19 Contact Center Automation Examples to Improve Your Operation

When you reduce the number of manual tasks in your contact center, you remove the high potential for error and improve the efficiency of tasks, routing, and customer inquiries.

One of the first steps is implementing contact center automation. However, with such a wide array of options, finding the right starting point can be overwhelming.

Here, we introduce front-end, back-end, and tangential contact center automation that you can implement immediately.

Front-End Customer Interactions You Should Automate

The major benefit of introducing contact center automation is the more efficient customer experience your customers will receive. Looking after the front end of your contact center is paramount to reducing average handle time (AHT) and first-call resolution (FCR). When planning for customer service automation, put these areas at the top of your agenda.

Automated call routing and interactive voice response (IVR) systems

With IVR systems, you can offer a menu of options for callers. Once selected, this system routes calls to the best-suited agent or department.

Behind the scenes, you configure skills so the right agents can match your customers’ input. Once an option gets selected, call routing automatically seeks an available agent, removing the need for manual transfers and speeding up the process.

You might have these types of VoIP automations available via your phone system. Or you may need to introduce a formal call center solution.

Self-service options

When thinking about call center automation, there’s no better enabler than self-service — especially if you’ve got tons of customers holding for repetitive tasks.

Rather than taking up your call center agents’ time with the same queries over and over again, you can implement chatbots, knowledge bases, and automated FAQs to enable customers to resolve simple issues without speaking to an agent.

• Start with basic customer queries like opening hours.
• Move on to automatic payments.
• Explore the possibilities of contact center artificial intelligence (AI) and see how much you can delegate to self-service options.

Automated callbacks

Rather than penalizing customers for your lack of availability, you can hold their position in line and call them back when their turn comes around.

Removing the need for long wait times is sure to boost customer satisfaction. Turning on automated callbacks is one of the simplest contact center automation features you can enable — and possibly one of the most effective.

Virtual assistants and chatbots

AI-powered bots can handle routine customer inquiries, book appointments, and provide order status updates without human intervention. Human agents then have the time to dedicate to more meaningful and complex tasks.

Going a step further than a basic chatbot, which answers pre-configured questions, you can use an intelligent virtual agent (IVA) — also known as conversational AI — to have entire conversations with your customers. IVAs use natural language processing to add context and emotion rather than responding with black-and-white answers.

If you’re exploring customer experience automation, make sure the proper rollout of virtual assistants is high on your agenda.

Automated ticketing

Automating the creation, assignment, and tracking of support tickets ensures that no customer issues fall through the cracks, routing them all efficiently to the right team. That means you can rely on a system with triggers and processes rather than the memory of a busy agent.

Automating tasks like these also reduces the burden on agents. When they no longer need to fulfill data entry tasks during wrap-up, there’s less chance of making a human error and more time to handle incoming calls.

Omnichannel interaction management

When you automate the handling of customer interactions across multiple channels and route them to the same centralized platform, you enable easy access and management.

Omnichannel supports the following channels:

• Phone
• SMS
• Email
• Web chat
• Social media
• Messaging platforms

What’s more, customers appreciate that agents can see their whole interaction history without needing to repeat their query, and they don’t need to wait for agents to confer with colleagues.

Unlike multichannel, omnichannel takes those channels and provides agents with a holistic view of all history, documentation, and transactions.

Back-End Contact Center Operations You Should Automate

Contact center automation has a major part to play behind the scenes, too. Here, you can expect to gain process efficiencies and better-quality data that you can do more with. These steps aren’t necessarily seen by customers, but they play a key role in improving agent productivity.

CRM integration and data syncing

Automating the syncing of data between your contact center platform and CRM ensures agents have access to the most current customer information, reducing the need for manual updates and the risk of errors.

When you integrate the two, you remove the need for manual searching and constant app switching.

The result? Lower AHT, higher agent availability, and happier customers.

Data appending and enrichment

When it comes to making and receiving calls, the more information you have, the more empowered agents are. If you’re lacking customer data, you can lean on automatic appending of missing or incomplete data from external sources.

Doing so improves the quality of customer profiles, and agents can have more personalized interactions. This not only enhances the customer experience, but it also increases the chance of booking appointments and securing callbacks in sales scenarios.

Data hygiene and deduplication

When you have enough customer data, the next step is keeping it clean and up to date. Automation tools can continuously clean up and deduplicate customer data, ensuring the retention of accurate records and reducing the risk of errors in customer interactions.

When agents have faith in the data they’re working with, they can speak with authority and resolve customer issues efficiently.

Workflow automation

If you send follow-up emails, escalate tickets, or trigger billing processes, there is a ton of time to be saved. These activities no longer need to be manually initiated processes or develop into time-consuming tasks that move from department to department.

Instead, you can use robotic process automation to configure pre-populated emails, tickets, and purchase orders that get actioned when a specific task completes.

For example, when you’ve worked through all first-line troubleshooting but haven’t reached a resolution, you can close off the first-line ticket and automatically assign a second-line engineer for escalation.

The ticket gets assigned to the appropriately skilled engineer, and an outbound call or email gets triggered. There’s no more checking of queues and hunting for personnel — just a smooth workflow targeted at efficient resolution.

Call monitoring and alerting

When there are drops in service, you need to know about them. Instead of sifting through random customer calls and hoping to find good or bad ones, you can enable automatic call monitoring and notify supervisors when issues are detected.

You might have an agent constantly being flagged for poor script adherence. It might be a live call with negative sentiment detected. It could also be a glowing reference from a customer when an agent has gone above and beyond.

Whatever the scenario, get notified in-app or via email so you can take the appropriate actions either mid-call or after the event.

Automated reporting and analytics

How long does it take to generate reports for call volume, agent performance, or customer satisfaction?

The answer, in many cases, is too long. Rather than spending hours — and sometimes even days — manipulating Excel spreadsheets, you can generate real-time reports and AI-driven analytics for your key performance indicators and metrics.

Nextiva Analytics gives you instant insight into the following call center metrics:

• Net promoter score
• Customer satisfaction
• FCR
• Customer effort score
• AHT
• Call volume
• Agent availability
• Agent utilization rate
• Occupancy rate
• Average speed of answer
• Cost per call
• Service level
• Call abandonment rate

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you factor in omnichannel reporting across channels like web chat and email, you uncover all sorts of insights that can optimize contact center processes and help you make business decisions.

Predictive analytics

Taking the data and analytics you gather, you can use built-in AI and machine learning to predict customer needs, anticipate problems, and identify patterns.

Armed with this information, you can take proactive measures to enhance service quality. There’s no more guesswork. You’re now empowered almost immediately with high-quality data and better decisions.

This means you can get in-flight suggestions to make more agents available, reroute calls, or focus more resources on different channels.

Other Actions You Should Automate

Outside these core front-end and back-end improvements, there are some key aspects that can be vastly improved thanks to contact center automation, even if they’re usually treated as an aside from the contact center. So, make sure to factor in all the following:

Workforce management

Call center workforce management was once a cumbersome task with minimal reward if staffing plans even slightly changed. Your supervisor — tasked with forecasting — spent weeks figuring out how many agents were needed at specific times, then you suffered an outage, and it was all for nothing.

Now you can automate agent scheduling based on predicted call volumes and dynamic algorithms to optimize staffing. When you factor in the possibility of change, you can prepare best-case, most likely, and worst-case scenarios for staff rotas.

By maximizing contact center agents’ time and skills while minimizing operational costs, you can put a green check mark next to your business unit for budget, bottom line, and customer satisfaction.

Training and onboarding

Automated platforms can help onboard new agents and provide continuous, personalized training. Rather than relying on one-to-one training for a new agent, you can use tools like training videos, tutorials, and automated Q&A systems to get agents up to speed.

With some call center software, you even have test logins so new agents can roleplay customer scenarios. You can use anonymized customer data to get them used to the look and feel of day-to-day interactions without pulling experienced agents away from their day jobs.

Feedback collection

How do you know what your customers feel about their experience with a call? Sure, you might rely on agent feedback. But what’s better than asking your customers directly? Consider adding a post-call (or post-web chat, post-email, etc.) survey to gather real-time customer satisfaction data.

You can ask questions like:

• Did the customer support agent fully resolve your query?
• On a scale from 1 to 10, how helpful was the agent who helped you?
• Answering yes or no, based on your recent interaction, would you recommend [your business] to a friend?

Creating a Survey – V.2

Call recording and storage

Turn on automatic call recording to ensure you keep an archive for training and compliance purposes. Instead of relying on agents to turn it on when they think they need it, you can roll this out across the company to avoid the potential of missing compliance adherence.

You also benefit from a vast repository of calls you can lean on as examples when onboarding new agents and reviewing agent performance.

Transcription and analysis

With your bank of call recordings, turn on real-time transcription and sentiment analysis to monitor compliance and improve service.

Listening back to call recordings for the vital moment is time-consuming and adds little value. Instead, you can jump to highlighted sections in a transcript and review the call from that point on. You’ll save hours every week and be able to focus more time on customers.

Automated backups and business continuity

When you suffer a power outage or system failure, what happens to your contact center? Does everything come to a grinding halt while agents revel in their unplanned break?

While this might be great for morale, it’s taking its toll on your business. Customers can’t reach you, and no outbound calls are being made. Instead of chalking this down as “one of those things,” make the conscious decision to ensure continuous real-time data backups for improved disaster recovery capabilities.

You can also automate critical functions during downtime to streamline operations and service delivery. Things like automated triggering of backup power sources and failover to other locations are commonplace in high-performing contact centers.

Harness the Power of Automation in Your Contact Center With Nextiva

Automating customer-facing and back-end contact center processes is vital for those seeking more efficiency and better customer experiences. When you automate workflows and processes, you see immediate, tangible results. Among many other metrics, expect to see improvements in:

• Employee satisfaction
• Agent performance
• Customer satisfaction
• AHT
• FCR rates
• Average speed of answer

When you have a unified contact center platform like Nextiva at the heart of your business, enabling these automations is even easier.

When planning call routing, customer journeys, and workflows, Nextiva makes it easy for customers to embrace self-service and walk the path of least resistance.