If you’re struggling to deliver great customer experiences with an understaffed contact center, you aren’t alone. A 2021 survey of call center agents and their managers across 12 verticals revealed a 42 percent turnover rate on average, according to NICE. At a time when consumers have increasingly higher expectations for personalized service, agents can quickly become overwhelmed and burned out, leading them to seek alternate employment.
On top of that, adding staff members comes at a considerable price for contact centers. Accounting for recruiting, training, and lower productivity while the new employee learns the ropes, replacing a call center agent costs approximately $10,000 to $20,000, according to McKinsey & Company.
Fortunately, there is a way to make work more engaging and less stressful for your agents and increase productivity without hiring more staff members: Contact center automation. With technologies like conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA), you can delegate mundane and basic work to bots, freeing up your human employees to tackle more complex and interesting tasks. Ultimately, automation can lead to happier agents and better customer experiences since your non-bot staff will have more time to focus on complicated client issues.
If you’re wondering how to deploy automation in your contact center, here are some of the top use cases, according to UiPath, Qualtrics and CX Today.
- Self-service options like chatbots and intelligent interactive voice response (IVR) systems
- Data entry
- Customer sentiment analysis
- Call transcription and summaries
- Virtual assistants and prompts for agents
- Workflow automation (e.g., adding customer info to your CRM after calls)
- Speech and text analytics to track customer sentiment
- Customer survey generation and distribution
- Data extraction from documents
- Remote agent performance monitoring
- Quality management (e.g., notifying supervisors if agents deviate from standard procedures and need intervention)
Contact center automation can lead to significant improvements, including a 30 percent reduction in average handling time, a 35 percent reduction in client call volume, and an overall 10x performance boost, according to UiPath.
Our technology consultants are here to help if you want to learn more about your automation options. With our extensive partner network, decades of tech industry experience, and access to exclusive up-to-the-minute research and reports, we can rapidly identify solutions that make sense for your business based on your unique needs and goals. Additionally, we can generate objective comparison matrices so you can see how various suppliers and products compare side-by-side. On top of that, we leverage a proven methodology to suggest solutions you wouldn’t have otherwise considered and disrupt dysfunctional internal decision-making.
Start your transformation today by calling 877-599-3999 or emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com.