6 Types of Call Center Automation You Should Have in 2023

With technology providing the means to get everything within reach, every business is striving for more automation. Mainly call center automation trends are getting buzz in the market.

People can accomplish various tasks more quickly with technology, including customer service. As businesses continue to benefit from technological advancements, real-time automation becomes more important to them.

An automated call center eliminates the need for human intervention by automating repetitive tasks using technology integrations. These call centers can automate many different business processes.

You can upgrade your interactive voice response (IVR) system using automatic speech recognition (ASR). Customers can access self-service options, such as checking their account balances.

Additionally, ASR helps authenticate the identity of the customer before connecting them to an agent. Automation allows call centers to offload routine and time-consuming tasks, improving customer experiences, which in turn makes them more efficient.

Why is Call Center Automation is Important?

Simply put, the automation of a call center is all about reducing time and energy expenditures. This is crucial to become much more efficient. In fact, call centers equipped with automation customized for their needs are more successful.

Optimization of the processes is important for every call center, but specifically in a way that improves the efficiency and performance of their human agents. No matter how cliché it might sound, the fact is customer experience matters most; and agents must be empowered to deliver positive customer experiences.

This is where automated call center software can help, as it does most of the dull and repetitive work. Since your agents don’t have to spend as much time inputting customer data or taking care of multiple works simultaneously, they can focus more on the actual conversation, and best serve their clients.

6 Types of Call Center Automation Every Call Center Must Have

Several types of automated call center systems are in use currently and more are in the process of being created as AI systems to save time. The following are some automation your call center business needs.

1. Automated Interaction

Average call handling time and potential customer frustration are among the two most important things you must consider if you want better productivity and high customer satisfaction. Of course, there are other parameters to consider; but whatever they are, you can take care of them autonomously.

Automated Interaction encompasses several tools used to gather information regarding customer intent.

Having these tools at their disposal enables agents to be familiar with the customer’s needs when making a call.

Take Chatbots, for example; they provide clients with useful information or tools for searching and exploring on their own. In the meantime, they also collect context regarding the client in order to provide agents with better assistance.

Other examples include Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or an online knowledge base that gives the agents a better context regarding the customers.

2. Forecasting Automation

Call centers are indeed all about the data. Data related to the customer, sales, product, number of inbound and outbound calls, etc., are important for various analytics and forecasting in a call center.

As a manager, forecasting is an immense part of the job because it shows the trends in your workforce. Having said that, it is also difficult to get right.

Automated forecasting allows call centers to gain actionable insights and make better decisions. You can estimate future contact volumes from different channels along with the number of agents needed to handle that specific volume.

In a nutshell, you have the best chance of making well-informed business decisions when you use automation software.

3. Workflow Automation

Human beings are prone to error, and the likelihood of making errors by call center agents is high, considering the mundane and repetitive tasks they have to complete during their day-to-day routine.

From interacting with clients to inputting customer data, managing internal interactions, and switching between applications and multiple channels, they have to cover a lot.

Agents need a reliable means to manage their workflow, and that’s where workflow automation comes in.  Workflow automation using AI cuts duplicative and repetitive tasks out of the equation to help agents free up time to work on important tasks, such as focusing on client interaction with undivided attention.

4. Automated Agents Guidance

No wonder call center agents have to multitask during an ongoing call with the customer considering the nature of their job. And they have to be on top of it because a failure to do this can lead to a negative customer experience.

A call center automation tool allows agents to access customer information as soon as the customer reaches out. During a call, a customer service representative can reach out to a multifunctional user interface to gain access to account information, payment history, and anything else the customer might need assistance with.

A customer support agent can offer guidance during customer interactions, troubleshoot problems, provide legal advice, and monitor compliance with industry regulations.

5. Sales Automation

Call centers are primarily associated with customer service. Regardless of size and nature, any business with a contact center wants to grow and develop just like any other company.

As a result, sales and marketing are integral to their day-to-day workings. Automation can help agents in simplifying the processes like interacting with clients, ensuring a sale, and, most importantly, hooking them.

They can easily automate routine tasks like sending announcements, onboarding emails, follow-up emails, post-sales emails, and different offers according to customer purchase history.  

6. Scheduling Automation

Schedules are an incredibly important aspect of running a call center, especially one with a large staff. Though as much as it sounds simple, an effective call center schedule can be quite complicated to create.

It takes more than just a headache to manage hundreds of employees within a 24/7 operation, avoiding gaps and excessive labor costs in the meantime.

Using AI, Automated scheduling constructs the perfect schedule. It simply looks at employee availability and calculates the ideal number of hours to meet your business requirements.

What types of businesses or industries benefit from call center automation? 

Call center automation helps different types of industries such as

All small and medium-level businesses and enterprises

The scalability of call center automation has ensured agent quality can be improved across all kinds of environments, from small, and medium businesses to enterprises.

E-commerce

E-commerce business moves fast, and call center automation helps to keep up the pace. Customers come with questions and problems, and since E-commerce doesn’t have live staff to assist the customers, call center automation can be an effective way for people to engage with your brand. 

Banking and Finance 

Customers look for convenience, speed, and expertise when choosing banking and finance firms to do business with. A call center will help the banking and finance sector streamline their sales and support operations and eventually serve customers in ways that inspire brand loyalty.

Telecom sector 

With telecom call center automation, you can immediately respond to your most frequent requests over email, web, SMS, and voice. Customers don’t have to wait for service, and your operational costs can be drastically lowered through simple yet powerful automation in telecom industry use cases.

Conclusion

As automation continues to advance, call centers are constantly changing. The only way to keep up with the latest trends is to experiment with yourself. With automation software, there can be issues of emotional connection due to lack of human interaction, yet anyway, but it can ensure an overall more efficient and effective service.

Automation in call centers is not the ultimate end goal for businesses, but it is a means to help agents save time and ultimately make money by doing better work. Many interactions that escalate beyond simple requests require the involvement of humans.

Determine what time-consuming and repetitive processes need to be automated according to your business requirements. After that, all you need is to choose the right tool like KrispCall that is easy to use and implement.

Arun Chaudhary

Arun is SEO Analyst at KrispCall. He has written in extensively in the field of cloud telephony and call center solutions.