How Automation Improves Customer Experience in Contact Centers

With the final quarter of the 2019 calendar year fast approaching, any discussion of customer experience must include strategies for more rapidly achieving greater customer satisfaction and higher rates of resolution. We all know that greater employee experience, training, supervision, and career pathing are important potential methods for doing so, but any strategy that doesn’t include the use of automation will likely fail. My own company, a live-agent outsourced contact center, was at one point diametrically opposed to even the mention of automation. Today, we understand that it's either automate or perish.

Facts (or what are reported as facts):

• Live chat software has a 73% satisfaction rate as a way for customers to interact with businesses.
• 64% of internet users say 24-hour service is the best chatbot feature.
• 37% of respondents predict the reason they would use a chatbot is for getting a quick answer in an emergency.
• 35% predict they would use a chatbot for a complaint, a problem, or to get detailed answers or explanations.
• 55% of respondents say they would most enjoy getting an instant response and answers to simple questions from a chatbot.
• 34% of respondents say they would use a chatbot to find a human customer service agent.
• By 2020, it is predicted that 85% of consumer interactions will be handled without a human agent.
• 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2020.
• 35% of consumers want to see more companies using chatbots.
• 21% of consumers believe chatbots are the easiest way to contact a business.
• In regards to e-commerce, 34% of respondents said they would prefer to answer questions from AI via chatbots or virtual assistants.
• 53% of customers are more likely to shop with businesses that they can message.
• Over 50% of customers expect a business to be open 24/7.
• Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs.

Admittedly, I have cherry-picked the data points from the post that most illustrate the emergence of automation and chatbots in the customer care ecosystem that consumers seem to prefer. But in-house, outsource, on-shore, near-shore… whatever the flavor or flavors are, immediate response and fast resolution times are the mandate in our on-demand, always-on society. Even those that have made our business exclusively from training other people how to serve customers are now faced with offering the tools to ensure uninterrupted availability at the speed of now. The costs of doing so – especially in a market of record low unemployment can be between staggering to untenable – are the cause célèbre behind automation and chatbots. 

The new mantra is Automate or Die. Even for live agent contact centers, we must figure out the context how to introduce automation tools at the front, medium, or back end to speed customers through their interactions with us. The tools are cloud-based and getting easier to deploy, the barriers to entry are few to none, and the pace of migration across the customer care world towards automation will only accelerate. The data points show a version of what customers demand today, and we must give it to them, to ensure optimal customer experiences.