The Top Trends in Call Center Automation

Ever-evolving technology is bringing huge change for businesses, especially when it comes to customer service. Today’s technology is introducing new ways to drive up customer satisfaction and improve customer loyalty. 

In addition to advancing technology, what customers expect from the brands they do business with is also constantly evolving. Today’s customers demand more from businesses than ever before. In fact, 89 percent of companies today compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36 percent in 2010. 

To keep up with these growing customer demands and to continue increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, organizations must introduce smarter methods to both deliver, and analyze, customer service interactions - and do it at scale. 

That’s why call center automation is crucial when it comes to providing a world-class customer experience in today’s market.

What is call center automation

Call center automation is the use of technologies such as contact center artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotic process automation to ease strain on internal resources, deliver customer service at scale and provide superior customer experiences.

Essentially, call center automation is the process of performing repetitive tasks through the help of contact center technology, in an effort to eliminate repetitive human processes and better deal with a large number of customer service queries at any given time.

Call center automation benefits include:

• The optimization of internal resources - through saved time and money
• Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Happier employees
• Improved first call resolution rate
• The implementation of 24/7 customer service 

Call center automation trends

With so many customer queries coming into your business, there’s only so much your customer service agents can do to keep customers happy. When agents are overloaded with call volume, hold times start to creep up, the quality of customer care starts to decline and customer service agents aren’t able to perform to their full potential.

The implementation of automated interaction can solve that. Automated interactions refers to AI-powered technologies such as chatbots and interactive voice response systems, which provide customers with the automated tools they need to either answer their own questions or be routed seamlessly to the appropriate agent. 

These technologies provide round-the-clock care, self-service support and , which all significantly reduce the strain on a company's customer service representatives - allowing for better resource allocation and improved customer service interactions.

To continually improve the customer experience and meet the needs of customer expectations, call centers must collect large amounts of data to gain insights into customer expectations, product information and customer service performance.

To better meet the needs of customers, the most successful call centers today are using conversational analytics software to analyze customer interactions across all challenges and gain insights into how customer service teams can better interact with their customers. 

By gaining insights into customer query aspects like the top five reasons for customer calls, the top product issues or understanding which issues have the longest call times, brands can use this information to proactively address common customer service issues to minimize call volume.

When assisting customers, it’s essential that customer service agents deliver an expected level of service. To achieve this, it’s important they keep the call center compliance rules in mind and stick to the script that they have been given.

Top performing call centers today use artificial intelligence technology to monitor and guide customer service representatives in real-time for optimum performance levels. 

Agent guidance technology can give businesses actionable insight into agent performance by monitoring agent-customer conversations. This technology can be used for in-the-moment agent feedback, rapid changes to the script and after-call agent feedback that improves their performance moving forward.

Are you interested in learning more about call center automation or how Advantage Communications uses world-class contact center technologies to drive customer service success for our clients? Get in touch with us today.