Transform Your Contact Center into a Profit Center: Use Automation & Existing Technology to Build More Business Logic Around Employees

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Over the course of the past year, I’ve had dozens of conversations with practitioners about the crucial role of automation in transforming their enterprise. Automation can exist in many different forms and “robotic” automation, though it’s gained a great deal of attention lately, only represents a portion of automation capabilities, primarily restricted to straight through processing.

Robotic automation can dramatically increase productivity by completely removing certain manual activities. By computerizing those activities and leveraging robotic automation and desktop automation together as part of an enterprise transformation strategy, the potential return on investment can be up to ten times greater than using robotic automation alone.

The first three parts of using automation for enterprise transformation are:

1. Fully automating repetitive manual transaction processing using robotic automation.

2. Removing manual work activities using desktop automation to streamline processes, enabling employees to perform higher value, customer-focused transactions.

3. Optimizing processes that cannot be fully automated to simplify and accelerate transaction execution.

Once you have automated and optimized the tools your agents utilize to carry out their jobs, it’s time to evaluate ways that same technology can be used to directly impact the bottom line. You’re now ready to focus on how you can use automation to build more business logic around your employees and achieve revenue goals.

Today’s enterprise executives are not only focused on building more efficient operations and driving down the cost to serve. Much attention has turned to the contact center and back office business units as strategic profit centers. C-level leaders are exploring ways to drive increased customer engagement and deriving increased revenue per transaction.

The fourth step of using automation to transform transactions with the enterprise is to use automation to leverage your existing technology investments by building extensible business logic that improves transaction quality and increases revenue per transaction. Once you’ve optimized all of the activities performed by the employee on the desktop, you have the ability integrate the technologies on the desktop to use in next-best-action or next-best-offer algorithms to use for generating new promotions for the customer, also known as “intelligent guidance.”

Having intelligent guidance prompts delivered to the contact center agent at the “moment of truth” can improve average revenue per transaction, and increasing average revenue per transaction across a large group of sales agents can dramatically increase top line revenue growth. Additionally, having more contextual customer intelligence enables employees to provide more accurate information and reduces the need to navigate and search across different systems to locate, process and fulfill sales orders.

How are you considering all of the critical aspects of automation to transform your enterprise in 2016?

Paul Sewell
Paul Sewell is the Senior Director of Communications and Intelligence for OpenSpan (www.openspan.com). A 14-year veteran of the customer service technology industry, Mr. Sewell is a respected evangelist and proponent of technology solutions that deliver world-class customer experiences. At OpenSpan, Paul's efforts are focused on marketing the company's activity intelligence and desktop automation solutions.

1 COMMENT

  1. Automation is great if you implement it strategically, but there will always be aspects of the contact center that will need the human element. Customer experience is a huge part of the process, and the human element is a greatly valued aspect that can never be outdated.

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