In the last few years, many companies have reported an increase in their bottom line. Conversion rates are at an all-time high. Customers are purchasing new products and services but return to the same brands for repeat purchases.
So, what changed in the recent years?
Yes, consistent customer service efforts have definitely increased customer satisfaction.
But how did customer service transformation get stronger? Why are call center agents able to smell opportunity proactively? How is agent performance impacting customer journey?
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Call Center Automation Software: Transforming Operations And Agent Performance
Automation changed the way call center operations are performed. In fact, a report by Deloitte found that 76% of call centers are planning to invest in AI, and 73% will adapt to process automation.
Currently, agent-related processes are being automated to;
- Cut call center costs,
- Improve operational efficiency,
- And increase conversion rates.
Let’s consider the typical case of agent onboarding. Agent onboarding is well-known time-consuming task, and onboarding a single agent costs around $2500. Unfortunately, one major challenge we often fail to tackle is the agent attrition rate.
What if we said call center automation could help promote agent retention and reduce ramp-up time by 60%?
If you can increase agent retention and upskill employees, not just cost-saving but conversion rates are bound to improve.
Hence, we decided to highlight how automated call centers help overcome operational challenges, and reduce human intervention while improving conversions.
How About A First-Hand Call Center Automation Experience?
What Is An Automated Call Center?
Automated call centers are contact center technologies that reduce repetitive tasks and increase strategic activities impacting conversion rates.
Benefits of Call Center Automation
Contact center automation streamlines the customer service process by:
- Contributing immensely to solving complex customer issues and handling customer queries.
- Encourages self-service portals and processes for customer convenience.
- Replacing human error, guesswork, and bias with data-backed decisions.
- Help businesses save money by reducing the need for human intervention.
- Strive to improve the average handle time and first call resolution rates.
- Deliver exceptional customer experience by offering an integrated and smooth customer journey.
- Improve agent satisfaction and retention by making their work easier and streamlined.
This helps contact centers focus more on core, strategic activities influencing sales-impacting behavior.
What is an example of call center automation?
A good example of call center automation is note-taking on a phone call. Automating repetitive tasks such as note-taking can reduce the chance of human error, eliminate duplicate entries, and improve agent productivity.
What are the main challenges of call center automation?
Generally, contact center automation has more benefits than challenges. However, any automated task often;
- Loses the human touch,
- Make agents dependent on tools,
- And faces adoption resistance.
5 Incredible Ways To Boost Sales Using Automated Call Centers
1. Improved Call Routing And Prioritization
Automated systems can quickly identify and route the most valuable leads to the appropriate sales representative. This improves the efficiency of the sales process and ensures that the most promising opportunities receive immediate attention.
2. Enhanced Customer Profiling And Personalization
Automated systems can analyze customer data and interactions to create detailed profiles, allowing sales representatives to tailor their approach to each customer and increase the likelihood of a successful sale. Data extracted from the automated tools give cues on upsell and cross-sell opportunities that don’t meet the naked eye.
3. Increased Agent Efficiency And Productivity
Automation can handle routine tasks such as data entry and appointment scheduling, freeing sales representatives to focus on high-value activities such as closing deals and building relationships.
4. Better Data Management And Analysis
Automated systems can capture and analyze data on customer interactions, allowing sales teams to identify trends, make informed decisions, and optimize their strategies for better results.
5. 24/7 Availability
Automated call centers can handle customer queries and sales calls outside of business hours, ensuring no potential opportunities are missed.
Omnichannel contact centers are the next big automation revolution!
Here are the latest trends!
Results first, payment later
This blog is just the start.
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How To Boost Sales By Increasing Agent Efficiency and Productivity?
In the earlier segment, we discussed 5 ways to boost sales. Now, we’ll elaborate on one critical method. Increasing agents’ efficiency and productivity results in higher conversion rates.
An increase in sales revenue is highly dependent on agent performance. Right from onboarding an agent to closing a deal, the agent plays a vital role.
AI-driven conversation intelligence platforms are drivers that ensure agents receive support and help during a customer conversation. We identified some driving processes that can be automated and ensured higher efficiency.
1. Automated Call Center Quality Assurance
We are no longer talking about 1-2% call audits but a 100% call center QA. To ensure 100% call auditing, call centers must eliminate random sampling leading to biases, inaccurate data analysis, irregular feedback, and human errors.
Elimination of manual auditing and human error ensures better visibility into agents’ progress, strengths & weaknesses and captures readiness
What will you find inside:
- 100% audit of calls, emails, and chats.
- Ability to video and audio comments for a more intuitive experience.
- AI score depicting the call quality concerning the parameters set by the organization.
- Review customer sentiment analysis.
- Transcriptions in multiple languages.
- More actionable insights on the conversation, driving faster business-driven decisions.
2. Automated Call Center Coaching
Investing in a comprehensive coaching program ensures lower ramp-up time and boosts agent productivity.
With automated call center coaching,
- Agents are trained and upskilled faster.
- Personalized and scalable coaching is offered.
- Peer-to-peer coaching is leveraged.
- Learning progress is monitored and visible on an interactive dashboard.
- A library is accessible, which makes for a uniform knowledge base. (Allows storing reusable reading assets, call recordings, and other resources.)
- Agents are enrolled for self-assessments to evaluate agent readiness and coaching effectiveness.
3. Customer Intelligence
Customer intelligence goes beyond customer service as it helps in active listening– what the customers have to say!
CI is a gold mine of customer insights derived from client conversations. From grabbing words, phrases, and moments that indicate business-winning and losing keywords to competitors, there’s nothing hidden about customer choices and business needs.
Robust analytics is a key driving force in higher conversions. Tracking customer trends and demands helps contact centers tweak strategic decisions such as discounts, product packages, releasing freemium products, cancellation policies, etc.
Book a demo to see automated call center software firsthand
A Call Center With NO Automation
Automation has established itself as an authentic source of increased call center revenue.
In fact, in many cases, automated call centers proved to be an asset–specially in decoding customer trends and sentiments.
But here’s what happens when automated tools and processes are taken for granted;
1. Agents Fail To Follow A Script
A call script is a guiding tool for agents. During the call, agents can hit the right cord at the right time with the help of a call script.
But when agents tend to sway away during conversations, they lose context and miss critical information. For example, an agent failing to inquire about the tentative purchase timeline and budget. Moreover, judging an call center agent’s performance is difficult without following the script and evaluating what’s working and what’s not.
2. Frequent Occurrence Of Misselling Episodes
In the occasion of no automated call auditing, customer complaints are frequently surrounded by compliance violations and misselling episodes. Misselling episodes result from the customer’s lack of knowledge regarding the product or service, the urgency created by customer service reps(to meet targets or deadlines), and half-baked knowledge of reps.
With misselling, organizations aren’t able to achieve a healthy brand reputation and lose customer rapidly.
Call Center Compliance: Reduce Rampant Mis-selling Episodes With Automation
3. Lack Of High-Quality Calls
All agents are expected to make 50-60 calls a day. To achieve the target, agents often pretend to dial fake calls. In absence of automated tools, it’s difficult to trace if calls were made to customers or not?
4. Time-Consuming Manual Quality Assurance
Manual call center QA is a repetitive and time-consuming task.
Contact centers have manual auditing programs with manual tools and sheets. But on an organizational level, it comes with multiple issues if done incorrectly.
For instance, only 1-2% of calls make it to the manual auditing queue without giving priority to high-risk calls. What about the rest of the 98% of calls?
Manual auditing of less than 3% of conversions poses some serious issues:
- Dependency on spreadsheets and multiple tools
- Human errors
- Duplicate entries
- Biased against certain agents
- Irregular feedback(offered monthly rather than daily or weekly).
- Poor visibility into agent performance issues.
- Low ROI due to fewer audits compared to the average number of daily calls.
5. Inefficient Agent Coaching
Most call centers follow one-on-one coaching. Scalable? Definitely NO.
Call center coaching in organizations is still generic and lacks proper coaching methods. With conventional coaching methods, agents take considerable time to ramp up and existing agents aren’t upskilled.
6. Inefficient Tracking of Call Center Metrics
Call center metrics need continuous tracking. The progress report needs to be circulated to managers and agents.
In absence of automation, agent performance metrics aren’t shared on time. Delayed progress reports tend to create a gap in performance improvement cycle. And creation of best practices for higher conversion also suffers.
7. Lack Of Knowledge Base
After providing decent training, it is important to keep agents on top of the game. Managers and supervisors often have new information to share, find new areas of improvement for agents, discover new training opportunities for agents, etc.
Often call centers end up accumulating an unstructured and unorganized knowledge base that does no good to agents.
When all the above challenges come into play, call centers often find themselves showing no growth and poor conversions.
Check Convin pricing here.
Summing Up
All said and done, automation is an integral part of all processes today. Call center leaders need to adopt the transition faster and encourage agents to hop on the automation bandwagon.
Convin’s automation engine is designed on the same lines. We developed a contact center QA and coaching software that ensures higher conversion rate by keeping customer journey at the forefront.
If you are seeking a high conversion goal, start your call center automation journey today?
