March 25, 2022

6 Call Center Automation Tools and Strategies

Call center automation has helped businesses seamlessly integrate efficiency with personable human interactions. Unpack the best automation strategies with us now.

Kayleigh Berry

Reading time: 8 minutes

The unique business goals, requirements, and challenges of a contact center mean that these businesses are always looking for new ways to improve the customer service experience. As technology advances, a new suite of call center automation tools is being created.

And done right, it has helped businesses seamlessly integrate efficiency with personable and genuine human interactions.

In this article, we’ll go through 7 strategies and tools you should use for call center automation so you can streamline operations and work more efficiently. Let’s dive right in!

What is call center automation?

Simply put, call center automation, or contact center automation, is all about saving time and energy and offering exceptional customer experiences.

According to Statista, 87% of global organizations believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage by removing unnecessary human intervention and making call centers more efficient.

And while many traditionalists voiced criticism over contact center automation’s less personal approach, tools like chatbots and conversational AI aren’t about removing genuine human interaction.

Instead, with automation, reps spend less time entering data into a CRM, switching between applications, or connecting the customer with the right person for the job. This leaves reps with more time to focus on the actual conversation and how to better serve potential customers.

Benefits of call center automation

Operational efficiency

Manually attending to all tasks can cause delays. Whether a call center is fully or partially automated, it helps minimize the involvement of human reps and reduces the average handle time.

Consequently, this positively impacts service quality and productivity.

Reduced business costs

Delays can lead to a decrease in customer satisfaction, which can lead to lesser customers. And we all know what happens when you have fewer customers.

No sales.

If you speed up call center processes, you can reverse this and generate more leads and higher revenue for your call center.

Increased customer satisfaction

Studies show that almost 3 out of 4 customers believe that valuing their time is the most critical factor in good online customer service.

Call center automation starts the interaction right away with qualifying questions, authentication, and other methods to reduce handle time for the customer.

No management disruption

Running a call center requires managers to have a finger on the pulse. It’s impossible to manage scheduling and planning for the future without knowing how your team handles fluctuations in traffic. You can automate basic tasks and let management focus on challenging issues.

6 call center automation tools and strategies

As products become more readily available, customers and clients are willing to drop a product simply because the support experience they received from contact center staff was poor.

So how can your organization reach these high expectations set out by the customers and clients?

To maximize the benefits of using automation, here are seven tools and strategies to start thinking about boosting your call center productivity.

1. Automated customer interactions

Automated customer interactions refer to AI-powered customer service. It’s a blanket term for any customer service tool that allows a customer to speak to a program rather than a human.

Options for automated customer interactions include:

Chatbots: Chatbots can initiate conversations with clients browsing an organization’s website and prompt clients with questions. After gathering some basic info, the Chatbot pass them onto the relevant department when necessary.
AI-Powered IVR: Interactive Voice Response automatically responds to customer queries with speech that’s either pre-recorded or generated dynamically. It allows customers to access various services without speaking to a human agent.
Virtual reps: Virtual reps can mimic live reps in real-time. A virtual agent uses scripted rules and AI to provide automated service and guidance. Virtual reps use natural language processing (NLP) and conversational AI to offer a more human-like approach to customer experience automation.
Automatic call back: Customers can request a call back whenever the queue is too long, or their other avenues have been exhausted.

What do automated customer interactions do?

These call center automation tools all fit within this same context:

Provide the client with a faster response time and the tools to search and explore independently.
Gather context and intent to assist the agent better and free up their time to focus on the complicated issues. This reduces agent workload and improves employee satisfaction.

Like all things in business, the key is to provide quality content and service.

Whether that be routing them to the best department, following up with a customer after their experience, or incorporating human reps into the dynamic.

When revamping your call center with automated customer interactions, you should consider which calls should be routed to virtual reps or accelerated to human reps. Your decision should be based on the complexity, urgency, and emotionality of the customer’s request.

And don’t forget to follow up.

Reach out to customers to ask about their experience. If they didn’t have a positive experience, ask them what they want to resolve the problem.

Automated interaction tools

NovoChat

NovoChat is a chat marketing platform that can help you tremendously in this aspect. With its centralized inbox, you can connect multiple communication channels and view them in one dashboard. This allows you to easily manage and monitor all customer conversations without juggling various tabs.

Best features:

2. Workflow automation

Customer service reps have a lot on their plates, and workflow automation significantly benefits contact center reps by reducing the daily mundane tasks they deal with.

The call center workflow automates the process to minimize the processing time and improve task execution and performance.

From making it simple for teams to collecting data through forms to moving between applications, input centralized information, and even following up with leads.

Workflow empowers the work from start to finish and enables a better-coordinated effort.

What does workflow automation do?

Workflow automation tools can be integrated with various forms as many tasks in contact centers are highly repetitive. The more you can reduce these repetitive processes for the agent, the more time they spend on the actual customer.

Some of the features of workflow automation are:

Tasks and forms: Automated workflows use pre-determined steps and functions to route the information among various users. It enables your team to collect data through forms and prioritize tasks across the board.
Workflow-specific reports: It’s impossible to manage contact center operations like scheduling and planning for the future without knowing how your team handles fluctuations in traffic. Reporting and a centralized dashboard can identify common issues, successes, and demonstrate gaps in your support.
Dashboard: A unified customer service experience reduces customer friction and increases front-line efficiency. Ideally, you want a CRM that logs incoming calls and distributes them across channels and reps.

A great tip is integrating desktop automation software that blends the array of existing applications into a new customer-friendly workflow. This prevents reps from getting bogged down with so many different applications that weren’t necessarily designed to integrate.

Workflow automation tools

Hubspot

HubSpot’s winning CRM is a reason it stands out. HubSpot’s contact center automation software serves as a central hub with all its jam-packed capabilities. Contact center reps can effortlessly access this centralized hub to access essential information.

Best features:

Workflow automation and elimination of repetitive tasks
Powerful Content Management System (CMS)
Complex data reporting
Data segmentation and email logs
Seamless connection to CRM database

3. Sales automation

Sales automation addresses a unique challenge contact centers have — support reps aren’t only in-charge of interactions, but of customer engagement too.

While customer interactions are essential, they’re just a starting point. Reps need to help improve one of the main goals of contact centers: increasing sales.

What does sales automation do?

Sales automation focuses on simplifying and automating the sales process, ultimately increasing the sales cycle’s speed and efficiency and leading to more conversions.

You can automate many processes related to sales and marketing — emails, social media outreach, and omnichannel sales engagement.

The best way to do this is to bring in relevant customer information and data to help provide a more personalized experience.

Here are some processes you can automate:

Emails: Identify the emails you send out frequently — welcome messages, follow-ups, and more. You can save much time in the process.
Lead generation: You can revisit previous customers or ask current ones for referrals. It’s also a brilliant idea to work with your peers and the people in your network.
Lead capture: Use lead capture software to collect customer information that you can use for future lead nurturing campaigns.

Sales automation tools

Novocall

Novocall is a business phone system that comes with features like a click-to-call widget, an outbound dialer, and call tracking to support both inbound and outbound call-driven lead generation efforts.

Novocall also integrates with popular CRMs such as Hubspot and Salesforce so that your data is automatically recorded in the system.

Best features:

Suite of call management features
Callback scheduling
Lead distribution capabilities
Facebook Lead Ads integration
Business hours

Agile CRM

Investing in proper CRM software to centralize all customer information is sage advice. Investing in Agile CRM is an intelligent approach. This creates alignment between your reps and properly follows up with customers.

Best features:

360-degree contact view
Timeline, deals, and documents
Telephony and lead scoring
Calendar integrations with standard software (like Google Calendar)

Nextiva

Nextiva is an easy-to-use solution that helps you connect with more callers in less time and with fewer reps.

With Nextiva, you get features like IVR, automatic call routing, and call queuing. Also, you can optimize agent call flow, leverage virtual reps to automate interactions, and streamline the experience for the caller.

Best features:

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service
Unlimited services (including text messaging, web conferencing, and online faxing)
Unlimited calling (North America only)
Team chat

4. Forecasting analytics

Forecasting analytics, also known as predictive analytics, provides insight into customer behaviors.

This helps businesses evaluate behavioral patterns which allow call centers to provide better support, improvements, or ticket resolutions by analyzing customer behavior and predicting future actions.

But data is useless if there’s no one or nothing to make sense of it.

What does forecasting analytics do?

Forecasting analytics can help organizations by allowing them to understand their data better. It also shows them how to optimize their collected information by thinking without biases.

Essentially, it helps people make predictions based on trends in your workforce and those discovered in existing datasets.

Let’s say your lead response time is incredibly high at certain times of the day — this could be because of understaffing or a high influx of calls. To resolve this problem, use forecasting analytics to collect data and make room for the necessary improvement.

Here are some tips on forecasting analytics:

Focus on quality: Make predictions based on the existing operations of your call center. From there, determine the areas where you can improve and implement better processes.
Give time allowance: If you make improvements, avoid discontinuing the new processes immediately and instead wait for matters to work. You may have to wait weeks or months before you see results.
Consider adapting: In case of significant changes to your operations, embrace the change. If you haven’t implemented changes, check out the promising trends in your industry.

Forecasting analytics tools

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is an excellent CRM for contact center automation because it’s easy to use. It also comes with in-depth insights and reports that can enhance forecasting analytics. For these reasons, it’s ideal for those with limited CRM experience.

Best features:

Workflow automation
Outstanding 24/7 customer support
Mobile accessibility
Integrations with several apps

Call center automation is the future

And there you have it! We hope that this article has given you insight into call center automation and the tools you can use.

The world is constantly evolving — and so can our processes.

With the help of AI tools and other automated systems, you can streamline your call center operations and ensure a more productive team.

If you’re interested in how Novocall can help your call center operations, get started with us today!

Kayleigh Berry

Kayleigh Berry is an SEO marketer at Paperform. Outside of work, you’ll find Kayleigh surfing or training her Australian Shepherd puppy.

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