In the aftermath of COVID-19 businesses are struggling to improve their customer experiences as the first point of contact is the hardest hit. From healthcare to banking industries, email, calls, and chats came pouring in as people around the world scrambled for information.
Additionally, contact volume in both public and private sectors spiked due to pandemic complications. This challenging complication of skyrocketing contact volumes and impaired contact center capacity has been grueling for customers to get access to the service or information they needed.
As per Deloitte survey, “65% of the contact centers are presenting dissimilar customer experiences across their offered channels.”
Moreover, businesses are going hyper-digital to provide a seamless, immersive customer experience. The adoption of digital customer experience has increased 10x during the pandemic.
The post-pandemic, customer interaction with an organization set off a prolonged effect on their sense of trust and loyalty. Hence, it is a must for contact center leaders to keep a real-time pulse on contact center trends to thrive in the new normal.
What is Contact Center Automation?
The contact center is a crucial piece of infrastructure for an organization that handles the routine tasks of external and internal customers’ requests at a large scale.
Also, managing a high volume of customers queries is a major undertaking for contact center agents. The other challenges faced by contact center agents include:
- Inconsistent onboarding
- High inbound call volume
- Technology limitations
- Multiple logins
- Switching between legacy system
- CRM management
As every customer is different, there is a broad range of strategies and expressions involved when customers interact with the contact center agents. The contact center agents must have omnichannel support and high discourse flexibility for swift resolution of customers’ queries and to prevent customer churn. And this seamless human-machine interaction is achievable by contact center automation using Robotic Process Automation and AI.
Even Gartner in a survey stated that “customer service and contact center leaders must leverage digital channels and capabilities to improve customer experience and a significant reduction in live volume”.
Contact center automation aims to handle these repetitive and routine tasks through intelligent algorithms without human agents’ interference.
With the automation-assisted contact center, organizations can hand off the post-call updates directly to robots and reduce error rates.
Why choose RPA in the Contact Center?
Businesses are embracing upcoming technologies to stay ahead of the digital disruption curve and RPA is an integral part of it. Hence, it will be naive for contact center leaders not to leverage automation or real-time assistance bots.
As per the PwC survey,”42% of customers want assistance online via real-time bots and smart AI voice assistants.”
RPA or AI-assisted technologies enable organizations to keep up with the ballooning interaction volume by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. By implementing RPA for contact center automation, contact center leaders can-
- Speed up agent productivity by automating data entry
- Integrate applications to make information available to agents at one click
- Level up contact agents confidence for better customer service with ticket intelligence
- Reduce cost on manpower and enhance ROI
Along with increasing productivity, lowering the operations costs, it frees up the contact center agents to focus on the higher-value tasks.
Furthermore, when used with a combination of AI and other cognitive technologies, contact center agents can become the agents of the future delivering real-time assistance.
Overall, RPA enables contact center leaders to deploy a digital worker factory model equipped with the intelligent virtual agent to handle multiple use cases, multichannel requests, and provide a consistent, hassle-free omnichannel experience to customers.
As per the KPMG report, the global robotic market is predicted to reach $157.2 billion.
RPA tools for Contact Center Automation
Real-time assistance is a positive force in the customer service space to bolster the customer experience with minimal human intervention.
Here are some trending RPA tools that can be leveraged to automate the process in the contact center industry:
Conversational AI is any software through which a person can talk to. It could be a chatbot, social messaging app, virtual assistant, or any other interactive voice-enabled interface. It is not a substitute for human-to-human interaction, instead, it is a substitute for situations where employees are entrapped with repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
What’s more compelling about conversational AI is that it uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies that provide a more realistic experience than traditional chatbots. With predictive analytics, conversational AI offers both text and voice modalities with multichannel support.
As per business insider intelligence, “conversational AI in banking operations can save up to $416 billion.” That’s one of the reasons digital banking is one of the most strengthened by AI & automation.
Overall, conversational AI offers a whole new category of capabilities that financial leaders can leverage to serve their customers and stakeholders.
1. AI-assisted chatbot
Chatbots are automated programs that interact with humans through textual and auditory means. By using natural language processing algorithms that assign a framework for programming computers, chatbots analyze and process large amounts of data.
Along with bringing operational efficiency, these chatbots save cost, offer convenience, and add service to internal employees and external customers.
Even when chatbots can’t resolve an issue, it transfers the issue to human agents and create efficiency for customers and agents.
These AI chatbots, can be around the helpdesk, CRM knowledge bases, Human Resources, Banking and so on.
Chatbots allow contact center agents to engage with their customers in a personalized manner in real-time and enable organizations to scale up and down as per business demands.
2. Real-time virtual assistant
As per a recent survey, more than 50% of customers don’t like waiting to talk to a contact center agent in real-time assistance. Hence, enabling virtual assistants in the contact center is imperative.
But, if your legacy system lacks APIs, then you might not be able to integrate and retrieve information in real-time. That’s where artificial intelligence comes into the picture.
By integrating AI, the virtual assistant effectively navigates through legacy systems that don’t have API.
Instead of providing answers from a readymade knowledge base, virtual assistants perform specific tasks such as resetting passwords, providing temporary USB access, onboarding process, and so on.
Virtual assistants also learn from the previous experiences by using NLP and save it to apply in case of similar interaction in the future.
At the same time, with faster resolution, virtual assistants eliminate the manual associate responsibility to resolve complex issues.
Zero-touch contact center with RPA
Contact centers are highly paced working environments, where multiple processes are conducted through multichannel.
But to thrive in the new normal, contact centers would likely need to embrace next-generation cloud-based and data-driven technology platforms to provide flexibility to employees.
Chatbots and virtual assistants have already stirred the winds for change. Hence, the contact center of the future must be a distributed network of agents and technologies combined to deliver customer service from anywhere in the world through any channel.
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Conclusion
Undoubtedly, in the hyper-digital Post-COVID industrial world, RPA is playing a key business enabler to provide a seamless, immersive, and touchless customer experience.
AutomationEdge, being a business transformation expert helps its clients to adopt the RPA-assisted content center or leverage the existing RPA tool to provide a never-before customer experience and have a competitive advantage.
So if you are looking for a business transformation partner or want to kickstart your RPA journey or leverage the existing RPA infrastructure in the contact center, request a live demo with our experts.