Why Retailers Should Automate Their Contact Centers This Post-Holiday Season
Now that the shopping season is over, contact centers should be ready to handle customer complaints. Discover why automation is crucial for retailers now.
Once the busiest shopping season is over, business’ contact centers should be ready to handle an influx of customer calls and solve their problems. Here is where automation is crucial. Matt Edic, Chief experience Officer, IntelePeer, discusses why retailers should automate their contact centers post-holidays and what they should keep in mind.
The busiest season for retail is, without question, the holidays. And with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas in the books, retailers are bracing for the initiable wave of frustrated customers calling about returning a product due to malfunction, damage, dissatisfaction, etc. However, should a company’s contact center get overrun by these callers, the consequences could be disastrous to brand reputation, customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
To ensure that contact centers can handle the influx of unhappy customers, retailers should leverage automation. Indeed, automation tools, such as virtual assistants, will be a boon not only during seasons of high call volume but also in the event of an unexpected outage or spike in traffic, alleviating overwhelmed agents. Call center automation is no longer an added functionality but a key driver of productivity, cost-savings and customer experience (CX).
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The Benefits of Contact Center Automation
For retail and many other industries, the increased post-holiday season sales, orders, and returns calls require higher staffing levels to compensate for the greater call volume. Inevitably, however, come the new year, companies will look to cut back on the size of their contact center operations, creating extra work for human resources and weakening employee morale. By implementing automated services like chatbots, messaging apps, and virtual assistants, retailers can maintain consistent staffing levels year-round, eliminating dramatic, seasonal fluctuations in the number of agents operating a contact center at any given time.
Integrating automation into an existing contact center empowers retailers to enhance CX. Today, consumers shop online because of the speed and convenience — the same principles apply when trying to resolve issues or get questions answered. Automating communications enables retailers to make interactions faster, truncate business workflows and reduce hold times to support a smoother customer journey. Automation allows retailers to quickly handle customer inquiries meeting high expectations while increasing loyalty and retention; plus, communication APIs can gather insights from automated interactions to improve CX further.
Retailers can also deploy automated self-service tools in their contact centers to offload repetitive customer calls from their live agents. Giving customers the freedom to resolve their issues easily, be that checking the shipping status of a package or checking the availability of an item, will enable agents to divert their attention to more value-added tasks or complex problems. Moreover, automating these monotonous tasks reduces costs while boosting efficiencies. Virtual assistants don’t need to sleep or take breaks (and can work holidays), adding up to 4.2 times more hours than a human in a year.
Automation: A Cautionary Tale
Although retailers should utilize automation solutions, these tools are ultimately not a replacement for humans. Automation can only take the caller so far in the customer journey, especially for complex or unique questions. If needed, there should be a graceful exit from the virtual assistant to the live agent at some point. If there is no way for the customer to transition from an automated channel to one with a live agent, they’ll hang up the phone or terminate the interaction.
Retailers should also examine the involvedness of the use case they wish to automate. For example, if a customer needs to determine the arrival date of their package or a store’s operating hours during the holidays, those simple and routine inquiries should be automated. But, a more complex request, such as a customer wanting to change the shipping address for a package currently in transit, requires a live agent. This hypothetical customer will also want assurance from a human that their package will arrive at the correct destination safely. Similarly, retailers must continually refine their automated workflows to prevent any negative impact on customer satisfaction.
Likewise, retail brands must ascertain the digital proficiency of their customers and, by extension, which channels each demographic prefers. Many older generations are not as confident using self-service tools as the younger ones. In fact, a survey asking different age groups which solution or method they would use to solve an issue with a company found that nearly 50% of Gen Z and 41% of Millennials said a digital self-service option was preferable to speaking with a live agent. However, Gen Xers and Boomers were less likely to use self-service tools and would rather talk with an agent when they had a problem.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Automation
After retailers implement automation solutions into their communication channels, they must measure the effectiveness of their deployments. It’s not enough to measure productivity based on the number of complete calls or serviced customers; these tactics won’t necessarily tell retailers much about customer satisfaction. Instead, companies should use quantitative and qualitative methods.
Various quantitative strategies include containment and abandonment rates. The former is the percentage of interactions where the customer fully resolved their issue, whether through web chat, SMS, or voice, without going to a live agent. The containment rate can also reveal which uncontained items are eligible for improvement. The latter option, abandonment rate, indicates where customers abandon interactions or opt to speak with a live agent. Retailers should ‘contain’ interactions as much as possible through automation features like conversational AI and virtual assistants. A good indicator of productivity is a low abandonment rate and a high containment rate.
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While quantitative data can identify areas for improvement, it cannot always articulate how to solve these problems, which is where qualitative information comes in. Retailers can collect customer feedback through a simple thumbs up or down or a “how was your experience today?” style survey at the end of an automated interaction. Or, they can use a more traditional customer satisfaction scale of one through five ratings. If scores are low, it is paramount that retailers ask a follow-up question for comments or an explanation for how to improve. Listening to voice call recordings with virtual assistants will also elucidate roadblocks to an ideal CX, such as background noise, language challenges or prompt errors.
Modernizing Communications
Automation is a versatile tool, helping retailers alleviate the chaos of return season and empowering them to navigate other looming challenges. Indeed, as the frequency and severity of network outages continue to increase due to trends like remote work and the favoritism toward online shopping, it is all the more critical that retailers plan accordingly. Automation is pivotal to any modern communication strategy, and retailers should strive to integrate such solutions into their contact centers this new year.
Have you automated your contact centers? What benefits have you seen? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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