Mastering the art of workforce augmentation

Today’s contact centre customers expect quicker responses and more intelligent and personalised services than ever before. Failing to accommodate these needs can lead contact centre organisations to lose favour with customers, resulting in greater churn. Investing in smart solutions like robotic process automation (RPA) can help intelligent, forward-thinking contact centre organisations augment the agent experience and empower employees to deliver improved customer interactions.

AI an essential tool

Automation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) is an essential tool for today’s contact centre organisations. However, automation on its own can only take a business and its contact centre agents so far. For the best chance of success, organisations need to effectively manage the move to an augmented workforce underpinned by intelligent solutions like RPA. Contact centre organisations can use RPA to enhance the agent experience by delivering more seamless workflows and comprehensive support that lets them respond to customer needs in real time. Ultimately, this can improve customer satisfaction by giving them faster, better results.

Two types of automation

There are two key types of automation at play in business: attended and unattended. Unattended RPA is designed to eliminate routine tasks that don’t require human input from the agent. Comparatively, attended RPA integrates robots into workflows to better support human agents with real-time guidance. This gives human contact centre agents essential support, acting as a virtual assistant or agent that can proactively carry out tasks including performing calculations, providing quick links to relevant data, and looking up information across multiple applications to assist with customer interactions.

Attended RPA delivers significant benefits to businesses by empowering human agents and robots to work in tandem to support customers. This is achieved by integrating AI into the contact centre workflow, which can automatically step in to help during customer interactions. This effectively ensures the accuracy and speed of process-driven robots with the nuance and human touch of a real person to deliver the best of both worlds to customers.

This is especially beneficial for contact centre environments that have pivoted towards hybrid work environments, where remote workers no longer have the rapid access to their colleagues for support that they once had. RPA can effectively bridge this gap and empower contact centre agents to deliver unparalleled customer experiences from anywhere by giving them access to a virtual agent that can support and guide them through even the most complex customer interactions in real time.

Leveraging unattended and attended automation together can also help bolster the employee experience and eliminate any potential agent anxiety. For example, unattended automation can help reduce repetitive tasks that agents don’t enjoy, freeing up their time to contribute to more meaningful activities. At the same time, attended RPA can help agents deliver even better experiences for customers, giving agents job fulfilment.

Evolving expectations

Customer expectations are constantly evolving and the agent experience needs to evolve with them. It can be challenging for organisations to keep pace with the rate of change; however, AI and automation helps ensure that agents and contact centres can more broadly continue to respond to shifting customer needs. Additionally, it can help agents and organisations move beyond real-time customer engagement and begin to respond proactively to challenges that customers aren’t even aware of.

For an organisation to truly master the art of automation and reap its benefits, it must be understood and used effectively, making change management an essential element in the evolution of an augmented workforce.

To get the most out of RPA, organisations must effectively integrate automation solutions into their operations with an employee-first approach that ensures agents feel supported, not threatened, by AI and automation. It’s essential to demonstrate the benefits that AI-powered automation will deliver to agents and the business more broadly.

Image credit: iStock.com/Funtap