Modern call centers and contact centers operate in a highly dynamic environment. Customer interactions are happening across various communication channels, while agents are expected to handle multiple simultaneous tasks and deliver outstanding customer experiences. How do you ensure everything runs smoothly, uninterruptedly, and efficiently within your call center? This is where workflows come into play.
Workflow automation and optimization is an excellent way to improve the efficiency of your call center operations, increase customer satisfaction, and maximize the productivity of your call center team. Let’s explore call center workflows in more detail and how you can optimize them to enhance your call center’s efficiency.
What is Contact Center Workflow?
A workflow is defined as a sequence of connected actions that complete one or multiple tasks. In the contact center context, workflows are the processes and procedures that ensure efficient handling of customer interactions from start to finish. Naturally, contact centers try to optimize workflows by automating them wherever possible. Automated workflows reduce the number of manual repetitive tasks, save your reps time and effort, add efficiency, ensure better service delivery, and help you cut down on your overall operational costs.
Examples of Contact Center Workflows
Here’s a simple example of an automated workflow in a contact center. When a new customer inquiry is received, your contact center software can be set to automatically create a new customer record in your CRM system and schedule a follow-up reminder for the agent to ensure timely response and resolution.
Basically, any contact center event can be a trigger that initiates the workflow execution – termination of an inbound or outbound call, missed call, SLA breach, etc. Similarly, there are multiple possible actions that can be executed once an event occurs, such as sending a follow-up email or SMS, updating customer information in the CRM system, or notifying the manager or supervisor.
How to Optimize Your Call Center Workflows for Maximum Efficiency
1. Automate repetitive tasks
Automation is the key to improved call center operations and increased efficiency. Automating repetitive tasks like inbound call routing, data entry, and follow-up communications, to name just a few, can reduce manual effort for your agents and free them up to focus on more complex, higher-value tasks, such as handling customer interactions that require a personalized approach. Besides, automation can help you minimize human efforts and speed up the entire process of handling customer interactions. Whatever contact center software you use – make sure to take the most out of its workflow automation capabilities.
2. Streamline your call routing
Automatic call distribution (ACD) and call routing systems help contact centers distribute incoming calls fairly among available agents, enabling you to better balance their workload. By setting specific call routing rules, you can make this process more efficient. For example, with skill-based routing, you can automatically route customer calls to specific call center agents with the most relevant skills and expertise. This type of call routing can help you reduce average handle times (AHT), improve your first call resolution (FCR) rates, and increase your customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) while streamlining your inbound call flow management.
In addition, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems can help contact centers further improve the inbound call routing process and simplify agent workflows. An IVR system interacts with incoming callers through a series of pre-recorded voice prompts and menu options, enabling you to capture each caller’s intent and route their calls to the most relevant departments, teams, or even individual agents. That helps you reduce call transfers and improve FCR and CSAT scores.
3. Implement AI and ML solutions
There are several AI and ML-driven solutions you can implement in your contact center to optimize agent workflows, improve your contact center processes, and boost agent productivity. For example, with predictive auto dialer software for call center, your outbound sales team can make more outbound calls in less time, helping you improve the efficiency of your outbound calling campaigns.
AI predictive dialers automate the entire process of making outbound calls and connect each agent to an answered call as soon as they complete their previous interaction, increasing talk times and minimizing idle times. These systems can also leave voicemails automatically when customers or prospects don’t pick up and intelligently schedule redials and follow-up calls to ensure each calling campaign gets maximum outreach.
4. Integrate your call center with your CRM system
Integrating your call center software with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can help you optimize agent workflows in a number of ways. Firstly, it enables your reps to make and receive calls right within your CRM interface without having to constantly toggle between the two systems, saving them a great deal of time and effort. They can also log calls, make notes, and update customer records during the call.
Secondly, such integration fetches customer information in real time, including interaction history, order history, customers’ preferences, and notes left by agents who previously interacted with customers. Having this information at hand when handling calls empowers agents to resolve issues faster and deliver more personalized experiences, streamlining call handling and improving customer satisfaction.
5. Take advantage of third-party integrations
Besides integrating your contact center software with your CRM system, you can take advantage of dozens of other integrations with third-party business tools and productivity apps through workflow automation software like Zapier. It can help you automate many tasks by building automated workflows between two or more apps your team is currently using.
For example, by integrating the VoiceSpin call center software with Flowster through Zapier, you allow the two systems to communicate and automate workflows, saving your team time and reducing manual effort. For instance, once an agent finishes a call, a task is automatically created in Flowster for the agent to send a follow-up email to the prospect. And you can do much more with similar integrations.
6. Leverage call center reporting tools
With reporting features of call center software systems, you can track various metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and monitor the efficiency of your call center workflows to better understand what’s working well and where your processes and workflows should be improved. For example, if you see long average handle times, high call transfer rates, and low first call resolution rates, you might want to adjust your inbound call routing strategy to ensure incoming calls are routed to the best-suited agents based on caller intent and preferences.
7. Uncover inefficiencies with speech analytics
Speech analytics solutions are advanced tools you can use to get insights into your voice interactions and uncover inefficiencies in your workflows and call center processes. You can also use these insights to assess your team’s performance and gauge customer satisfaction by tracking customer sentiment scores.
Additionally, speech analytics solutions allow you to transcribe calls in real time and generate post-call summaries based on your specific requirements to evaluate the quality of customer interactions and track specific keywords and key phrases used in conversations. These insights can even act as triggers for specific workflows, like alerting managers or supervisors in real time when specific keywords or negative sentiments are spotted during customer conversations.
How Contact Centers and Call Centers Benefit from Automated Workflows
Enhanced contact center efficiency
Automating contact center workflows streamlines repetitive routine tasks that your team would otherwise have to do manually and helps you reduce errors. Imagine an agent having to route incoming calls or enter vast customer information datasets manually into a system. A high risk of human errors and incorrect data entry may lead to delays, escalations, or inaccurate reporting. Automated workflows address these challenges and help you improve your contact center’s efficiency.
Increased agent productivity
Automating workflows and call center processes ultimately means that your agents don’t have to waste precious time doing repetitive administrative tasks and can focus more on complex and higher-value activities, such as handling complicated customer issues and those that require a higher level of personalization. Not only does it increase your team’s productivity, but it can also help you improve agent experience, increase job satisfaction and engagement, and reduce agent turnover.
Better customer experiences
Creating, automating, and optimizing call center workflows for handling customer interactions can speed up your inbound call handling, issue resolutions, and follow-up processes. For example, you can use workflows to automate follow-up messages, like welcome emails, issue resolution confirmations, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. That helps your team deliver better customer experiences and improve customer satisfaction.
Reduced operational costs
Efficient contact center workflow management and automation can also help you reduce your contact center’s operational costs. For instance, by optimizing your outbound outreach campaigns with auto dialing software and automated follow-ups, you enable your sales team to handle more outbound interactions in less time, helping you improve conversions and cut down on your operational expenses.
Wrapping up
Workflow automation and optimization should be one of the top strategic priorities for contact center and call center leaders. Building and automating workflows for numerous processes is a great way to improve agent experience, increase customer satisfaction, boost your team’s overall efficiency and productivity, and maximize your contact center’s efficiency – all leading to increased ROI and revenue.
