Category: Customer Experience

Call center automation is one of the best ways to improve your customer experience, increase agent happiness, and light up your KPI dashboard in the best possible way! Sounds great, right?
But in a world of possibilities, you may wonder which processes are best to automate. Or where you should even start. Trust us; it’s worth the effort to review your operations and pinpoint the places where automation can offer the most significant payload. We’ll break it down for you, take a closer look at the various types of automation – and share a step-by-step guide to getting started. Let’s jump in with some basics.
What is Call Center Automation?
A little background first. Call center automation is a practice of using software to automate processes and perform tasks – often those that are simple and repetitive. Automation should reduce the need for a human staff member to complete these tasks or, in some cases, eliminate the need for human involvement. (Keep in mind that all automated processes need to be monitored at a higher level and continually optimized to ensure you are getting the desired results from your tools.)
Call centers must deliver consistent, accurate information, and automation can help meet this goal while improving the customer experience and reducing agent stress. Let’s face it; repetitive taskwork is tedious and leads to employee burnout.
FACT: A 2019 study found that 70% of call center agents reported experiencing emotional exhaustion, a key component of burnout.
Best Processes to Automate in Your Contact Center
The rise of AI and machine learning has dramatically – and suddenly – increased the number of call-center processes that can benefit from automation. Here are some popular examples:
Chatbots automate simple customer service
Chatbots use artificial intelligence to answer your customers’ questions with instant responses. They are becoming increasingly popular in contact centers and are one of the first AI-assisted tools many businesses try. Chatbots can handle enormous query volumes, reply to simple questions, and escalate callers to a live agent if needed. They can be trained to answer frequently asked questions, make recommendations, and even complete basic transactions.
Intelligent call routing directs calls automatically
Smart call routing is a popular contact center automation many of us are familiar with. These IVR-based systems screen callers with simple questions and direct them to the right agent or department. This can help to reduce wait times and improve the customer experience.
Voice call-backs offer return calls during quieter periods
Voice call-backs keep customers off hold by automatically offering a call-back during peak call periods when agents are overloaded. The best call-back software is omnichannel and flexible, allowing customers to schedule their preferred call-back time from any device. Look for easy integration with your existing software, quick deployment, and in-depth analytics when shopping for call-back technology.
Automated reporting and analytics offer real-time insights
Automated reporting and analytics systems provide real-time insights into the metrics that matter most to call center managers, such as call volume, wait times, call resolution times, and other KPIs. Automated tools help organize the enormous volume of data flowing through a contact center, and having this information at your fingertips allows managers to make well-considered, data-driven decisions.
Knowledge management systems support AI tools and agents
Your organization needs a well-built central repository of company knowledge – like an internal FAQ – to provide agents, and AI tools, with real-time access to the information necessary to resolve customer inquiries.
Automated dialing systems improve outbound calling
The line between inbound and outbound call centers is blurring as contact centers rely on call-back technology and take on increased sales and marketing duties. Increase the efficiency of outbound calling and reduce human error with automated dialing systems. These systems are enhanced with predictive dialing algorithms that maximize agent productivity by only connecting agents to live calls.
Streamlined lead nurturing drives conversions
Modern call centers are integral to your business’s sales and marketing process and rely on customer relationship management and sales software. Automation can help streamline processes like lead nurturing by sending targeted emails, SMS messages, and other communications to prospects at the right time, helping to build trust and drive conversions.
Our Top 6 Picks for Call Center Automation Software
More Benefits of Call Center Automation
Automation directly impacts many of the KPIs that call center managers closely monitor. Here are more ways automation can impact the success of your operation.
Automation can improve CX.
At the end of the day, the real goal of any contact center is to deliver an excellent customer experience. By reducing wait times, resolving issues quickly, and providing consistent, high-quality service, automation augments the human touch and helps agents deliver next-level customer service.
Improved agent happiness
Successful businesses know that employee happiness is directly linked to customer happiness. After all, an agent who works in a supportive environment with the proper tools and engaging, challenging workflow is much more likely to provide good service than someone worn down by repetitive, mundane taskwork. Automation relieves agents from monotony and lets them focus on creating positive customer interactions. Happy agents = happy customers.
Increased efficiency and accuracy
Automation can significantly increase the efficiency of contact center operations by streamlining processes and reducing errors. Automated reporting and analytics systems provide real-time insights into key metrics, ensuring agents spend their time well and signaling areas where more support or training may be needed.
Reduced costs
By speeding up processes, decreasing wait times, and introducing efficiencies across workflows, automation saves money across your operation. For example, an automated dialing system saves agents time and company dollars by connecting agents only to live calls, with no downtime for agents or callers. Chatbots answering simple questions and respond to huge volumes of calls, saving labor costs – and reserving live agents’ attention for more complex queries.
Better data management
When automated systems store call center data from multiple channels in a central repository, they save immeasurable human hours that would otherwise be spent storing and retrieving this information. The data is easier to access and analyze, and automated QA systems (call recording methods screened with NLP-enabled AI tools) can also monitor the data’s quality and identify areas for improvement.
How to Automate Your Call Center: 4 Steps
Automating a contact center may seem daunting, but consider the benefits: streamlined operations, reduced human error, improved CX, and decreased costs. This simple four-step plan can help you get started.
1. Conduct an audit and assess your needs
Conduct and audit to assess your needs and identify which processes can benefit from automation in your contact center. Review your KPIs and consider call volume, wait times, call resolution times, and CSAT levels to decide which processes could benefit. Involve your staff! Agents will have critical insights into the aspects of their workflow that are overly repetitive or prone to human error.
2. Create a budget and choose your tools
Start with a budget to help keep goals realistic and manage expectations as you automate your workflows. Consider tools like chatbots, reporting and analytics systems, lead nurturing strategies, Web Call-Backs (formerly Visual IVR), and knowledge management systems. You’ll need to delve into the fine print to be sure that new software is quick to deploy, easy to use, and integrates well with the systems you already have in place.
DID YOU KNOW: TECH_TALK – CALL OUT TO FONOLO” S QUICK DEPLOYMENT TIMES
3. Deploy your tools and monitor your performance
Implementing your tools likely involves sorting out integrations with current software, configuring the new system, and training your employees on how to use their new tools. Your IT team will be involved, so ensure they understand the benefits of automation upgrades.
It’s important to remember that automation is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” scenario. You’ll have to monitor performance and metrics like CSAT scores to ensure your tools are optimized for peak results.
4. Continuously improve
Finally, it is essential to continuously improve your automated processes by regularly reviewing performance metrics, soliciting feedback from customers and employees, and making adjustments as needed. Automation is an ongoing process, and there is always room for improvement.The post Call Center Automation: Best Processes to Automate first appeared on Fonolo.

Although selling yourself as a professional is an art you must learn, it does not mean your chosen career is destined to create your own business. Some careers offer great possibilities when you want to work as a freelancer. This unique feature allows us to create our own company after working under professional fees. However, so little…
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Awards International announces the start of its premium programme, the UK Customer Experience Awards, to recognise top results and achievements in CX across the United Kingdom. As of February 14, the fourteenth edition of UK CXA®is officially accepting entries. Organisations from the UK are invited to showcase their results and achievements, submit their application and compete for…
The post UK Customer Experience Awards 2023 – open for entries appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Call centers have always relied on different forms of automation to provide swift service to their clientele. And in today’s market, there’s no shortage of solutions to choose from.
As technology gets smarter and more intuitive, so does the contact center that benefits from it. But how do you know which solutions are best for your operation? To find the answer, you need to evaluate your current call center workflow and identify opportunities for automation.
Still unsure where to go from here? Read on for an introduction to call center automation, plus our top software picks!
How to Buy Contact Center Software
What is Call Center Automation?
Call center automation is the practice of using technology to tackle manual, time-consuming tasks on behalf of your agents. By automating these simple tasks, you can lighten the load for your call center employees so they can focus on tackling more complex issues, like customer care.
Automation is nothing new to the call center industry. Consider how IVR systems direct incoming callers to their appropriate channels, all without human intervention. In short, automation is a great way to streamline your call center operation and alleviate the burden of manual taskwork from your agents.
Benefits of Call Center Automation
You may be wondering what the benefits of implementing automation technology look like. Here are just a few examples:
Boost first call resolution
A high first call resolution, or FCR, usually indicates a well-performing call center. By automating manual tasks from your agents’ workload, they can focus on providing excellent and efficient service to your callers and resolve their issues in the very first interaction.
Improve customer satisfaction
With the right automation tools in place, improved customer satisfaction is sure to follow. After all, callers are looking for a frictionless experience with your call center, and automation is a great way to accomplish that.
Raise agent satisfaction
A good call center manager knows that agent satisfaction is just as important as customer satisfaction. After all, an agent who enjoys their daily work is more likely to provide good service. Automation can remove the mundane, time-consuming parts of an agent’s work so they can focus on creating positive customer interactions.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in Today’s Contact Center
Lower cost of operations
If you still consider call centers to be cost centers, think again. With improved call center performance comes lower operations cost, which you can leverage to better your business.
Offer after hours service
Don’t fret about callers who choose to contact you outside of your regular service hours. Automation can help you provide basic support without involving a human. It can be as simple as directing them to an FAQ page or offering them a call-back from a live agent later.
Features of Call Center Automation Software
Now that we’ve established the main benefits of call center automation software, it’s time to break down the key features. There are a lot of call center solutions on the market, each with their own unique offerings. When hunting for new call center technology, keep these features in mind:
Forecasting
In the contact center, every customer interaction is logged as multiple data points. So you can imagine the sheer volume of data your call center collects on a regular basis. Leading contact centers use forecasting automation tools to help them analyze this data and identify trends to inform decision making.
Consider how much time would be required to have a human analyze all that data. With automation software, these insights can be at your fingertips in just a few clicks. It’s a powerful weapon for your contact center.
Call routing
Call routing is one of the most common forms of call center automation. Your callers probably know this technology better as a phone menu or an interactive voice response (IVR). Its purpose is to direct customers across different support channels and connect them with an agent best equipped to assist them.
In the early days of the call center, it would have taken a lot of manual work to evaluate each incoming call and connect it to the correct support line. Thanks to automation, this is a task your agents don’t need to worry about.
Call-backs and virtual queueing
It’s a known fact that customers hate being made to wait, especially when they’re trying to access support. Long hold times in call centers directly affect customer satisfaction, increase abandonment rates, and lower the overall performance of your operation.
With solutions like automated call-backs and virtual queueing, you can save your callers the hassle of waiting on hold. It’s as simple as saving their place in the virtual queue, and automatically deploying a call-back to the customer when a live agent becomes available.
The ROI of Call-Backs for Your Contact Center
Omnichannel
Omnichannel continues to be the new standard for contact centers. Why? Because your customers expect to be able to reach you on their preferred type of channel — this can include chat, email, social media, and more. But with so many platforms to manage, things can get chaotic, quickly.
An omnichannel contact center platform brings all customer interaction history into one central database, so your agents can seamlessly transition from channel to channel with your customers without dropping the conversation. In other words, you can offer a more unified experience for your customers, no matter what channel they start or end the interaction on.
Sales and marketing
Modern contact center agents are no longer just support reps — they’re key parts of your sales and marketing team, too. Since they are the first point of contact for your customers, they’re in an ideal position to keep callers engaged with your products and services.
Sales and marketing automation involves setting up sequences to move the sales cycle along while improving overall conversion. You can automate promotional emails and other communications, and even personalize them for recipients. Most marketing CRM software has these capabilities, so it makes sense to harness their power for your contact center.
Customer interactions
Automated customer interactions are exactly what they sound like. Automated tools like chatbots and IVR can engage your customer without human assistance to set them in the right direction.
Let’s look at chatbots as an example. These AI-powered tools can interact with your customers on your website or mobile app, learn details about their query, answer simple questions, and escalate customers to the proper channels if needed. With this approach, your automated tools can take care of basic customer issues so your agents can focus on more complex issues.
CRM integration
The more background information an agent has on a customer, the more effective their support will be. By referencing past interactions, your contact center can reduce repetition of information and resolve the query more efficiently.
That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) tools really shine. By combining the abilities of your contact center platform with your CRM, you can provide your agents with helpful context so they can better understand and solve the issues presented to them.
Workflow operations
Think about the amount of information flowing through your contact center channels each day. Managing this information can be time-consuming without the right automation tools in place.
Consider the manual tasks associated with agent work, such as data entry or sending follow up messages to customers. Automation tools can help you do this, while minimizing the risk of human error.
Our Picks for Best Call Center Software
1. Fonolo
Call-back technology is quickly becoming a staple for contact centers around the world. Fonolo offers feature-rich cloud-based call-back solutions that can be customized to suit your business operations, making it a powerful automation tool. With Fonolo, you can:

Offer call-backs from your website or mobile app
Allow callers to schedule a call-back at a later time or date
Offer dedicated queues for VIP customer service

Top 10 Problems Fonolo Call-Backs Can Solve
2. Five9
Five9 is a well-known all-in-one call center software that supports omnichannel operations. They serve over 2,500 enterprise, mid-market, and SMB customers around the world, and offer integrations with different CRMs. This software also has AI driven capabilities, making it a powerful automation tool. With Five9, you can:

Implement workforce management tools
Use predictive dialing
Use on-screen caller information

3. Twilio Flex
Here is another popular all-in-one omnichannel contact center platform. Twilio Flex is cloud-based, customizable, and highly scalable for your business. Plus, it’s quick to set up and deploy and can support many other contact center platforms. With Twilio Flex, you can:

Update automated workflows, routing rules, channels, and more
Generate KPI reports to gain business insights
Integrate Twilio with any CRM

4. Genesys Cloud CX
Genesys Cloud CX leverages AI enhanced functionality and focuses on unifying customer and agent experiences across your channels. It’s suited to support businesses of all sizes, and offers automation tools such as:

Workforce engagement management tools
Custom IVR flows and outreach sequences
Multichannel routing and CRM integrations

5. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS Software
Avaya OneCloud is an omnichannel contact center solution that improves customer and employee experiences alike. They also use predictive AI tools to power their features, which include:

Self-service features
Intelligent call routing
Sentiment analysis

6. NICE in Contact
NICE in Contact is a cloud suite that also supports an omnichannel customer experience. They help your contact center create a seamless conversation with your users. Here are a few features that they offer:

Robotic process automation
Predictive dialing
Conversational AI
The post Our Top 6 Picks for Call Center Automation Software first appeared on Fonolo.

The alphabet is a miracle, one that is compounded by books. And the lessons we learn from this cornerstone of modern culture apply to organizations, meetings, tech, politics and almost everything we do together.

Your copy of To Kill a Mockingbird contains every single word that Harper Lee had in the edition she signed off on. Even if the paper, the page count and the typography change, it’s a high-fidelity duplicate of the original.

She wrote the book using the same 26 letters that every author in the English language uses, and when you read it, it will reveal itself in precisely the same format as she intended.

The fidelity is high. Every duplicate is the same.

And the work isn’t compressed. It unfolds precisely as the creator intended–26 letters, all available to each author.

This is different than AM radio or a song copy on a cassette. AM radio is compressed, and by the time it gets to you across the city, it’s also low fidelity. MP3s are compressed, but every copy is a high-fidelity duplicate of the first one. On the other hand, with cassettes, each copy loses something. Eventually the copies become nothing like the original. 800 copies later and you have nothing but static.

Lossy compression is forever. Information was intentionally removed. What you hear isn’t what the artist heard in the studio, and all the equipment in the world can’t restore it. On the other hand, math and computers can now often give us reversible compression, but that’s a different discussion. We compress information because smaller files give us a chance for higher fidelity and cheaper networking.

High fidelity means that each copy is what we expect.

Lossless compression (or no compression) means that we haven’t left anything out in order to get the fidelity or sharing to work.

Packaged food companies and makers of cheap chocolate prize the consistency of high fidelity (every bar is the same, if lousy) over the magic of something special. So they blend ingredients and dumb down the recipes so it’s always the same. This compression isn’t done in error, it’s something they work hard on.

A Broadway show is high fidelity when you see it, but that disappears if you try to save it. You have to be there live, a reference recording on video isn’t the same. Telling someone about the show is not the same as seeing it.

And the script is not lossy compression. In fact, the script is exactly what the playwright intended, but the director and the actors embellish the script in each production and performance. That’s part of their job. Sort of the opposite of compression.

Gossip is compressed and low fidelity news of the community, and both get worse as it spreads.

One of the miracles of email and the internet was how high the fidelity is (instant perfect copies, forever) and the ability for text and certain forms of other media to be uncompressed as they spread. Of course an MP3 can’t be turned back into the original reel to reel master recording, and a Wikipedia article changes over time.

Language translations are lossy and also low fidelity. Nuance disappears as we swap one language for another, which is why a talented translator is so much more valuable than a computer doing the same work.

And meetings? Meetings at work are largely low fidelity and ultimately quite compressed. Unlike a memo that can be in and of itself, a meeting is a performance, and then it’s summarized, and summarized again, until it becomes a story that’s a shadow of what the person who started the whole thing had in mind. Nuance disappears.

Democracy is probably best served by high resolution and the non-lossy compression of ideas and arguments. Alas, the internet and TV, while adding speed and impact, probably lower the resolution and increase compression at the same time.

As Jeff Jarvis points out, GPT and other AI chatbots are essentially lossy compression mechanisms for the web. They read the entire web and compress it on demand into a few paragraphs. Like Cliffs Notes, one of the problems of this convenience is that it can’t be uncompressed. The nuance disappears and is difficult to reconstruct.

Our lifetimes have seen this pendulum go back and forth, over and over. From black and white TV to color (this offers way less compression of the original image). From film in the theater to low quality streaming on a phone. From a landline phone conversation to a bad connection on a cell to a few characters in a text message. CDs sounded worse than a good LP, but SACDs and MQA can sound better in the right circumstances. Companies go from handbooks and memos to hallway conversations to Slack checkins.

Lossy compression is forever. Fidelity is a powerful delight. Stories spread and resonate, but by their nature compress the truth of what we just encountered. A novel is the author’s complete telling of the story the way they chose to tell it, while history books and journalism always compress what actually happened.

If you want to change the culture, or understand a technology in media, or do history, mess with fidelity and look for compression. Robert Caro is a low-compression biographer…

And now, AI redefines fidelity altogether, sometimes embellishing what was there before and presenting something that might mistakenly be seen as a high fidelity original.

And still, the alphabet is a miracle. High fidelity, low compression, resilient and widely distributed.

If ever there was a term suited to the times we live in, then surely “thrifting” is it. A recent report published by SAS highlighted the challenges retailers are currently facing. Consumers across the board are looking to cut back on non-essential spending. In fact, the survey found that 95% of respondents were more cost conscious than they were…
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In recent years, Gen Z has become the driving force behind Valentine’s Day gift giving as the youngest working generation. Born between 1997 and 2012, this generation is one of the largest, most diverse demographics in the world, as well as the most tech-savvy. As Valentine’s Day approaches, young lovebirds will be on the hunt for the perfect present. Companies need to prepare for an influx of queries regarding everything from gift returns…
The post How brands can show love to Gen Z this Valentine’s Day and beyond appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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Retail today is perhaps more complex than it has ever been. But giving customers the experience they now expect doesn’t have to be.  This year’s study revealed notable increases in consumers who are willing, prefer or have a growing affinity for self-service technology. From contactless and mobile “anywhere checkout,” to smart carts and digital kiosks. This…
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Customer experience dimensions refer to the main areas that should be considered when developing a great CX strategy. These dimensions should be the focus areas for building customer experiences that will be great for your consumers. As a result, your business will flourish with a cohort of loyal customers.  We all know that there is a…
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