Five Unique Ways Call Centers Use Automation to Improve the Customer Experience

Keeping the customer experience top of mind with your contact center agents and managers is an ongoing effort. The following examples demonstrate how contact center leaders are using real-time automation to empower employees to focus on improving the customer experience.

Go Above and Beyond

One global hospitality organization is always looking for new ways to improve employee engagement and the customer experience. The director of workforce management aligned the workforce management and operations groups to ensure agents have everything needed to provide a customer experience that fulfilled their brand promise.

They designed a program that empowered agents to go above and beyond for customers and used real-time automation to launch the program that recognizes agent accomplishments. The automation platform shares these success stories across the center using real-time rules that deliver the content during idle time. While maintaining service levels, agents get a short break (which is a huge morale booster on its own) to hear examples of how their peers made such a positive impact for their customers.

In one scenario, an agent made reservations for a family needing to be near the hospital for their young son to have medical treatment. During the conversation, the mother mentioned that her son was into superheroes. Thanks to the agent, the family was greeted by a team of superheroes when they checked into the hotel. The organization used the automation platform to share this compelling story with all of the contact center agents, providing a real example of how their efforts can dramatically impact the customer experience.

Conduct Proactive Outreach

A large retail company used automation to improve the customer experience with proactive outreach. For big-ticket purchases needing delivery, the company used automation to prompt agents to begin outbound calls to customers scheduled for an upcoming delivery.

This tactic, which enables blended agents to be automatically prompted via the rule to switch between inbound and outbound calls based on service level and agent availability, provided a significant lift in productivity. From the customer’s point of view, it delivered a positive experience, while saving inbound calls to the center.

An automated platform must have real-time integrations with the ACD and WFM to have immediate access to call queue data to make this dramatic increase in efficiency possible.

Care About Customer Well-Being

When storms are on the horizon, this utility company takes extra measures to contact an older, at-risk population of their customers. The agents are empowered to inform people of impending inclement weather to make sure they’re prepared in case an outage occurs. When agents receive automated prompts driven by real-time conditions, they begin making outbound calls to show their care and consideration for their most vulnerable customers.

Hold, Please

One minute feels much longer for a customer who has been placed on hold than for the agent who is using hold time to solicit help in resolving customer inquiries.

Workforce management teams have long watched dashboards to find agents with excessive hold times. Unfortunately, this approach is manual and subject to human intervention and management.

Modern centers now use contact center real-time automation to detect and ultimately reduce customer time spent on hold. They set up business rules within the platform to monitor for predetermined thresholds of the ACD agent hold state. The second that an agent passes specific thresholds, the agent receive real-time alerts to remind them about the customer and asking if they need help. Supervisors can also be alerted if agents spend too much time in this state. This real-time automation use case dramatically increases efficiency while also improving the customer experience.

Invest in Customer – And Agent – Satisfaction

It’s undeniable: engaged and empowered employees = happy customers. A leading telecommunications company made this a reality by delivering on both agents’ work-life balance needs as well as their development and training needs. The result: more engaged agents and better experiences for their customers. Here is what they did.

When it comes to work-life balance, the company used real-time automation to offer agents a chance to leave early - at the end of shift and/or for lunch and breaks. Real-time rules monitor WFM schedules and ACD call queue stats to assess: if agents’ break or end of shift is coming up; calls in queue; and that service levels are in check. This assessment is made in real-time versus at an interval level. Agents welcome the offer to leave early. And, no more getting stuck on long calls. Who wouldn’t like that?

When agents don’t have access to training and up-to-date communications needed to serve customers best, they become frustrated. Unfortunately, agents are most impacted by the typical scenario of back and forth training being canceled and rescheduled due to changes in call volume and needing to meet service levels.

This company put these training woes to rest by fully automating training activities via real-time rules, which find idle time based on real-time conditions to deliver training. That’s the power of operating in real-time, using actual, up to the second ACD data and knowing what training the agents are due, the rule can find and deliver the training.

When agents are consistently trained and engaged, they provide better customer service. Investing in agent development and satisfaction has been and will remain a key factor in improving the customer experience. Automation can certainly help provide a foundation – to learn more, check out lasts month’s article: Boost Morale by Giving Every Agent An Automated Manager.