During the record-high customer support ticket volumes, many companies looked to AI-powered technology like chatbots and interactive voice response to assist their overworked and overwhelmed customer contact centres. During the pandemic, one in three companies adopted interactive voice response (IVR) and live chat as communication channels for the first time.
What is it, exactly?
Contact centre automation refers to the utilisation of technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), RPA and NLP, to streamline and expedite customer interactions within a contact centre environment. It involves automating routine and repetitive tasks that were traditionally performed manually by human agents.
By implementing automation, contact centres can handle a higher volume of customer enquiries across various communication channels such as phone calls, emails, social media and live web-based chat. This allows for immediate service and a more efficient customer support experience.
Automation can be supported through several different technologies, including:
Chatbots: AI-powered virtual assistants that interact with customers through chat interfaces.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Technology that allows call centre machines to interact with customers via voice recognition or keypad inputs.
Voice Bots: Voice bots, also known as virtual assistants or conversational AI, are a more advanced form of IVR that can understand spoken language and provide relevant and helpful responses to customer interactions over the phone.
Modern contact centre automation brings human agents and virtual agents together as collaborative co-workers. When virtual agents are integrated correctly into a contact centre, they can seamlessly hand off complex or escalated issues to human agents when necessary, ensuring a positive customer experience.
What processes can be automated?
As discussed earlier, automating contact centre operations can greatly enhance customer service by handling routine enquiries and tasks, freeing agents to tackle more complex issues.
This approach enables AI to swiftly respond to frequently asked customer questions without human intervention, significantly boosting efficiency.
Additionally, processes such as ticket routing and prioritisation are automated, ensuring that customer requests are directed to the appropriate department or agent skillset, improving response times.
Automation can also handle transactional tasks, such as billing enquiries or account updates, further reducing the workload on human agents and speeding up service delivery.
In conclusion…
It’s clear to us that contact centre automation technology is not just a fleeting trend but a pivotal shift in how businesses interact with their customers. By automating routine tasks and streamlining customer service processes, companies can significantly enhance efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and allow human agents to focus on more complex, value-added activities.
Embracing contact centre automation is a step forward into a future where technology and human ingenuity combine to create more meaningful and productive customer interactions.
Interested in seeing the transformative potential of conversational AI in action? We invite you to explore Customer Driven’s partnership with Boost.ai. Together, we are committed to providing class-leading experiences and innovative solutions for contact centres across Australia.