is key to implementing the right automation strategy in a contact centre. Attended automation. Post call updates, for example, when an email or text confirmation needs to be sent out to the customer, can easily be done by a digital worker, leaving the agent to move onto their next call. In this article, we’ll focus on the example of automating email processing, but automation of any communication channel can be viewed as a beneficial approach to improving customer experience and delivering consistently good service across the business. What is customer service automation? The question is, how can automation deliver fantastic new outcomes for contact centres? From the customer’s perspective, having automation technology in place that resolves their query more efficiently and more accurately – whether instantly through an online chatbot, or a process that gets them through to a human agent more quickly – can only serve to improve the company’s reputation and increase brand loyalty. These bespoke solutions cover every component of the contact centre – from call routing, unified communications, networking and security, right up to emerging technologies, such as AI chatbots and Robotic Process Automation. If a customer does speak to an agent and can sense that the agent is giving them their full attention, rather that having to look through multiple interfaces to find the right information, their overall experience will be that much better. Skill-based routing (SBR) directs customer calls to the next available agent who … His focus has been on pioneering the development of self-service and compliance technologies for the contact centre space and he was recently awarded a patent for the co-invention of a revolutionary fraud prevention tool for contact centres. At that time, many businesses would’ve considered the volume of emails, their complexity, and the widely anticipated reduction in email contact, and decided the investment in automation wasn’t justified or affordable. Automation technology will also be fundamental in empowering agents in their work as introducing a digital workforce alongside human agents has many benefits, from reducing costs and churn, to enabling agents to provide a better, more human service by allowing them to do work that holds meaning for them. Contact centre agents are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between the customer and the computer that they’re using to purchase a product, or complete an application etc. He is a regular contributor and speaker at customer experience and contact centre events around the world. But first, we need to set a foundation … Definition of customer service automation. Build IVR into your mobile apps. Contact centers have long embraced automation in the form of Interactive Voice Response (IVR), much to the dismay of their customers. But there’s a significant risk that ignoring one of your channels will undermine the efforts and investment in others, as any lack of consistency in communication will damage customers’ trust and confidence, and variation in response times outside of clear SLAs will result in multiple contacts for the same issue, which is likely to hurt your brand and your pocket. Now is the perfect time to revisit the prospect of automating your email processing, to free up budget and resources as an integral part of your digital transformation and further improve customer experience. With these figures in mind, Deloitte predicts that RPA will achieve near-universal adoption within the next three years. Furthermore, Gartner predicts that 25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants this year. 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