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7 ways to improve contact center performance with automation
There is so much scope for simplification in today’s contact centres. Team Leaders and evaluators alike face high pressure and intense workloads, which can sometimes result in QA being less about improvement and more about ticking boxes.
Thankfully, technology has come a long way in how it can support roles across the contact centre, providing tons of opportunity for greater efficiency.
But if you’re in the dark about how automation could help you, don’t worry. Below we’ve shared a mix of ideas that touch on everything from operations, employee experience and software – and not one will replace the all-important human element of the contact centre.
1. Leverage automatic conversation selection and allocation
It’s only human that evaluators might gravitate towards the path of least resistance when there’s a lot going on. Shorter calls tend to mean quicker resolutions, which makes it easier to hit those quotas – but unfortunately, that puts evaluators at risk of selection bias.
At evaluagent, we call these ‘Auto work queues’. They mitigate selection bias by randomly selecting calls for evaluation and assigning those to an evaluator, removing the mental load of decision-making and saving time. The queues can even be tailored to certain parameters to ensure a good variety – so no doubt there’ll be a nice mix of shorter and more complex conversations to evaluate.
It’s a simple but effective way to remove that selection bias.
2. Uncover rich insight with AI assistance
Artificial intelligence will be an essential tool in contact centres moving forward. According to evaluagent’s recent research with ContactBabel, 87% of contact centre leaders believe AI will be important to their future operations.
Just one of the ways it can assist is by increasing QA coverage of conversations to 100% of those happening in your contact centre.
With AI, you can build on conversation metadata, offering richer insights. For example, AI can recognize sentiment in a conversation by picking up trigger words, and even detect vulnerability and compliance issues.
What this means is you can now identify and report on higher risk conversations across the board – not just the conversations being evaluated. With AI able to help QA all conversations, you can go even deeper by finding conversations that suggest agent underperformance. Even better, these conversations can be automatically sent to evaluators.
3. Automate the agent-evaluator feedback loop
Ensure no evaluation or feedback gets lost, ignored, or forgotten. After all, QA is not just for compliance, but helps ensure agents are able to deliver continually great service to customers.
Close the feedback loop by automating it! When an evaluator submits feedback, have your software automatically notify the agent. Allow them to read it and acknowledge that they’ve digested the information – which should then notify the evaluator that it’s been understood.
Providing this real-time feedback to agents means they can take action in the next conversation they have. And, if necessary, you can build this feedback into training, coaching and one-to-one discussions to see even more improvement.
4. Use real-time dashboards to democratize data
A great operational and employee experience starts with transparency. An automated dashboard keeps everyone up to the minute with the latest data.
Letting agents have access to their own data – the same data team leaders and evaluators get to see – helps to reframe coaching and one-to-ones. That is, it’s not about what an agent needs to do going forward, but what they’ve already done.
Agents and team leaders alike can come into the conversation with the same information, ready to discuss goals, their current situation and how to achieve those goals. All in all, a much more efficient use of time and a great way to automate and improve the employee experience at the same time.
5. Harness automatic quality scoring
Now, you can automate scoring based on what a conversation contained. So, if the conversation related to customer vulnerability, you can deploy a vulnerability auto scorecard to measure agent performance.
This doesn’t replace evaluators, but adds additional insight into the conversation. Essentially, you can easily find high-risk conversations that your evaluation team can deep dive into and provide meaningful feedback to the agent.
It’s about making the work your evaluators do much more valuable and meaningful, mitigating the risk of your QA program becoming just a tick box exercise.
6. Bring the fun into work with gamification
Modern QA programs put employee experience at the centre of operations – and with good reason too! Engaged agents are happy agents. In fact, according to research by Gallup, engaged employees help companies go on to achieve 21% greater profitability, and 10% higher customer ratings.
Gamification is one way to invigorate teams. Use a platform that automatically awards points and badges for certain actions and achievements, watch as agents compete to race to the top of leaderboards and see their efforts repaid as they bid on rewards.
None of this needs to be complicated. Once you’ve set up your rules in your software, like how long leaderboards should run for, and the number of points that get awarded, the games can begin!
7. Deploy generative AI: the next frontier of the contact centre
Beyond the traditional AI of tagging and sentiment analysis that we covered earlier, sophisticated platforms are harnessing generative AI to consider everything from agent responses, to wider context, to automatic scoring.
Generative AI in QA is able to give reasons why it has scored something the way that it has and even provide suggestions for improvements. It’s like having a clever co-pilot for your evaluators. Ultimately, it’s up to them whether they choose to use those insights or not, but doing so will effectively boost their productivity, since they’re able to achieve much more coverage in less time.
With so many angles to automation, you’re spoilt for choice on which strategies you choose to employ. Assess where your contact centre’s particular pain points lie and see if they could be rectified by reducing the opportunity for human error or bias, then build up from there. Enjoy the automation adventure!
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