Contact center automation
Leverage contact center automation with RingCentral RingCX to improve customer experience, boost agent engagement, make cost-savings, and more.
Contact or call center automation is how businesses get the most out of their customer service resources. Cloud contact center solutions like RingCentral RingCX help you leverage artificial intelligence (AI), call center process automation, and more to take time-consuming tasks off the plates of your agents and generally streamline workflows.
Note-taking, data entry, and more can all be automated to not only save time and effort, but also eliminate human error. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Developing technologies in the AI field like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI, and machine learning mean the possibilities for automation in call centers and contact centers are near endless.
What is contact center automation?
Contact center automation is the application of technology—particularly AI—to complete tasks in your call or outbound contact center that would otherwise be handled manually by your staff. This includes automating repetitive tasks like data entry, note-taking, or lead management.
Automation in a contact center is aimed to streamline processes and give agents more time for tasks that truly need a human touch. Now that the contact center automation definition is out of the way, let’s look at what it could do for you.
What are the benefits of automated call center processes?
Automated contact center or call center processes deliver a wide range of benefits to businesses. While there are obviously elements of your operation where you’ll want to retain the human touch, automating others simply frees up your agents and team members to be even more effective.
Here are just a few ways that automating contact center workflows and tasks can benefit your agents, customers, and bottom line:
Reduced wait times
Tools such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and AI-powered intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) can address common customer queries efficiently, routing calls to the right department or providing self-service solutions to reduce hold times.
Faster average handle times
Combining workflow automation with skills-based routing translates to more first-contact resolutions and faster average handle times.
Higher first contact resolution
AI can provide accurate responses in real-time to help agents solve customer issues accurately.
Reduced costs
Save money spent on hiring and training additional personnel while improving customer retention and satisfaction rates at the same time.
How does contact center automation work?
In a nutshell, contact center automation works by utilizing technology to handle tasks that would otherwise need to be done by agents or other staff. More often than not, that technology falls under the umbrella of AI, and can include the likes of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI, machine learning, and more.
Thanks to the ability of AI algorithms to process massive amounts of data near-instantaneously, both the accuracy of tasks and the speed at which they’re completed can be improved by smart automation.
You probably don’t want to go down the route of full call automation—although there is the technology for making AI calls. However, there are a range of areas where you might choose to implement contact center automation.
Common contact center automation use cases
While the applications of call center automation are many and varied, here are a few of the many areas where businesses are already leveraging the tech:
- Forecasting & scheduling automation - AI and automation can take the guesswork out of forecasting demand and scheduling agents in a contact center. Algorithms can crunch huge amounts of call data to effectively and accurately predict demand and ensure you staff your center accordingly.
- Workflow & back-office automation - It’s a common complaint of contact center supervisors and managers that their agents don’t spend long enough actually interacting with customers. Automation via AI can handle many of the tasks that traditionally keep agents off the phones or away from their live chat interfaces. Think things like interaction summaries, identifying follow-up actions, , and more.
- Customer interaction automation - AI can also help support agents with actual customer interactions. AI-powered IVAsare often great at solving simple and common issues, without the input of agents at all. What’s more, AI can also support agents as they help customers. For instance, some of the best AI-powered contact center solutions present agents with screen pops and other real-time guidance based on the content of ongoing calls.
- Conversation intelligence - AI can automate time-intensive tasks like call reviews and scoring, identifying customer sentiment, and finding trending topics. This can save significant time for businesses, who typically struggle to review 1% of their calls.
- AI Receptionists - Implement AI-powered virtual receptionists to handle initial customer interactions, provide basic information, and route calls to the appropriate departments or agents.
Call center automation software features to streamline your workflows
RingCentral RingCX is an easy-to-use and intuitive cloud contact center solution that comes with a whole host of contact center automation tools built right in. Your agents and supervisors have the power of AI and related call center automation technology at their fingertips to help improve customer interactions, handle time-consuming but simple tasks, and much more besides.
AI Assist
- RingCX AI Assist leverages artificial intelligence to automate tasks during conversations and help agents receive assistance in real-time.
- Make sure customer needs are met via smart replies and suggestions from your existing knowledge content, troubleshooting guides, and webpages.
- Alert supervisor in real-time to surface calls that need immediate attention.
Intelligent Virtual Agents
- AI-powered intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) provide quick answers to multiple customer issues at once. Select a single predetermined response when users contact your business, providing consistency in branding across all communication channels.
- Maintain 24/7 availability—creating a constant line of communication between your business and your customers all day, every day.
- Go beyond basic chatbots and deploy assistants capable of handling simple repetitive tasks (scheduling, replying to emails, and more).
With RingSense, the AI finds the coachable moments in a call within a few minutes, meaning that process takes one-third of the time –and that means our leaders now have the time to review more calls and spend more time coaching their team members.
Joe Phelps, Intake Director
Husband & Wife Law Firm
Husband & Wife Law Firm
Contact center automation challenges
While the potential benefits of contact center automation are clear, it’s important to understand the possible challenges you may face, too. No new technology or process you introduce to a business, after all, is completely without difficulties.
In the case of automation in the contact center, these challenges are—broadly speaking—ones of perception. In other words, they regard how both your contact center staff and your customers may view automation.
In the case of your agents and other contact center staff, they may fear that automation and AI poses a risk to their jobs. It’s contingent on you, therefore, to clarify that this isn’t the case.
Contact center automation is best at taking the pressure off your agents and giving them more time and space to do what they do best. Things like applying creative problem-solving to delight your customers.
Speaking of your customers, they may have a negative view of AI and automation of support, too. Understandably, they may be worried that automated responses to their queries may lack the personal touch.
Once again, though, this is easily remedied. The best conversational AI chatbots, after all, are now great at communicating naturally. If someone really does object to AI, too, you can (and should) make it easy for them to escalate their issue to an agent - with full context so the conversation can continue instead of start over.
Best practices for implementing call center automation solutions
Being aware of some of the potential challenges of automated contact center solutions is a good first step to ensuring successful implementation. The following are a few more best practices to help you on your way:
- Apply automation strategically - Don’t automate processes in your contact center just because you can. Instead, focus on your business’s CX pain points and implement contact center automation solutions and tools that directly support those. You can always roll out more features further down the road.
- Stay customer-centric - Don’t get carried away with the technology or even with the potential for cost-savings or process improvements within your contact center. Make sure your first thought when considering potential contact center automation is always for your customers. If you feel there’s any risk of negatively impacting customer experience, then that particular automation isn’t worth it.
- Choose the right tools - Investing in the right contact center automation solutions is critical. Assess any software’s AI and automation feature sets against what you want to achieve for your customers and your contact center. Then, consider things like reliability, security, and support.
- Train and support your staff - Once you’ve invested in a tool for automation in your contact center, make sure your agents and supervisors can get the best out of it. Dedicate time and effort to training them on the available features and be available to them if they have any questions or feedback.
- Monitor performance over time - Once implemented, you should monitor the key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that you want to improve. Determine what impact the AI is having on those metrics. Most automation tools have analytics capabilities to show how well they are performing. Over time, you may find additional improvement opportunties.
Contact center automation trends
Contact center automation, and the AI field more generally, is a rapidly evolving area of technology. As such, the ways of implementing automation in your contact center are likely to keep changing and developing.
Areas such as sentiment analysis and the broader application of conversation intelligence are likely to be hot contact center automation trends in 2025 and beyond. They have the twin benefits of both leveraging cutting-edge technology and being focused on better understanding and serving customers.
Generative AI, too, is a burgeoning area. Solutions like ChatGPT and similar have burst into the wider public consciousness in recent years. Potential applications of technology that can create written content without human intervention within the contact center are apparent.
While the future of contact center automation is undoubtedly bright, it’s very much a theme of the present, too. If you don’t embrace it for your contact center, you may get left behind.
Save on support costs, improve CX, and better engage agents with contact center automation
Contact center automation FAQs
Robotic process automation (RPA) is the technology businesses (such as call centers) use to automate repetitive and mundane tasks. Bots learn and record tasks performed by humans on the computer and then carry out the same tasks without human intervention. This allows tasks to be completed not only without errors, but at high speed and volume, too.
Not all contact center software is built the same. Some offer just the basic features, while some go above and beyond to make sure businesses make the most out of their investment. Here are some essential tools that you should consider before making a final decision:
- Interactive voice response (IVR) - This business phone system feature interacts directly with callers via a pre-recorded message and a menu and performs actions based on the caller’s answers. It can provide requested information immediately or prepare the call for queuing and route the caller to a human agent for more hands-on assistance.
- Predictive dialing - This is a type of auto dialer that automates the dialing process for live agents. It uses call metrics, analytics, and reports to improve outbound call center dialing rates and efficiency.
- Automatic call distribution (ACD) - As the term implies, this telephony system feature automatically receives incoming calls and distributes them to an available agent. Its main function is to help contact centers sort and manage large inbound call volumes.
- Forecasting - This contact center management tool allows businesses to gain a holistic view of employee schedules and shifts across all channels, accounting for shrinkage and volume spikes. Accurate forecasting translates to adequate staffing that anticipates changes in demand.
The most important factor when deciding which automation solutions to implement in your contact center is always your customer. Start by thinking about what you want to improve in your customer experience and how AI and automation can help you achieve it. That way, whatever you do implement will keep your center customer-centric.
If you’re looking for a contact center solution for your business, it’s critical to consider not only the functionality of the platform you’re eyeing, but also the impact it would have on your budget in the long run. With RingCentral RingCX, for instance, you get to choose the plan that works best for you and your team.
Click here for an overview of our plans and pricing, and discover why RingCentral is among the top providers of contact center solutions with automation built right in.
Click here for an overview of our plans and pricing, and discover why RingCentral is among the top providers of contact center solutions with automation built right in.
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