Scope and Benefits of Customer Contact Center Automation

The volume of calls that the customer contact centers are processing has increased many-fold since the commencement of the CoViD pandemic. The hold time, average queue, average handle time (AHT) of calls, abandonment rate has all increased with this. This has resulted in various contact centers resorting to automation to meet the hike in demand.

The power and quality of automation has markedly improved the way contact centers manage their calls. Some of the direct benefits the caller enjoys are:

• The present day systems will retrieve the caller’s identity and other relevant information and present to the agent before the start of the call. This significantly reduces the average handle time of calls.

• The introduction of live chat facilities have helped to reduce hold time very much.

• With the help of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems much of the less complex issues could be addressed with lesser human intervention.

The next layer of benefits enjoyed by the contact center are: first call resolution (FCR) rates, better compliance, reduced errors, increased customer satisfaction, better agent experience, and reduced training and onboarding costs.

Researchers have identified that the introduction of Artificial Intelligence and Robotic process automation (RPA) can reduce the time spent by call-center agents on processes by 25 – 40% in the next five years.

Integration is the primary step to automation and the power of RPA could be tapped here for enhancing the integration options. With RPA, integration is possible not only with the APIs but also with the legacy applications are possible with RPA.

Low code options like RPA will enable the automation tasks in very less time and are the one of the best ways forward for yet-to-automate customer centers to survive in business.