Question: What contact center solutions can help agents deliver a great CX and boost productivity?

Answer:

Here are a few to consider:

Real-time guidance (RTG): provides agents with easy-to-follow procedures and information that enables them to resolve inquiries properly, handle objections, close sales, and increase collections. These applications also enhance soft skills such as communicating appropriate levels of empathy and professionalism. Implementation typically takes one week to three months, and these applications should pay for themselves within three to six months after implementation.

After-interaction wrap-up and summarization: creates and posts a summary of each customer conversation to a CRM solution, eliminating the need for agents to spend time on this important but time-consuming step. It improves the agent experience by automating a high-pressure process and ensures a proper interaction summary is captured, which enhances the CX if the customer has to follow up. 

Knowledge management (KM): equips front-line employees, both on-site and remote, with the information to deliver a great CX. KM solutions help companies institutionalize their knowledge and provide a “single source of the truth” so that consistent information can be provided to enterprise employees and/or customers. KM is increasingly being used to support self-service solutions and other enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that need a large data repository in order to be successful.

Robotic process automation (RPA): Contact centers are opportunity-rich environments for RPA, as agents perform many rote and repetitive activities that do not require complex human reasoning. Classic examples of these activities, which RPA can easily take on are: auto-retrieval of information, cutting and pasting data from one field or system to another, completing forms, data propagation, launching context-sensitive content, and fulfilling customer requests. 

There are many other systems and applications that make positive and quantifiable contributions to contact centers, but these four are relatively new, use AI, and are likely to be first-time implementations instead of replacements, which typically increases the odds for budgetary approval. As importantly, all of these investments do what all good contact center solutions should: they enhance the CX and EX while reducing operating expenses and improving productivity.