NICE is a Business Reporter client
For contact centre agents, the past couple of years have certainly not been easy. That’s why leading companies are looking at how they can use automation to address the pressures agents have experienced working from home and dealing with massive call volumes from distressed customers seeking reassurance from a human voice.
The new pressures put further strain on the stress points that have always existed in call centres: the challenges of keeping staff up to date with ever-changing tech and regulation, meeting higher customer expectations and driving higher efficiencies. These challenges actually lead to lower employee engagement and motivation, while increasing the need for retention as many employees are experiencing burnout.
Many agents are frustrated with the technology and processes they use to do their work as well as with the work experience itself. The US Contact Center Decision-Makers Guide 2021 reveals that 81 per cent of contact centre decision-makers agree that multiple copy-and-paste leads to wasted time and errors.
Another 68 per cent said that it’s important to reduce after-call work, while 76 per cent agreed that agents find it difficult to learn new systems. Perhaps most concerning of all is the finding that repetitive work remains among the top three reasons for agent attrition.
The good news is that contact centre decision-makers are recognising the role that digital technology can play in resolving some of these challenges. Seven in ten, for instance, report that robotic process automation (RPA) can help to reduce average call handling times.
Attended automation: the next step forward for call centres
The benefits of unattended RPA in the back-office are, of course, well understood now. They reduce costs, enable scalable operations and let people focus on work that requires strategy, creativity and interpersonal skill rather than on repetitive processes.
Leading organisations are looking at taking automation a step further by putting robots on the frontline of customer service as enablers for contact centre agents. These desktop robots, or attended automation, can assist agents to perform efficiently and accurately by taking away the need to manually navigate multiple screens and apps.
Attended and unattended robots working together
The benefits of automation really begin to compound when attended and unattended process bots are blended to scale operations and drive higher efficiencies. For example, an attended bot could automatically populate a form or provide the agent with links to data and real-time next best-action guidance as they help a customer to open a new bank account.
Unattended bots could be used to generate an email to the client after the call with the agent is complete, or to generate and categorise technical support tickets on behalf of the service agents. This combination of attended and unattended technology lets people focus on adding value rather than on processes and systems.
For automation to be successful and sustainable in a contact centre environment, it needs to enable agents in real time. Today’s sophisticated blend of cognitive, attended and unattended automation solutions delivers this functionality, helping to bridge the gap between employee engagement, customer experience and cost containment.
Today’s leading call centre operations are leveraging the digital workforce not only to make human agents more productive, but also to give them a better employee experience and to empower them to deliver a better customer experience in turn. This approach satisfies many of the contact centre agent’s core motivations and skills:
- The power to help the customer
- Getting a 360° view of the customer in a single view
- Research support
- Guidance around compliance
- Ability to work efficiently to help each customer and serve more people
Enabling contact centres to scale and perform
Most call centres want to drive significant and continuous improvement in six ways:
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Reducing handling time and increase efficiency
- Increasing first-contact resolution
- Reducing training time
- Improving compliance and process adherence
- Increasing upselling during service calls
Automation enables enterprises to achieve these goals.
At NICE, we have a long history in contact centres as well as a strong track record in attended and unattended automation. Our products are built on 20 years of deep understanding of contact centre operations and technology – and we can offer an integrated suite of RPA and contact centre solutions.
With NEVA, our personal agent assistant, we have pioneered attended automation. NEVA resides on the agent’s desktop, helping them in real time and in a contextually relevant manner via interactive callout screens. Her unique capabilities ensure real-time process optimisation and automation of desktop tasks, resulting in improved employee and customer experiences.
Our ability to span the back-office and the contact centre with a comprehensive, intelligent automation solution is unique in the market. We would welcome an opportunity to discuss how we can help your contact centre reconcile the customer experience and employee engagement challenges it faces today.
Originally published on Business Reporter
