Supercharge Your Contact Center with Workflow Automation

In a prior post, I discussed an IDC Technology Spotlight paper and its conclusions on how the 2020 pandemic accelerated business digital transformation and the impact it had on 2021 IT investment plans. In this post, I want to talk about another topic in the paper. How workflow automation can bring about significant changes in how the call center operates.

Call centers are filled with processes. I call them their life blood, since I doubt a contact center could even work without them. Unfortunately, many of these processes are labor intensive and take up employee time that could be better spent on higher-value activities. This manual nature also tends to make them error prone and produce inconsistent business outcomes. Fortunately, emerging workflow automation technology offers an opportunity to transform the contact center operation into a smooth running, less process intensive machine.

Addressing the impact of the 2020 pandemic on investment priorities, IDC research concluded that one of the top three factors shaping IT investment strategy is “pursuing initiatives that deliver business value and efficiencies while helping maintain business continuity.” Given its high dependence on manual processes, the contact center is ripe to deploy automation technology with high potential for significant business ROI.

IDC breaks down automation technology into three major segments:
 

• Decision-centric automation, which consists of process mining and insights and event stream processing software used for process-oriented predictive and prescriptive analytics
   
• Labor-centric automation, which includes capture software, process-centric application platforms, and robotic process automation software
   
• System-centric process automation, which encompasses API integration and management software and the portion of event-driven middleware associated with process automation
   

According to IDC, “Most organizations identify improving the customer experience as a key goal of their DX initiatives.” Workflow automation and the contact center operation are positioned to not only deliver a high ROI, but also improve the customer experience. 

The paper goes on further to discuss the key features and design principles contact centers should look for in evaluating workflow automation technology. In my final post on the paper, I’m going to talk about “empathy at scale” and how workflow automation helps to drive customer experience improvement using it.