How to get added capacity into your Contact Centre

How to get added capacity into your contact centre

Brad Beumer, Customer Experience and Contact Centre Automation Lead at UiPath explores how intelligent automation can support your customers, boosting the employee experience and improving the customer experience.

Customer service remains one of the top ways customers interact with your brand. How you address customer complaints and challenges can leave a lasting impression — and customers demand better results the more they interact with you. More than half of all customers expect an improvement in customer service year-over-year, according to a recent survey. This demand for more knowledgeable and personable agents comes at a time of upheaval and turnover for the industry. Contact centre turnover hovers between 30-45% and disruption caused by the pandemic didn’t help matters. In this environment, many customer service centres are turning to technology to reduce the stress on their employees. Solutions such as robotic process automation (RPA) and AI are increasingly being deployed with existing channels to create an intelligent virtual agent to help customers solve difficult issues without the need to speak with a live agent. This can increase customer satisfaction and boost employee satisfaction and retention. With automation and AI working together with existing service channels you can create an intelligent virtual agent available 24x7x365. This helps companies move the needle on metrics like self-service containment and call deflection. The ability to provide support at all hours increases customer satisfaction by eliminating the need to wait until normal business hours to call in. Reducing the number of calls can both reduce wait times and improve agent productivity by focusing their time on solving complex challenges. Finally, automation can improve the employee experience by easing the stress of your employees. This in turn can reduce turnover — essential at a time when many employees are short-staffed.

Here are three areas using automation can support your customers, increase productivity and improve employee experience.

Help Customers Help Themselves

One of the keyways intelligent virtual agents can assist your customers is by unlocking systems and processes that today require live agent assistance. Automation can unlock access to systems and data to allow customers to help themselves by allowing them to securely perform the same steps as a real agent. For example, a global fintech provider leveraged UiPath automation connected to their existing interactive voice response (IVR) system to automate common customer inquiries, eliminating around 10,000 calls per day to the contact centre.

Create a Proactive Engagement Model

Customers have a multitude of different channels to engage businesses with, research shows that two-thirds still prefer to resolve issues over the phone, making phone service a key component of your customer service strategy. Virtual agents allow your company to move from a reactive to a proactive engagement model. For example, you can leverage automation when a customer needs to be contacted. Given a set of parameters, you can determine who should be called, when to call them and what should be said or asked. Automation can provide this information to the virtual agent to place the actual outbound call. Once your virtual agent interacts with the customer to gather and provide updated information, the virtual agent can give everything back via automation to update the CRM as well as other systems. When one clinic needed to check in on their patients to get updates on their COVID symptoms, they used UiPath automation together with their existing IVR. As the IVR read from a prepared script, robots were updating patient info in real time, freeing clinicians from having to speak to everyone and only focusing on those patients who needed immediate attention. Another health care company sought to use RPA and AI to expedite documentation completion, streamline bill payment and automate prescription refills. Together, automation works to both help customers and help customers help themselves.

Hand Off Tasks

Much like your agents shouldn’t have to do everything themselves, neither should your virtual agents. Automation can complete a number of repetitive, low-level tasks to support your customers. The virtual agent can instruct robots to perform a number of background tasks, such as securely unlocking accounts, filing claims forms, starting loan applications, triggering fraud claim investigations, disputing transactions and many more.

As the labour market remains tight, many companies have turned to automation to improve customer service and reduce stress on their staff working in the contact centre. Automation and AI can combine with new and existing self-service channels to form a virtual agent to handle routine customer service tasks. Virtual agents can improve self-service containment rates, route calls more effectively, create a proactive engagement model and increase customer satisfaction by increasing the efficiency in which customer challenges are addressed.