Automation helps contact centers improve experience for staff and customers alike

Three years ago, the FCC said it would help companies replace network equipment and services from Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE due to fear of digital espionage. But the initially promised amount of $700 million was not enough. (RCR Wireless News, 2022) The combined price for these rip-and-replace requests is almost $6 billion, more than eight times the original prediction. (LightReading, 2022)

Rip-and-replace stories like these cause many businesses to hesitate before upgrading their contact center. Thankfully, by using communications automation platforms, companies can modernize and automate their contact center and still meet customer demands without fully replacing existing infrastructure.

Integrate and scale with ease

The advantage of communications automation is that it layers on top of an enterprise’s existing contact center infrastructure, allowing the business to integrate new functionalities like real-time voice, messaging, or chat. No disruptive modifications required. You can add other invaluable tools like interactive voice response (IVRs) and call queuing to enhance the experience for customers and employees.

Flexibility, scalability, and customization come pre-packaged with automated communications, too. Many features and customer communication solutions adjust to your business needs in minutes. Your company can grow or change and still support millions of customer interactions.

The incredible value of an automated contact center

In today’s world of staffing shortages and demanding customers, an automated contact center is a necessity. Too many contact center agents are negatively affected by the volume of customer communications. This can cause both parties to get upset and frustrated. Implementing automation capabilities and self-service options help companies offload incoming communications to reduce the burden on agents. Self-service can handle common inquiries such as business hours, bill payments, and product questions.

An automated contact center allows customers to easily and quickly solve their questions with AI and self-service. This frees up contact center resources and allows agents to focus on pressing and more complex issues all while reducing hold times. Also, an automated contact center can trigger contextual communications based on consumer activity and proactively notify customers and employees of important information in real time.

Use communication data for further improvements

Communications automation enable contact centers in collecting important insights like:

• The duration of the customer’s wait time
• The number of times they called
• Location traffic by the hour

Analyzing this data helps contact centers understand customer behaviors – which will help identify communication bottlenecks and customer pain points. Businesses can also use consumer data to personalize the customer experience (CX). Post-call surveys, for example, let organizations collect information as close to the customer’s interaction with the contact center as possible.

IntelePeer’s powerful communications automation platform action

One IntelePeer customer, NSD, has scaled with automation and plans on continually improving CX while saving $730,000. Marshal Ware, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at NSD used IntelePeer’s tools to update his organization’s contact center and found that “[the company is] able to help about 30% of our customers without us having to talk, which is nice. That’s thousands of calls a week and tons of hours that have been saved because 30% of our calls don’t have to have a live person. That’s been a big benefit. We’ve saved approximately two thousand dollars per day since this platform started.” Learn more about Ware’s experience in our NSD case study.