Adopt automation to reduce the strain on your contact center in times of crisis

Right now many of us feel overwhelmed, stretched thin, and anxious about what is happening around us. For your contact center, this means more customer inquiries, dispersed workforces, changes to company policies, and potential losses in productivity. What actions can you take today to help maintain the level of service your customers expect while ensuring your agents stay productive and engaged?

While maintaining operational continuity may seem nearly impossible during times of crisis, a tool like IntelePeer’s Communication Automation platform can help you quickly and easily enhance communications for your business. You’ll be able to offload incoming communications from your agents, allow customers to solve issues on their own, and proactively notify customers and employees of changes in real-time.

Offload work to increase agent productivity

Perhaps your workforce has been separated or is now working remotely. Maybe your business hours have been adjusted based on location or other factors. Added to this are increased customer inquiries, causing your agents to feel overwhelmed or unable to dedicate the time necessary to help individual customers. SmartFlows can help to distribute customers to virtual contact centers equally, or based on location, to prevent any one center or agent from becoming overloaded. With the ability to adjust how communications are distributed on the fly, it’s easy to keep up with office closures, change in hours of operation, or if an employee calls sick.

Location and volume are not the only ways to mitigate bouts of increased inquiries. Providing multiple channels for your customers to reach you means fewer calls and more opportunities for contact center automation. Website chat functions and social messaging make it easy for agents to work with multiple customers at a time. A virtual chatbot can address simple inquiries like hours of operation, product information, status updates, and more. Issues that require more attention can be passed along to a live agent.

Provide consistent customer experience with self-service

Oftentimes, customer issues are easily solved. So easily, in fact, that the customer could have solved it themselves if given the right tools. As calls continue to barrel in, wait times increase, and agents feel more and more stretched, customers are going to get frustrated. Help deflect inbound inquiries from your agents and give your customers immediate assistance with contact center automated experiences. Call-in menus with options for information about your most common questions, like account balance inquiries or shipping updates, can quickly assist customers and free up your agent’s time. Of course, the virtual assistant mentioned above can also help to avoid agent overload.

Keep customers and employees informed with outbound notifications

Proactive communication is critical to maintain seamless operations and a good experience for both your customers and employees. If you send your customers updates as they happen, like revised hours or changes in product deliveries, you have just saved them valuable time as they no longer need to call in to get answers. Make sure your employees receive information first, so they can be prepared for questions that do come in. Or, simply send words of encouragement and advice to help keep them motivated. Engage empowers you to schedule and send out messaging to your audience. Notifications can be sent through voice, SMS, social messaging, or other channels based on individual customers’ preferences.

Get back to business with communication automation

SmartFlows comes with pre-loaded templates for these contact center solutions, meaning you could deploy these changes to your communications strategy with just a few configurations. Built-in integrations with WhatsApp, IBM Watson, Facebook, and more, can help take your customer experience to new levels. Plus, getting started is easy! Begin building flows or work with our team of experts to build and deploy solutions.