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Contact Center Automation in the Age of COVID and Worker Shortages
Contact centers, like most industries, have struggled over the past couple of years. COVID-19, supply chain disruptions, worker shortages and demands from customers for new ways to engage have all forced businesses to change the way they handle customer service. A smarter and more automated contact center is the logical solution for dealing with this new customer service environment.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already driving innovation within the contact center, which Gartner predicts will reduce agent workloads by eight percent in 2024. Workloads were already reduced by one percent in 2020, with 2022 poised to see many more investments in AI and automation.
One of the key ways contact centers are automating is through the use of virtual assistants to drive up customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Beyond mere bots, virtual assistants can handle many customer queries that would otherwise be routed to a live agent. They are driven by powerful technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques, resulting in a personalized approach to customer engagement.
Another way contact centers can efficiently automate is to streamline multichannel engagement through a single unified interface. There are a variety of automation solutions available to ensure all customer interactions from a variety of channels are funneled into a single holistic interface. This helps with customer satisfaction, as customers don't have to repeat their queries across multiple channels, while also assisting agents with the most unified view possible of all customer interactions.
Advanced data analytics are also becoming an important part of contact center automation. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 45 percent of agent-assisted customer interactions will make use of real-time analytics to directly improve outcomes. Contact centers also benefit from being able to view and leverage data from all points of the customer interaction journey.
Contact centers can also expedite the automation process by choosing low-code, lightweight automation offerings instead of costly and bulkier legacy solutions. Low code automation platforms provide easy integration, agility and simple deployment, ensuring the customer experience will not be negatively impacted.
Finally, contact centers can make the most of automation by leveraging the collaborative intelligence of human agents as well as AI. There are times when only a human customer interaction will suffice, and AI needs to be programmed to understand when the handoff to an agent is required. A contact center automation solution that recognizes the importance of this collaboration will yield the most postie customer interactions in the most efficient manner possible.
Edited by Luke Bellos