Top 3 Automation Trends for Call Centers

A row of empty call center workstations. Photo: Adobe Stock

A customer service call can make or break your brand for a problem customer. People expect an appropriate, positive call center experience when they have a problem, and long waiting times or conflicting agent responses only affect their experience. With customer expectations and satisfaction for the success of your brand, call centers can take advantage of many innovations in automation. According to ICMI's "State of the Contact Center in 2021", the Contact Centers cited three key reasons for upgrading technology in the survey: improving the customer experience, controlling costs and supporting a growing customer base. To do And the cost of upgrading technology can be huge. According to Deloitte, customers who report positive experiences in call centers spend 140% more with the company.

UiPath's 2022 Trends report shows that automation is now a top priority for the C-suite, and chief information officers are at the forefront of determining how technology will be used throughout the organization. As the automation market accelerates, there are many types of tools and solutions to consider. In this article, we consider the three biggest automation trends that can transform your call center.

RPA improves back and call center functions.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows organizations to streamline easy, hard-working processes, increase efficiency, and avoid tedious, time-consuming tasks for employees. According to Precedence Research, the global RPA market is projected to reach $ 23.9 billion by 2030. And a recent survey of Deloitte executives found that 78% are already implementing RPA in their company, while 16% plan to implement it in the next 3 years. Only 6% have no current plans to implement RPA.

Robots have great potential to help contact centers. Customers have the ability to get prompt response to basic requests, and agents can devote much of their time to providing the best in-house support for more complex issues that require human contact. RPA technology can also collect data from different systems and present customer information to agents on a single interface, allowing agents to access a complete view of the customer when they call. This allows management to focus on finding talent with the skills of strong people and developing those soft skills whose agents need maximum customer support.

Organizations will focus on successfully deploying AI solutions.

UiPath's 2022 Trends report shows that while investment in automation and AI is growing rapidly, the return on investment is low due to the time it takes to use AI models in the workplace. According to a survey of IT and AI practitioners, 64% said it takes at least a month to implement the new AI model. And 1 in 5 respondents said 90% of their AI models are unused. UiPath suggests that influence centers can be used to achieve AI solutions for the typical customer experience, such as NLP / U, can be actively used on this elbow and in the call center.

Employees need time to get used to the human digital workplace.

According to UiPath's 2022 Trends report, a hybrid human digital workforce will become a new routine within the next five years, with people and virtual assistants working side by side. Getting to this point will not be as easy as investing in the right technology and seeing it work. HR teams and IT decision makers need to take care of real change and make sure employees are on board. For some employees, the skills they need and the tasks of their day-to-day jobs may change with this shift, so it will take time for them to fully integrate into the human digital workforce. And, as Deloitte noted in a recent report, the stigma of human beings still exists after robots and automation have entered the mainstream.

The call center industry is poised to innovate the human digital workforce, especially since there are so many repetitive, tedious tasks that agents have to do to find and collect case information from callers. Are According to Forrester, call center agents spend 35% of their time searching for information and 15% just transferring data between apps. Task sharing can help call centers become more effective. Robots can take care of repetitive, tedious tasks, giving agents time to focus on the more interesting, human aspects of the job. Overall, this will improve the experience for both agents and callers.

Highlight the potential of innovative technology.

With so much innovation in automation and AI, call centers have a great opportunity to transcend curves and wow customers with their seamless service. AI can accomplish every aspect of work to help increase productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Human digital workforce is the way to the future, and organizations that learn to implement automation and AI models quickly and efficiently will be built for success.

Learn more about the UiPath Contact Center automation solution at uipath.com.

Find UiPath's 2022 Trends Report here.

Brad guides UiPath's Customer Experience and Contact Center practice for the United States and promotes the UiPath platform for customer experience and contact center automation. Brad created two CRM consulting exercises from the ground up.