10 Ways to Increase Agent Productivity Through Contact Center Automation

1. Cheatsheet: 10 Ways to Increase Agent Productivity Through Contact Center Automation

2. Agent Productivity Through Contact Center Automation Creating a memorable customer experience is the end goal of every contact center. Faster and more efficient processes are what define contact center competencies in today’s world and automation is the way to ensure that. Contact center automationrefers to the process of letting technology take over repetitive and manual tasks. Ranging from RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to conversational (voice and chatbot) assistants, the whole landscape of contact center processes is getting transformed. It helps to streamline the routine processes, save time, minimize human involvement and reduce operational costs. To achieve this, contact centers need a seamless amalgamation of technology and an agent’s efficiency.

3. Why Contact Center Automation is Required? Running a contact center can turn out to be expensive. Management is always looking at performance of call center agents to optimize costs. The automation process can help improve key call center metrics along with performance while also reducing costs. Here’s how: Reduce human errors Increase agents work efficiency Keep everyone updated Automation can be pivotal in reducing agent’s workload, responsibilities and allow them to address customers' concerns in a prompt manner. By automating the contact center workflows, the need for repetitive data inputs gets eliminated and enhances communication across departments. With contact center automation, reminders, alerts and notifications are automated, offering more insights into the contact center operations and helps keep agents and supervisors on track by keeping them informed.

4. 10 Ways to Enhance Agent Productivity via Automation Here are ten ways why contact center automation merits our attention and has proven itself to be the future of contact center customer communication: Leveraging self-service channels Ensure Omnichannel experience Routing calls to appropriate agents Increasing First Call Resolution Rates Optimizing workforce management and planning Enabling contextual conversations Automating manual and repetitive tasks Unified customer information Improving internal communication Ensure smart monitoring & analytics

5. Leveraging self-service channels Report from Microsoft highlights that 90% of customers globally expect brands to have an online self-service portal. Multiple platforms for agents to connect with your customers is a great way to analyze their performance and increase productivity. An omnichannel approach allows them to handle a higher number of clients or customers with a single contact center software. It will get easier to identify the agents who are pro at resolving queries of multiple customers and the ones who are not. Even customers prefer a company with an omnichannel presence as a trust factor. Self-service options such as SMS, email, chat, virtual agents,etc can reduce call volumes and improve agent productivity.

6. Routing Calls to Appropriate Agents Everyone needs monitoring and support for improvement. So, your contact center needs a to route calls and guide them whenever required. For this, even a supervisor desktop is a good product as it allows managers to live barge-in, route calls, or perform re-skilling of agents. The AI powered IVR systems have something new to offer, over and above the functionalities of the traditional IVR. From voice assistant, predictive analytics and biometric authentication, the AI driven IVR is all about making customer experience truly smooth and helping improve productivity metrics by really understanding customers.

7. Enabling Contextual Conversations If your agents have to constantly search for information through multiple systems, emailing, calling managers, or consulting colleagues to answer questions, therein lies the productivity rub! Contrast this with the AI powered knowledge base, assisted by virtual agents to offer relevant and contextual information. Agents don’t feel lost while conversing with a customer and can pick up a conversation where another agent left it previously. This saves time because both the parties and agents don't feel secluded from a previous interaction because now they have the contextual anchor to drive the conversation ahead and not back. This is what a customer support automation tool does. By giving a unified view of the customer to the agents, not only does the average ticket handling time go down but also makes call handling processes simpler for live agents.

8. Improving internal communication Agents have to put customers on hold to seek information from sales, billing and technical departments in order to address the query effectively. Not only the customer experience but the productivity of agents and the entire team suffers. By strengthening the internal communication system It becomes much easier and simpler for agents to get in touch with the internal technical team, their manager or even a colleague for that matter. The integration of unified communications (UC) with the contact center breaks down team barriers, improves effortless communication and promotes a customer-centric culture. Agents can instantly refer to required information while resolving customer queries and share related documents with the customer for better understanding. Similarly, there are gadgets like inter-team communication, agent phonebook that help improve the agent’s performance.

9. Improving First Contact Resolution Rate How high would an organization's productivity be if customer issues were addressed around the first time they called? When concerns are addressed at first, the same customer doesn’t keep calling around, which impacts team productivity considerably. Also, not to forget that FCR is influenced by lack of access to customer information and systems data. A disparate contact center where software is not integrated, agents struggle to find access to accurate information about their product/service and have to toggle across screens and consult various people. All the while keeping agents on hold. Automated integrated information via knowledge base and training helps to resolve customer issues in the very first attempt and reduces the chances of a customer calling back again and again.

10. Automating Manual and Repetitive Tasks Agents are burdened with a lot of tasks in contact centers. When they have to deal with repetitive, manual, monotonous tasks, it doesn’t only impact agent productivity but also impacts agents motivation towards their job. Automation frees up agents to take care of more important issues while significantly reducing errors and keeping information up-to-date. The automation of contact center processes streamlines operations and improve agents performances by: Sensing order update messages to customers Updating customer information on CRM Call logging and recording calls Adding tickets

11. Ensure Omnichannel Experience With omnichannel presence, agents will be handling a larger call volume across channels, but with integrated contact center solution, agents will be able to multitask. They can manage customers across channels within a single interface by swapping between channels. Also, an application like ticketing and billing can be taken care of with seamless integration in place By automating your contact centers for customer support, conversations are automatically recorded, saved and synced with your CRM and other customer data platforms in real-time. The customers not only not only reach out to you across multiple platforms but their previous chats also get synchronized across these platforms. This truly ensures a delightful omnichannel experience in every sense of the term.

12. Optimizing Workforce Management and Planning Call center workforce optimization (WFO) is a practice used in call centers of ensuring their employees are appropriately scheduled, trained, monitored, evaluated, rewarded and engaged. The success of call centers is heavily dependent on the quality of their agents and efficient management of labor costs. Contact center automation can help in optimization of staff scheduling, make it easier for agents and supervisors to share workload and reduce the time spent on allocating shifts to the team members. This way contact center industries can ensure that the right agents, with the right and requisite skills are available in a shift when they are needed most to address queries.

13. Unified Customer Information If agents hustle and are motivated to work, they may not get the returns as expected. Improving the average call handling time requires the agent to be able to quickly access the right information. If all the customer data like chat/purchase history, customer’s location, communication platform etc. is displayed on a single screen, it also helps with customer profiling and gives an option of sending customized messages to customers. Not to mention that in the long run, this paves the way for streamlined interactions, better customer retention and optimized revenues. NovelVox unified agent desktop, for example, is the information unifying tool that your agent needs. Agents can deliver all customer support across multiple communication channels like phone, chat, email, social media platforms without multiple logins. Secondly, agents are aware about entire customer journeys making it easier for them to understand customer’s concerns and giving them the desirable services.

14. Ensure Smart Monitoring & Analytics Call content is equally important when it comes to improving call center or agent productivity. Analyzing the content of the call is important to understand what type of calls your organization receives. Based on the call intent, they can be routed to a visual IVR, a bot, or an agent. This can bring down the call flow to agents and help them improve the quality of calls they handle. By decoding the customer sentiments and deciphering their utterances, such tools can report on the emotional state of the person and help in maintaining a positive sentiment all through the interaction. AI-driven bots, for example, can read into the customer’s sentiments based on their typed and spoken responses - words, expressions, punctuations, emojis and help agents to deliver empathetic answers that offer the best customer experience.

15. Biggest Library of Cisco Finesse Ready Integration

16. About NovelVox We, at NovelVox strive to create and deliver automated contact center solutions for exceptional caller experience. Our core contact center solutions include Unified Agent Desktops, CRM Integrations and Wallboards for Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Amazon Connect, Webex CC, etc. Our AI-powered omnichannel customer engagement platforms - CXInfinity, Chatbot - InfiBot, Live chat, Voicebot, Video chat, and Co-Browse empower clients to deliver state-of-the-art CX across different channels. We deliver scalable CTI integrations with CRM platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, ServiceNow, MS Dynamics, Epic, and Oracle Service Cloud to automates tasks, simplifies data management processes, and enhances CX. You can easily optimize your customer service operations through BI-enabled reporting & analytics.

17. info@novelvox.com www.novelvox.com +1888544808