Workforce Management Featured Article
Consider Attended Bots to Help Improve Workflow and Customer Retention
If you could improve one metric in your contact center, it would make sense to focus your energy on customer retention. Acquiring new customers is expensive, and customers today are very likely to flee after even just one poor customer experience. By boosting retention, you’re causing a ripple effect across the contact center which can positively affect numerous aspects of your business.
So let’s assume you’re going to focus most of your effort in 2022 to improving customer retention. Where do you begin? It makes sense to ensure you have enabled your customer support agents with the tools they need to solve customer challenges, thereby improving the customer experience (CX) strategy, according to a recent article by Brad Beumer writing for CMS Wire. This is done by implementing effective end-to-end automation.
“In a nutshell, end-to-end automation involves using robotic process automation (RPA) to perform a variety of tasks to both assist agents and redirect their efforts toward higher-level work,” wrote Beumer. “Agents get assistance from both attended and unattended robots. Unattended bots can automate back-office processes, running in the background following rules-based processes. (These bots can take many post-call tasks away from your agents.)”
Attended bots, or virtual assistants, are there to support agents with workflow and basic tasks, leaving them more time to solve complex problems. Using a mix of one or both robots can have a huge impact on reducing agents’ low-level workload and improving service calls, according to Beumer. Beware, however, of choosing the first solution that promises to give you attended bot technology.
“Your attended and unattended robot solutions must be intelligent and specifically designed to improve the customer experience,” wrote Beumer. “Poorly thought-out automation solutions will complicate customer experience efforts, frustrating customers and ultimately leading them away from your brand.”
Ensure you find a tried-and-true solution that will work with your call center platform, understand your workload, and your customers’ and agents’ needs, in order to have a helping hand instead of a liability.
Edited by Luke Bellos
