Streamlining Operations: The Role of AI in Business Process Automation

The world produces more data in two days than it had between the beginning of humanity and 2003. Approximately 2.7 trillion terabytes of data exist in the digital world, and the volume of data organizations collect doubles every 14 months.

Contact Center organizations collect more data than most but according to one study, only 12% of the data captured is analyzed.  Humans cannot analyze data with the same speed and precision as technology. Business intelligence tools are necessary to define and understand your customers and improve their experience.

Many organizations moved to cloud-based solutions in the face of Covid-19 due to the necessity of remote work. Contact centers have evolved in that time, but many organizations still need to adopt the possibilities of AI based tools. It begs the question:  do they know that their agents are the organization’s voice and that it’s the first or last contact between their customer and their business?

You must create a relationship to create an experience. Therefore, the contact center aims to build relationships between your organization and customers. AI and business intelligence tools can go a long way in helping contact center organizations bridge that gap.

^{How does Business Intelligence improve processes and what are some examples of AI-based automation applications for contact centers?}

Let’s start with call management; most contact centers only listen to 2% of their calls due to a lack of resources and time. The lack of analysis impacts agent support, ongoing training, and coaching. More is needed to improve our relationship with them and to carry out detailed customer analysis and trend recognition.

You need to assign more than three full-time resources to listen to 1% of calls in a contact center that receives 1.5 million calls annually. A business intelligence tool like speech analytics allows contact centers to analyze 100% of their call recordings. This tool, linked to your call recording solution, does the work of 300 QA analysts in our previous example. Most importantly, it will filter all your calls and bring out your most valuable data points.

Keyword research on all calls in a day “x” or week “y” will quickly show the emerging trend for the coming days or weeks. A good keyword search analysis will allow you to better predict and turn contacts into opportunities. Become proactive rather than reactive!

With the arrival of business intelligence, we can analyze customer sentiments, and over time predict the quality results of all calls. Speech Analytics applications will allow you to examine first-call resolution issues and identify calls in which a phrase like “I called yesterday” was said. You can also search for multiple calls made by the same number to analyze and discover problematic procedures or behaviors.

How much money could you save a year if you decided to go after repeat calls to reduce the number of calls? For a customer contact center receiving 20,000 calls per week, reducing repeat calls by 5% would save $382,720 per year. Despite low response rates, many contact centers still use standard customer surveys to evaluate their agents and the customer experience. Artificial intelligence can unlock 100% of contact center data without burdening the customer.

With the emergence of telecommuting, tools like desktop analytics allow you to manage agents remotely and know which sites they spend the most time on. This tool should be used sparingly, but it does let you have employees worldwide and do real-time management remotely.

More and more companies are using chatbots as an internal FAQ tool for training and quality purposes; this allows your agents to have an online tool available at all times to support them during difficult calls and also allows a supervisor to have more agents under his wing and thus increase the supervisor/agent ratio.

New Era has a comprehensive team to support your digital transformation and business intelligence needs. Don’t hesitate to contact us.

Author Credit

Holly Irvin, WFO Practice Manager

Marie-Helene Savard, Executive Director Customer Experience