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Our goal was to incorporate the Omni AI components of ConnexAI to assist us with efficiency goals.
Explore Athena AICustomer engagement is one of the most competitive industries in the world. Whether it’s BPOs, contact centres or in-house company customer engagement teams, companies are constantly levelling up and on the lookout for new ways to get an edge over competitors. Constant contact centre optimisation is a must if you want to stay relevant in the market.
Customer engagement is one of the most competitive industries in the world. Whether it’s BPOs, contact centres or in-house company customer engagement teams, companies are constantly levelling up and on the lookout for new ways to get an edge over competitors. Constant contact centre optimisation is a must if you want to stay relevant in the market.
The goals of contact centre optimisation are pretty clear: after all, every decision-maker in this industry aspires to increase the productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of their contact centre’s team. Everyone wants to handle more calls in less time, increase sales, and satisfy customers better. However, the real question is what are the best means to those ends, and that’s where things get more complex.
The days when running a contact centre was mostly about traditional workforce management and strategising are far gone. In 2024, contact centre optimisation is often synonymous with staying up to date with the latest technological advancements that can make your processes more efficient at a better cost.
Here, we present you with some specific implementations or measures you can take right now to optimise the efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness of your contact centre:
A happy customer is a loyal customer. It should seem obvious, but unfortunately, many contact centres don’t seem to have internalised this essential truth.
However, the data leaves no room for doubt: PwC found that 73% of customers say that customer experience is an extremely important factor in their purchasing decisions. Around 32% of those surveyed said that they would walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience with the customer care team. According to Customerthink, 9 out of 10 customers won’t purchase from a company again after three or even less poor customer service interactions.
The bottom line is clear: contact centre optimisation, as well as a brand’s popularity and reputation, are dependent on making the customer’s experience as seamless, smooth, and pleasant as possible. This leads us to the next point.
In 2024, being present across all channels is vital for customer satisfaction. People use different devices and channels to talk to each other in their daily lives, and it only makes sense that they would want to do the same when communicating with businesses.
In a survey, Salesforce found that 75% of consumers look forward to a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels, and 73% will likely switch brands if they don’t get it.
If you want to provide your customers with a consistently satisfactory experience across channels and achieve unparalleled levels of contact centre optimisation, your best bet is to provide an Omnichannel Customer Experience. An Omnichannel contact centre brings all communication channels together into one hub, which will make interactions faster, smoother, and more effective.
A survey by Salesforce revealed that 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company. While it might not be possible to meet those expectations every time, intelligent call routing and workflow automation software can be a significant step in contact centre optimisation that will take you pretty close to that ideal.
Using AI automation tools, you can categorise calls based on real-time customer and agent data in order to direct customers to the right agent faster.
Some platforms, like ConnexAI, have customer service automation tools like Flow, which will allow you to easily create sophisticated rulesets and criteria to route inbound calls the smart way, reducing wait times and making for a more seamless and satisfying customer experience.
Customer Interaction Analytics tools can allow you to look deeper into your agents’ conversations with customers and give you access to unparalleled depths of insight. Some call centre software platforms come with AI Speech Analytics integrations that will delve into each and every conversation with your customers to recognise patterns, note customers’ levels of satisfaction, and read into agents’ performance, offering insights into areas for improvement, opportunities for coaching or for new strategies.
This information can be incredibly useful for teaching agents how to handle certain types of calls or planning your call routing in a way that matches the particularities of your market, enabling your contact centre’s optimisation.
According to research conducted by Userlike, a significant majority—60%—prefer interacting with a live agent over engaging with a chatbot, primarily due to doubts about the chatbot’s ability to accurately understand their questions.
However, when appropriately utilized, AI chatbots can be remarkably effective. A 2023 study by Gartner revealed that chatbots achieved resolution rates of 52% for inquiries related to orders and purchases, and 48% for returns or cancellations. As AI continues to evolve, these rates are expected to soar in the years ahead.
In summary, while contact centre chatbots can serve as valuable tools when deployed correctly, they cannot replace the importance of human support. The more advanced the AI behind a chatbot, the quicker it can respond to standard queries compared to any human agent. A proficiently designed chatbot can free up staff from handling routine inquiries, though it will not entirely replace them. Instead, it empowers them to focus on high-value interactions requiring a human touch or specialized expertise.
However, some Conversational AI models go even beyond the capabilities of traditional chatbots, achieving previously unparalleled levels of domain-specific knowledge, nuance, and understanding. These are the often called AI Agents, which excel at much more than simple back-and-forth conversations: they can also navigate complex conceptual frameworks, generate and adapt tasks independently to achieve their goals, and process new information to take appropriate actions. Some contact centre software solutions provide advanced Conversational AI powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), offering more sophistication and domain expertise than traditional chatbots. For instance, ConnexAI’s Athena LLM AI Agent can be trained on industry-specific conversations, enabling it to quickly learn specialized knowledge and respond to queries with increased accuracy and relevance.
Wondering how to improve your call centre agents’ performance? The best way to do that and to achieve effective levels of contact centre optimisation is to make their jobs more rewarding. But how?
An ICMI survey showed that 87% of call centre agents experience moderate to high levels of stress: 71% of them attribute that to system and tool inefficiencies. In the same survey, 100% of the organisations agreed that agent morale & satisfaction directly affects customer experience.
“When you ask business leaders what’s most important to them, they’ll tell you customer experience, customer service,” said Justin Robbins, senior analyst at ICMI. “But their actions are completely contrary to that. They know that their agents are stressed out and the main reason is their tools and technology aren’t efficient.”
The bottom line is clear: the best way to ensure your agents can do their job in a smooth and efficient way is to provide them with the best tools, like an omnichannel platform to free them up from menial tasks and enable them to switch channels seamlessly.
But there are even more options: Connex’s contact centre software platform, for example, comes with a Gamification module, an incentive system that rewards the best performers in your team and turns a challenging job into a game. And what’s more; it will also allow you to choose the game’s rules, standards, and rewards at will to suit your contact centre’s particularities. This aspect of Workforce Optimisation, together with other Workforce Management features, can be the key to a more productive and motivated staff.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the primary responsibilities of modern contact centre decision-makers is to keep themselves informed about the latest technological advancements that can enhance their operations’ effectiveness.
However, this can feel like a challenging and never ending task for contact centre leaders; technology advances quickly and new applications and tools are constantly emerging. That’s why ConnexAI is the ideal call centre software solution: it’s an evolving and adaptable Omnichannel software platform that grows with your needs and requirements, and we regularly add new features based on our clients’ input.
To learn more about how ConnexAI is captaining the revolution of Omnichannel Customer Experience and connecting contact centres with more customers all across the globe, get in touch with our team or request a free discovery session of our platform.
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