Contact Center Automation: 5 Types of Calls You Should Automate Right Away

The way businesses operate their contact centers is a subject of constant change. Although all business processes change with time, the contact center is more sensitive to change as it directly deals with customers, and customer expectations are ever-evolving.  

As a forward-looking business, you cannot afford to ignore what the customers want – you might lose the competitive edge if you fail (or exceed) customer expectations. 

What Exactly Is Contact Center Automation?

Contact Center Automation is a way of managing contact center operations, such as having conversations with customers, through bots with no or partial interference from human agents. Often, the term contact center automation is used interchangeably with AI-powered Voicebots and Chatbots. 

Apart from AI Voicebots and Chatbots, AI agent assists are widely used across contact centers that help human agents quickly find the answer to customers' queries. 

The Need for Contact Center Automation

Contact center automation is a win-win situation for everyone - customers, employees, and the business itself.  

Increase Customer Satisfaction

One of the main strengths of contact center automation is its ability to enhance customer experience without rising operational costs. Customers love the 24/7 assistance from AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots - they can have customer service anytime, not just during office hours. Also, they don't have to wait in queue for the availability of a human agent. 

Contact center automation increases customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores up to 80%

Improve Agent Productivity

It is unwise to deploy human agents to perform repetitive, iterative tasks - it's not only a waste of human skills, but also it leads to unnecessary burnout of employees and dissatisfaction.  

So, businesses deploy AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots to take care of the conversations that can be automated, so human agents spend time on crucial tasks - such as building relationships, generating sales opportunities, and closing deals.  

Contact center AI increases agent productivity by up to 50%

Some businesses go the extra mile and provide their agents with AI agent assists - virtual assistants that quickly find information and suggest answers while human agents are on call with customers.  

Reduce Costs and Increase Digital Sales

Contact center automation saves you the costs involved in recruiting, training, and operating support agents and telemarketing teams. 

Also, customers love the personalized, interactive buying experience. AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots provide information related to your products and services and point your customers in the right direction, which helps customers make decisions faster. 

Personalized, Interactive Buying Experience Increases Digital Sales by 150%

Which Businesses Must Consider Contact Center Automation?

Whether your business should go for contact center automation or not depends upon the volume of customer calls that your contact center receives. Typically, any business with more than 10 human agents can benefit from contact center automation.  

Businesses that rely heavily on customer support are the early adopters of contact center automation. Here are some of the examples 

What Calls Can You Automate?

While planning the contact center automation strategy, the first question you face is to decide what types of calls/conversations should be automated.  

You must keep in mind that not all calls should be automated. Human agents must deal with calls with high urgency, complexity, or emotionality. Whereas, routine calls/conversations can be handled by Voicebots and Chatbot. 

For example, someone buys a present from your eCommerce store for her daughter on her birthday, but the present comes broken. Now, in this situation, the last thing you would want is to let the bot handle the frustrated father.  

But it is a waste of a human agent's skill if a customer wants to know how to pay his credit card bill. A bot can easily explain the process. 

Although it varies from business to business, here are a few categories of calls that you can automate right away that need minimal to no human interference. 

Automated Outbound Calls

1. Collection Calls

Payment or debt collection calls are a perfect choice for automation. Bots can make calls and send messages across channels to remind customers to pay bills, EMIs, or debts. Even customers love friendly bots. Consequently, the success rate of collection calls increases. 

2. Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is crucial for your business. With the help of a Voicebot or Chatbot, you can take detailed, interactive feedback. This feedback can be taken after the call with an agent or after an issue is resolved. 

3. Lead Qualification

If you have a lot of prospects, automated lead qualification calls can make your lead generation process seamless. The Voicebot makes calls, asks questions, and tags call based on the answers provided by the prospects. The bot can schedule an appointment with sales reps too. 

Automated Inbound Calls

1. Credit/Debit Card Related Queries

Voicebots and Chatbots can easily address customer queries related to credit/debit cards, such as reporting lost/stolen cards, blocking/unblocking cards, or filing disputes related to card transactions. The bots enable quick action that customers would expect. 

2. Claims FNOL and Claims Status

One of the common contact center automation use cases for insurance businesses is automating claims FNOL and providing information related to claims, such as claims status. Automation can make the claims process 3x faster than the manual process. 

3. Interest Rates

Voice bots and Chatbots can answer common queries like interest rates, which need no human interference. 

4. Bill Inquiry

Do you think it's fair to make your customer go through a tedious process to inquire about the bill amount? First, the customer has to wait for the availability of the agent. Next, the agent asks the customer for the customer id and other information to fetch the due amount. On the other hand, you can answer bill inquiries within seconds through Chatbot and Voicebots. 

5. FAQs or Customer Support

FAQs are another category of conversations that can easily be automated. Instead of making customers rely on the availability of human agents for simple queries, the bots can immediately answer common queries. 

In fact, in some cases, bots become more convenient as they provide precise, accurate answers. The human agent could come into the picture when bots fail to solve the customer's problem. 

6. Simple Service Request

AI Voicebots and Chatbots can seamlessly process simple service requests, such as address or phone number change, appointment booking, checking account balance or pending bill amount, and canceling or modifying orders. Customers appreciate the faster processing of their service. 

7. Call Back Requests

If your contact center is flooded with the calls, the Voicebot can tell your customer that they will receive a call back from the agent. And then, the bot can raise a ticket or remind agents through another method to call the customer. 

8. Appointment Scheduling

With contact center automation, you can streamline appointment scheduling, canceling, or rescheduling. 

Final Thoughts

Apart from the conversations mentioned above, different types of conversations can be automated based on industry and business. For example, insurance businesses can automate Claims FNOL, financial institutions can automate debt collections, and eCommerce businesses can automate WISMO (Where is my order?) queries. 

To decide what calls you should automate, you should analyze your existing calls and ask yourself which calls a Voicebot would have handled better.