For many businesses, the pandemic generated a spike in contact center traffic bringing the need for more contact center automation for all the industries.
During the record-high customer support ticket volumes, many companies looked to AI-powered technology like chatbots and interactive voice response to assist their overworked and overwhelmed customer contact centers. During the pandemic, one in three companies adopted interactive voice response (IVR) and live chat as communication channels for the first time.
Situation didn't come back to normal and contact center automation keeps standing as a beacon of innovation, transforming the landscape of customer service.
What is it, exactly?
Contact center automation refers to the utilization of technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), RPA and NLP, to streamline and expedite customer interactions within a contact center environment. It involves automating routine and repetitive tasks that were traditionally performed manually by human agents.
By implementing automation, contact centers can handle a higher volume of customer inquiries across various communication channels such as phone calls, emails, social media and live web-based chat. This allows for immediate service and a more efficient customer support experience.
Automation can be supported through several different technologies, including:
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Chatbots: AI-powered virtual assistants that interact with customers through chat interfaces.
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Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Technology that allows call center machines to interact with customers via voice recognition or keypad inputs.
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Voice Bots: Voice bots, also known as virtual assistants or conversational AI, are a more advanced form of IVR that can understand spoken language and provide relevant and helpful responses to customer interactions over the phone.
Modern contact center automation brings human agents and virtual agents together as collaborative co-workers. When virtual agents are integrated correctly into a contact center, they can seamlessly hand off complex or escalated issues to human agents when necessary, ensuring a positive customer experience.
What processes can be automated?
We already mentioned that contact center automation can significantly streamline customer service by automating routine inquiries and tasks, allowing agents to focus on more complex issues.
This includes the automation of responses to common customer questions, which can be quickly addressed by AI without human intervention, enhancing efficiency.
Additionally, processes such as ticket routing and prioritization are automated, ensuring that customer requests are directed to the appropriate department or agent skillset, improving response times.
Automation can also handle transactional tasks, such as billing inquiries or account updates, further reducing the workload on human agents and speeding up service delivery.
Some recent examples of contact center automation
DNB, Norway’s largest bank, was finding it increasingly difficult to provide quick and accurate assistance to customers through channels such as phone, email and live chat. Their manual processes were inefficient and time-consuming for agents, often leading to delays in providing assistance and negatively impacting the customer experience. DNB launched the virtual agent ‘Juno’ to assist its agents and advisors in quickly and easily accessing the various routines they need to follow when assisting customers, in addition to other key information.
DNB’s agents now exclusively use Juno to access routines specific to their departments more quickly and effectively than ever. In 2022 alone, Juno answered over 2 million questions from around 1,200 daily active users, positioning the bot as a helpful digital colleague. - Read the full DNB case study
Nordea, the leading Nordic bank whose operations span Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, needed to find self-service options for its 9 million private customers and more than 500,000 active corporate customers. Across the Nordics, Nordea’s virtual agent ‘Nova’ averages over 220,000 conversations per month purely for private banking customers.
In Norway, Nova answers customers’ questions on more than 2,300 banking topics related to private and business banking and averages around 50,000 conversations each month with private banking customers, with no assistance from a human agent. In Sweden, Nordea can efficiently automate hundreds of inquiries each day without ever needing to escalate to a human. To date, Nova has a 91% in-scope resolution rate for private banking customers and 95% for corporate customers. - Read the full Nordea case study
Norwegian telecommunications giant Telenor wanted to increase its customer service offerings with the introduction of conversational AI virtual agent, ‘Telmi.’ Today, Telmi offers a range of functionality to customers who are logged into their Telenor account, including the ability to request a PUK code, upgrade their mobile data plan or view their invoice.
Since Telmi’s launch in January 2019, Telenor’s business and ROI goals were achieved within the first year, and Telmi has further proven itself, acting as an additional sales channel to help increase revenue. - Read the full Telenor case study
Now it’s clear to us that contact center’s automation technology is not just a fleeting trend but a pivotal shift in how businesses interact with their customers. By automating routine tasks and streamlining customer service processes, companies can significantly enhance efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and allow human agents to focus on more complex, value-added activities.
Embracing contact center automation is a step forward into a future where technology and human ingenuity combine to create more meaningful and productive customer interactions.