The contact center landscape is rapidly changing and evolving. What sets your business’ contact center apart from the rest? Would a customer of yours feel like they have the ability to get in touch with your business in a timely manner?
To stay ahead of the competition, it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest contact center automation trends in 2023. Automated contact centers are quickly becoming the norm for many businesses, as they can increase productivity and sales with ease. Here are a few of the key contact center automation trends to follow and consider implementing in 2023.
What Is Intelligent Automation in the Contact Center?
This type of automation utilizes artificial intelligence (AI), business workflow automation, and robotic process automation (RPA) technology to enhance the customer experience and simplify contact center processes. Intelligent automation can help automate routine tasks such as responding to customer inquiries, routing calls, and more.
It can be fully automated with no employee input, but more often than not, intelligent automation (IA) requires planning and forethought during setup before it can run on its own. Businesses that wish to use intelligent automation in their processes must first understand the scope and limitations of IA, and build solutions based on the currently available technology. Let’s take a look at some of the automated contact center tools available today, that are growing in popularity and adoption in 2023.
Automated Contact Center Tools
- Chatbots with Natural Language Processing: A chatbot is an automated messaging system that can respond to customer inquiries 24/7. They are a great way to reduce wait times for customers since they can respond quickly and efficiently to customer requests. Chatbots can also provide customer service, allowing customers to receive answers to their questions in a timely manner. Plus, if a customer has a more complex need, chatbots escalate the matter to a member of the customer service team.
- Event-Based Automation: Tools like Zapier and CRM systems offer event-based automation triggered by customer input (such as an abandoned cart or opened email) that can help your sales team follow up with prospective buyers in a timely manner. It can be difficult to juggle multiple sales and marketing-qualified leads that are at various stages of the customer journey. Sales automation makes it easier to make sure every lead has attention and personalized follow-up via phone, email, and SMS.
- Intelligent Inbound Routing: This type of automation helps contact centers route customer inquiries to the right person or team. Intelligent inbound routing can be used to prioritize customer requests, assign incoming calls and emails to specific agents, and even provide estimated wait times so customers know exactly when they can expect a response. Intelligent inbound routing tools can usually be integrated with your CRM, so that, for instance, existing customers can be routed directly to their account manager and new leads can be sent to sales.
- Calling and Dialing Automation: Automating phone calls and dials is a great way to ensure that customers are receiving timely responses. Platforms such as Kixie make it easy to set up automated call sequences that can be used for sales outreach, customer service, appointment reminders, and more. Integrating a sales phone system with your company’s CRM can also open up many automation possibilities, from sales follow-up messages to real-time contact record updates.
What Are the Benefits of Contact Center Automation?
Businesses can benefit from contact center automation in several ways. Automation can speed up customer service processes, reduce costs associated with manual data entry, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, increase sales efficiency, cut down on human error and provide an easy-to-use system for all employees. Additionally, automated contact centers are more secure and compliant than manual contact centers, since they provide increased customer data security and keep records of all communication.
Ultimately, contact center automation can help businesses increase productivity and gain insights into their customers that would otherwise be difficult to gather manually. Automation is quickly becoming the norm for many businesses—by keeping up with the latest trends in automated contact centers in 2023, businesses will be able to increase efficiency and productivity while providing customers with an enhanced experience.
