8 Benefits Of AI-Driven Contact Center Automation
There’s so much more to automation than just replacing human-led processes with technology. When automation is designed around your customers and their needs, it can improve almost every aspect of your customer service process and drive positive change on both a micro and macro scale.
Each of these benefits is compelling even in isolation – but when combined, they represent an incredibly cost-efficient way to transform your service process and save enormous amounts of money.
1. Lower Operating Costs
The most obvious benefit for any contact center considering automation is the profound reduction in operating costs you can achieve. Some studies suggest that harnessing technology to improve customer experience can reduce costs by 20-40%.
It’s easy to see how this applies to contact centers. Any increase in call volumes or the complexity of customer cases means more pressure on your service teams. Introducing AI Agents to automate parts of your service process means you won’t have to pay to recruit, train, and retain more human agents.
But it’s not just about recruitment. AI Agents can pre-qualify customers, assist service teams mid-call, and create post-call summaries to slash seconds or minutes from every single call. Over even a short space of time, this adds up to staggering cost savings.
2. 24/7 Multilingual Customer Support
The always-on nature of the digital world has changed how customers interact with contact centers. They want immediate support, regardless of when they choose to get in touch. A recent study found that 48% of consumers expect 24/7 availability from support teams.
AI Agents allow you to implement a 24/7 support service that can instantly answer a customer’s call and begin solving the problem. If the case is too complex, the AI Agent can send all of the relevant details to your human team so that they can prioritize it immediately when they start their working day.
AI Agents also offer automatic translation, so customers can speak in their native tongue and the AI Agent will understand them and reply to them in their chosen language, If a case is passed to a human agent, the AI can act as a second layer to translate the incoming conversation, display it for the agent and then translate their reply back into the customer’s language.
3. Reduced Average Handle Times
Average Handling Time (AHT) is, perhaps, the most important KPI for your service teams. The goal for every contact center is to reduce AHT while maintaining (or improving) service levels.
Automation directly impacts both talk time and hold times – two critical parts of your AHT calculations. An AI Agent can:
- Eliminate wait times by immediately answering incoming calls.
- Make agents more efficient mid-call with Agent Assist, slashing talk time and speeding up effective outcomes.
- Reduce after-call work by creating a wrap-up summary for your team.
Considering the average AHT is between 240-600 seconds, depending on your sector, any reduction can be significant. By removing wait times entirely, speeding up call efficiency, and taking care of post-call documentation, automation via an AI Agent will dramatically reduce your total AHT.
4. Deeper Insight
Contact centers depend on data to make informed decisions about future change. The technology that enables automation also helps you better collect, analyze, and utilize data.
Cognigy.AI, for example, gathers important insights and presents them automatically on a customizable dashboard. It helps contact centers immediately understand their current performance and how that compares to past metrics or future goals.
Artificial intelligence allows you to achieve far more with your data. You can, for example, ask an AI Agent to look at thousands of historic call logs to identify the common pain points that lead to call abandonment.
But that’s only one potential use case. The ability to automatically collect and interrogate swathes of data carries vast potential – but how you use it will depend on your business. Visit our Insights to learn more.
5. Improved Agent Efficiency
Contact center teams must embrace automation as a supportive tool that can help augment their working processes rather than replace them. AI Agents offering Agent Assist features benefit your human team in many ways, including:
- Tackling the low-value, repetitive tasks that eat up too much of your human agent’s time and lower their morale.
- Pre-qualifying customers and providing contextual case details so your agent is fully equipped as soon as they answer the call.
- Improves an agent’s efficiency mid-call by fetching answers to a customer’s query from your knowledge base, or creating a bespoke answer using Generative AI.
The common element in all of these examples is that automation helps your workforce focus on the high-value, high-complexity tasks that instill workplace satisfaction and represent the most value for your business.
6. Evolutionary Self-Service
Self-service is a type of automation that enables your customers to accomplish tasks on their own without the need for your involvement. In a pre-AI world, chatbots allowed users to get answers quickly – but they were prone to error or misuse.
AI completely evolves your self-service offering. You can deploy a digital chat AI Agent that users can contact through a multitude of channels, from voice calls and text to social media apps like WhatsApp. This intelligence assistant can guide users through more complex multi-stage processes that usually involve human intervention, such as booking a flight or processing a refund.
7. Better Customer Experience (CX)
There’s no real secret behind improving your customer experience ratings. Your customers want to have their needs respected and their problems solved as effectively as possible.
Automation allows you to reduce or even remove wait times. It also allows you to provide robust self-service options to give customers more choices when it comes to carrying out tasks. Finally, AI also helps improve agent productivity, meaning they can resolve customer requests faster. All of these factors contribute to vastly improved customer experiences.
It’s important to remember that automation might mean different things to different customers. Where one demographic may embrace talking to a Voice AI Agent, another may reject it and abandon the call. Building this concept into your automation strategy by creating a specific process for the non-AI demographic will be crucial in protecting any improvements made to CX ratings.
8. Increased Revenue
Automation isn’t just about saving money – it also helps you generate it. Reducing customer call times and improving satisfactory outcomes will increase the chance of retention and future purchases. Happier customers are also more likely to leave positive reviews and recommend your business to friends, which in turn increases potential revenue.
You can even leverage automation to carry out important revenue-protection activities, such as getting an AI Agent to proactively inform a customer about an upcoming renewal date and then guide them through the full process to reduce the chance of potential friction.
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