5 CX Automation Strategies for Contact Centers

The idea of organizations trying to do more with less could be seen as a negative approach to customer engagement. It conjures visions of a company trying to run its contact center with an overworked skeleton staff and doing the bare minimum for its customers.

However, in the context of CX automation, it’s simply a way of optimizing your workforce and maximizing the impact of engagement data – which in turn elevates customer experience.

Next generation CCaaS platforms inject AI into business workflows across an organization, enabling it to harness the power of CX automation and brings innovative AI technology to the fingertips of contact center agents.

What Makes CX Automation Work?

Rich behavioral data is at the heart of effective CX automation. With this data flowing through every application across an organization, companies can leverage it to deliver seamlessly automated interactions at every customer touchpoint – improving both employee and customer experience.

Whether it’s enabling customer self-service, intelligent routing or real-time coaching for agents – the AI behind these processes is only as good as the underlying data which drives it.

Here are five ways companies can lean into CX automation and build a strategy that reaches beyond the contact center to elevate customer and employee experience.

Open Up Your CCaaS

As companies move the contact center away from a telephony-first strategy and further embrace new engagement channels, next generation CCaaS platforms offer something that helps future-proof their operations – flexibility.

They enable an organization to grow at its own pace, give the freedom to choose the solutions best suited to their business and the ability integrate the latest technological advances.

When deciding to move to an open platform, there are plenty of considerations to take into account:

• Your choice of telephony vendor shouldn’t dictate every decision about your CX platform. Moving telephony to the cloud or going with a specific vendor to suit your needs shouldn’t restrict how you choose the rest of your contact center solutions.
• The impact of integrating automation into your business workflows. Identify where, when and how to initially introduce AI then expand over time
• How to make the most of your engagement data. Strategize where enterprise data is missing or not being optimized, then break down silos by building a unified data hub available across the organization.

Introduce AI into your CX Workflows

Verint’s 2023 State of Digital CX found that 55% of CX leaders already have AI technology as a key part of their CX strategy, with 27% planning to use it more extensively in the future.

But automation is here to augment the human workforce, not replace it.

Verint Da Vinci AI’s specialized bots are all designed to perform a specific task – such as customer self-service or summarizing an interaction as it’s transferred from bot to agent – which save agents time and make a more effortless customer experience.

However, AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. Using interaction, experience and workforce-performance data to continually improve your contact center automation is the key to elevating CX and creating a more efficient workforce.

Here are some suggestions for evolving your use of AI:

• Focus on high frequency/low complexity tasks when starting out. Straightforward interactions that can be easily automated by a data-driven bot are a great way to dip your toe into the world of AI and save millions of agent hours annually
• Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), aka chatbots, is the most recognizable starting point for many. By automating simple inquiries across engagement channels, customers get the quick response and resolution they want, and it takes the tedious tasks off your employees’ plates
• Evolve your use of automation beyond self-service and containment. By leveraging engagement data, AI can help agents in real time, power your analytics and deliver insights which constantly drive the improve of your service.

Build Seamless Customer Journeys

One thing we can be certain of about the future of CX is that the number of engagement channels isn’t going to shrink. Coupled with customer expectations of a smooth and seamless experience no matter where they interact with a company, the pressure to provide effective omnichannel engagement is real.

Failing to meet high customer expectations is not advisable – nearly 70% of consumers would change brands after a poor experience. So how can companies satisfy customer demands without exceeding budgets or exhausting their customer-facing employees? Through an Open CCaaS platform with CX automation at its core:

• Allow customers to engage on their channel of choice and switch when needed without having to repeat their details
• Leverage data-driven AI and intelligently route interactions to the right employees with the skills, knowledge and availability to successfully tackle an issue
• Build on the number of use cases which can be effectively handled by IVAs, improving first-time resolution and lowering cost-to-serve.

Empower the Workforce with Data-Driven AI

Engagement data can also be an incredibly powerful tool for your employees. You can’t save a bad customer conversation with a post-interaction debrief – organizations need tools that support their agents in the moment.

Next generation CCaaS platforms offer real-time guidance and insights, increasing agents’ speed and accuracy and enables them to meet their KPIs and deliver exceptional CX. Here’s how they achieve it:

• Automated real-time, contextual knowledge directly on the employee’s desktop to give assistance during customer interactions
• Offer personalized coaching delivered at the right time to maximize impact on an agent’s performance and minimize disruptions or pop-up fatigue
• Eliminate after-call work by integrating generative AI into the workflow. Using the technology to build a summary of the interaction saves millions annually by dramatically reducing the workload after every single conversation.

Capture and Act on Customer Feedback

It’s not a new concept to seek customer feedback after an interaction, but with traditional CCaaS platforms the feedback data is often siloed and companies are unable to leverage it to drive tangible change.

Verint’s Engagement Capacity Gap Study found that organizations who are highly confident in their ability to deliver exceptional CX are 2.8 times more likely to use customer feedback to improve those experiences.

With unified data and effective analysis of customer feedback, organizations can use cross-channel CX insights to pinpoint areas for improvement and elevate CX quickly and effectively.

• Listen everywhere. Capture feedback at every customer touchpoint and bring together surveys with inferred, indirect and third-party data and speech, text and other analytics to build a holistic view of CX performance
• Follow up on customer feedback in real time by creating alerts, triggers and automated action so issues can be fixed in minutes and hours, not days and weeks
• Share the feedback data with front-line managers and enable them to drive real change.

Implementing next generation Open CCaaS platforms is how organizations make the most of the latest innovations in AI and CX automation. It will result in elevated CX, reduced operational costs, and happier customers and employees so that companies can evolve their operations at their own pace.

Learn more about CX automation and Verint’s Open CCaaS platform.