Contact center automation

Could You Automate These 4 Front-Line Contact Center Tasks?

If there’s one industry that can benefit from automation in a big way – it’s the contact center industry.

So why do so many contact centers have trouble automating even the simplest processes?

We’ve come up with four vital processes which our clients are always interested in automating.

Here’s the question for you: do you have the resources to automate these processes, quickly and with zero fuss?

In this post:

4 contact center tasks you should be able to automate

#1 Identifying inbound callers

Let’s start at the beginning of a typical interaction. The first thing you need to know about any caller is – who are they?

(And by extension, what’s their relationship with your business? Customer? Ex-customer? Future customer?)

Some contact centers are about halfway to automating this – they have their IVR ask for identifying information, like a reference number.

Others leave it to the agent to ask ‘Can I take your name, reference number, date of birth, shoe size…’

talk time contact center

Source

How does automation help?

Forget reference numbers – the simplest way to identify a caller is by using their phone number. 

CTI makes this easy, ‘recognizing’ phone numbers and linking them to the caller’s profile in your CRM. But for some reason, only around half of contact centers do this!  

There are a few obvious benefits and the biggest is probably the saved time. Finding a caller’s profile manually can easily put an extra 20 seconds on every call.

20 seconds is a big deal for a busy contact center – with 100 agents each fielding 35 calls, that’s 20 wasted hours per day.

(Need more information? Read ‘what is CTI?’ ) 

#2 Real-time customer data

So you have CTI identifying incoming callers – good start!

But how do you get that information to your agents? If you’re moving data around quickly, make sure agents benefit from it too – don’t have them trawling through CRM records!

This is true for both inbound and outbound calls. Whether you’re talking to customers or leads, agents need the right data, now.

what customers want

How does automation help?

Real-time customer data is vital.

80% of contact centers say their agents are hampered by using multiple screens to access basic information. 

Even worse, 60% of First Contact Resolutions fail because agents can’t access the right information at all.  

The data you supply to agents needs to be:

  • Succinct
  • Accurate
  • Immediate

It’s up to you how you tackle this. 

The babelforce approach is to give agents an automatic screen pop of customer data scraped from CRM, lead management systems and your Helpdesk.

They know, at a glance, who they’re dealing with.

If agents cannot easily access relevant information, they obviously cannot deliver fast, convenient, accurate experiences for customers.

They also cannot connect with customers. Agents who fumble through multiple screens cannot pay sufficient attention to the customers with whom they are interacting. They, moreover, cannot readily access the insights they need to make meaningful connections.’

Brian Cantor, Contact Center Success in the Automation Age 

#3 Data entry

Y’know, the babelforce team deals with some pretty flashy, interesting automation. (Think skills-based routing, virtual queuing and pre-emptive service.)  

Data entry is nowhere near as attention-grabbing… but it is a fundamental part of contact center operations.

How does automation help?

Automation helps data entry in two key ways:

  1. By recording data (like, who called you)
  2. By sharing that data across different systems

We’ve already looked at how you can use CTI to identify callers. The next step is to automatically use that data to update your call log. 

For example: Mrs B, loyal customer, calls you. With CTI, you link her phone number to her profile in your CRM. At the same time, Mrs B’s details are entered into the call log, saving on after-call work. 

So that was part 1 – what about sharing that data across systems? 

With API integration, that’s simply not an issue. In effect, APIs means that your systems aren’t meaningfully separate at all – the same data can exist in all of them by default.

That’s good news for the 83% of contact centers who are aware of data silos at their organization! 

(Have you been meaning to learn more about APIs in automation? Read ‘How do APIs enhance contact center services?) 

…an organization with multiple data silos will find that as it grows each silo will scale independently of the others and lead to greater silos. As a result, its CX program becomes more and more complex to the point where the input far exceeds the output.’

Andrew Park, The Danger of Data Siloes 

#4 Managing outbound calls

This is one of the biggest pieces of manual work to tackle.

And we’re just not talking about dialing – in fact, we’re going to assume that you already use a power dialer or predictive dialer for that.  

No, the other massive piece of manual work is in putting together call lists. 

contact center obstacles

Source

How can automation help?

You might place outbound calls to make sales, provide service or conduct surveys. 

And those call lists don’t spring out of nowhere, do they? 

Creating call lists has tended to be a long-winded process with way too much manual input. But that’s just another kind of data entry, and we’ve already seen how easy it is to automate that…

Your systems – lead management, CRM, Helpdesk, etc. – contain the details of everybody you’d like to reach out to.

So all you just need is:

  • integration between those systems and your outbound dialer
  • an automated process that tells the dialer which entries to call (including recycled contacts you didn’t reach the first time.)

How do babelforce users automate contact center tasks?

This is the crucial bit – you need a way to actually make the automated process…

So how do you do that?

Well, if you have a large and well-resourced development team – working exclusively for the contact center – they’ll create whatever you want.

Do you have that?

Of course not. 

But here’s what you could have… babelforce is a No-Code automation platform. That means our users create processes with simple, user-friendly tools.

There’s no coding involved (the clue’s in the name) so users don’t need development skills to go from designing to creating their ideal processes. 

All they need is some time – usually a few hours – to assemble pre-built elements however they want them. 

It’s really that simple. 


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