Technological innovation has transformed the way companies do business, but transformation has not been spread evenly across organizations. For example, innovation has enabled Amazon to suggest products you didn’t even realize you wanted and deliver them within hours, but a lack of innovation in contact centers means you and I still spend 43 days of our lives on hold.
Investment Dilemma
Most contact centers generate costs but not profits, so they are not high investment priorities for most businesses. Traditionally, centers have been slow to adopt new technologies largely due to budget constraints: Labor costs absorb roughly 70% of a contact center budget, and given the obvious need to invest in employees, there is little left for investment in technology—whose ROI is difficult to measure and whose benefits may take years to have an impact.
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This labor vs. technology investment dilemma is self-perpetuating: Contact center attrition rates are notoriously high, as inefficient processes cause agents to feel overworked and underappreciated. Many agents turn over each year and onboarding a replacement can cost up to three times an agent’s salary. As a result, short-term budgetary concerns prevent businesses from investing in the very tools that could help solve their main long-term cost problem.
Technology as Transformer
How can businesses break this logjam? By freeing up more investment resources for innovation.
Clearly, those additional resources can only come from reducing labor costs and addressing chronic issues like agent attrition. A technology able to free significant financial resources for innovation by reducing labor costs would transform the contact center. Intelligent automation is that technology.
When it comes to improving handle time, it’s impossible for humans to manually track and proactively address instances when agents spend too much time in after-call work or leave customers on hold for too long.
But with intelligent automation, business rules are put in place to monitor these metrics and remind agents when they cross specific thresholds. This helps them stay on track to meet their KPI’s and also helps maintain consistent customer experiences.
When an agent takes a call right before a lunch break it delays the break and creates extra work for the workforce management (WFM) team, which must manually enter the exceptions across the entire agent population. With intelligent automation, ACD and WFM metrics are evaluated so that automation can proactively send agents to lunch early. This helps maintain agent engagement and eliminates manual work for the WFM team.
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When agents select the wrong AUX state—whether by mistake or as a call avoidance tactic—manually identifying outliers is challenging and coaching agents on this behavior weeks after the fact is not effective. With intelligent automation, agents are notified in real time and the savings derived from reducing inappropriate use of AUX state is significant.
One financial services customer leveraged AUX state alerts to realize $16.8 million in annualized savings. When added together, these gains from intelligent automation can reduce labor costs in a modern contact center by 5-10% in the first year; and soon, this technology will be robust enough to make contact center agents 20% more productive.
Reducing the cost of labor from 70% to 60% or even 50% of contact center costs will free up money that is desperately needed for innovation. Improving customer experience is the ultimate goal and giving customers back those 43 days spent on hold is a great place to start.
Automation
Intelligent automation finally offers organizations a way to reduce labor costs and free up additional resources to invest in innovation.
It also provides a consistent work experience to both remote and in-center agents; this unique ability to ensure location-agnostic consistency will be a major advantage as pandemic restrictions fade and businesses move part of their customer service teams back on premises.
Intelligent automation acts as a “virtual manager” to frontline agents. By linking multiple systems and monitoring agents and center activities, it supports service-level continuity (e.g., by recognizing extended handle time problems and supporting agents with prompts for help) and agent development (e.g., by prompting agents into coaching or training when call volume dips).
This helps agents maintain focus on delivering consistent, empathetic experiences to each individual customer.
The best of technology (speed, accuracy, efficiency) and the best of humanity (creativity, flexibility, empathy) work together to reduce labor costs and solve customer issues more effectively.
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