On the other side of the Atlantic, the US sector was worth $45.5 billion across the same 12 months. According to 2017 statistics, the European call centre market generated $49 billion. And, as agents are able to perform tasks faster, call durations and wait times decline, enabling the agents to help more people than ever before. 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 you’d like to be the first to receive the latest updates and insights from our team here at Maintel, sign up to our newsletter by clicking the banner below! After getting their basic information, they must initiate an entirely different process to find out about the customer's order history, whether they have had any previous support tickets filed, what the status of their most recent order is, etc. Learn how it can help you deliver exceptional customer experiences, enhance agent value, and accelerate digital transformation. Automation of Responses to Customer Complaints and Queries. 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. If they say they need more help with certain repetitive tasks, look to introduce a process that will do just that. There’s no doubt that continued advances in robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing, and voice-enabled devices will continue to increase the volume of complex enquiries that can be triaged or fully serviced without the need for someone to write an email or fill out a contact form. ThinkAutomation is designed to retrieve contact centre data, process that data, and respond to it based on your workflow rules. It also offers little or no reporting or statistics to guide continuous improvement initiatives. Not every process is a good candidate for automation, but here are three simple examples of RPA in action. Contact centres deal with vast quantities of complex and unstructured information and information that is vital to customer satisfaction. Ultimately, anything added to a contact centre should be to help the customer and build their loyalty, so recognising what their biggest frustration is, whether that’s long calls or speed of call resolution, is also essential to putting the right processes in place. This is because RPA works as a 24/7 digital workforce, working with everything from websites, emails, and contact forms, to data processing, onboarding new customers, integrating between different systems, and resetting new passwords. Leave your high volume contact tasks and simple support questions to our integrated robotics, and free-up your contact handlers to focus on more valuable work - like complex issues, account management, client retention and CSAT improvement. Many customers are still comfortable with emails because they can be authored when not ‘connected’ and sent as soon as they’re next online, with a clear time and date stamp. One example comes from the world of customer service. If human intervention is necessary, it will also automatically route the call to humans. Why Automation in Contact Centres has Benefits for Recruiters as well as Customers. Build IVR into your mobile apps. Robotic process automation (RPA) has become a major trend in call centre technology, offering significant cost savings through accuracy, greater compliance and … The knock-on effects will not only see improved and increased human interaction, but will also be good for the bottom line by reducing agent churn and call handling times and increasing first call resolutions. Almost two thirds (65%) of contact centre employees believe that the introduction of automation and robotic technology is an opportunity to learn new skills and grow their role within the business, while 66% believe these technologies will have an overall positive impact on their role. This collaboration between software bots and humans is called attended automation. Robotic process automation (RPA) is a tactical, short-term fix to digitise common, reproducible agent tasks in the contact centre. As a contact centre tech veteran, I can tell you that automation is nothing new. Customer experience is in the midst of mass disruption. 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. Information Entry and Management. Source: Statista. The self-service branch in particular has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years, with supermarket self-checkout counters, food-ordering phone apps and online chatbots becoming solidly embedded in our everyday lives. Contact centre automation, especially in key processes, is an effective way to achieve this. This practice remains prevalent today, resulting in poor SLA management, processing inefficiencies, unwanted repeat contacts, and inconsistent, unhelpful responses. 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. The automation of information flows has significant implications for many businesses, but it is perhaps in the contact centre that these implications are the most significant. Automation could just herald a new golden age for customer service. The question is, how can automation deliver fantastic new outcomes for contact centres? By communicating regularly with agents as well about the part that automation will play in their day-to-day jobs and what benefits they will see, will also quell any fears agents might have about loosing their job to a robot. Contact centers are the face and voice of BFSI, Retail, CPG, Hospitality, Tourism, Healthcare and many other sectors. 3 use cases of RPA in contact centres. Many companies have already introduced RPA into their contact centres and seen the rewards. The potential for automation in the call centre Call centre agents need to be trained to help customers with a wide variety of enquiries. Founded in 2001, the company has more than 300 customers and support more than four million transactions and 55,000 agents every day. Automation, it seems, is inevitable. Furthermore, many specialist providers have transformed their propositions to be consumed through cloud services, shifting to usage-based charging models supported by managed services, making them more cost-effective than previous capex-based on-premise solutions. Colin Hay Media archives within the contact centre solution are a perfect place to create a living library of machine learning and historical records of previous chat interactions. 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. Agents are key to CX and should be considered as part of the automation process with the aim of making their lives easier and letting them do what they’re good at. By providing agents with a digital assistant who can help with tasks such as updating contact details, or filling in forms, agents will have more time to spend with the customer with more complex issues, allowing the agent to fully put their training into practice. Furthermore, Gartner predicts that 25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants this year. Attended automation. How To Improve Caller Authentication in Contact Centres, 2021 Will Be The Year of CX in the Contact Centre, Happy Christmas From Everyone At contact-centres.com, Minimise Customer Effort & Maximise Customer Satisfaction, Alternatives to ‘Your Call Is Important To Us’ in the contact centre, Common Mistakes in Forecasting in the Contact Centre, Count to 5 for Perfect Multi-channel Forecasting, 5 Point Plan for Super-Connected CX Experience. The self-service branch in particular has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years, with supermarket self-checkout counters, food-ordering phone apps and online chatbots becoming solidly embedded in our everyday lives. Automation in customer service is not a new phenomenon. However, in the mean-time, there’s plenty of opportunity to make quick improvements that could release operational costs to fund projects which explore those new technologies. After all, they are the heart of every contact centre. 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. It’s also important to remember what makes a good automated process, as there are some that lend themselves more readily to RPA than others. Automation will also free up valuable time and budget, allowing you to focus on other areas such as enabling self-service capabilities, and letting your contact centre agents handle interactions that require human decision making and knowledge of more complex issues. Whether helping agents with their workloads, reducing call and wait times, or improving efficiencies in the systems, it’s essential to know what problems having automation technology can fix and what outcomes digital workers can deliver. How has COVID-19 affected your Contact Centre Operation? Source: Forrester. Harnessing the power of contact centre automation for a positive customer experience ... With the rapid advance of technology, however, self-service is fast becoming an important part of streamlined customer service. It also offers a range of professional services and devOps support, delivered by its highly accredited team of contact centre experts. From our heritage delivering and supporting traditional contact centres, through to new innovations in AI, Chatbots and Robotic Process Automation, we have been the trusted pioneer and evangelist of employee and customer experience for over 30 years with an enviable 98.7% customer retention rate. Steve has worked at some of Europe’s biggest contact centre integrators and at the world’s largest workforce optimisation and analytics vendor. A combination of rapidly advancing technology and increasingly high customer expectations is compelling businesses to transform the … If enterprises are to learn from any of the lessons of the past, the importance of being able to contact a human in customer service is unlikely to wane. For example, they can proactively collect and pass on customer data to agents from front-end systems, so that when the customer is eventually put in touch with the human agent, the agent is all set to go. With these figures in mind, Deloitte predicts that RPA will achieve near-universal adoption within the next three years. If you’re one of those organisations that still manually manages emails from one or more shared inboxes in this way, now is the time to reconsider automation, as many technology vendors in this space have made acquisitions, merged technologies, and developed new solutions to make contact centre workloads like email and web-chat more accessible and affordable, which will in turn benefit the customer. 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. 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. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. 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. The Age of Automation. IPI is focused on creating intelligent contact centre solutions that deliver exceptional customer experiences. Be the first to hear about our upcoming product releases, events and regular expert insights by completing the form below: Financial Results & Shareholder Communication. Automation in customer service is not a new phenomenon. 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. Maybe it’s because email isn’t as trendy as the more innovative customer experience technologies, or because it’s managed outside the contact centre. Looking at how to select the right processes to automate and considering what it means for the human agents on the front line are key places to start. And poor customer service not a new golden age for customer service is not a new golden age for service! Much to the dismay of their customers I can tell you that automation is the linking disparate! 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