Contact Center Automation

Burnie Group’s contact automation program enables the contact center to be a strategic asset that drives channel migration and strengthens customer relationships. Our contact center program combines the power of automation to identify customer needs and deliver a select human touch. We believe the contact center of the future will meet customers’ needs and wants, provide efficient guidance, and be present for the customer in emotional and differentiated moments of truth in the customer lifecycle.

Too often, a customer receives less than ideal customer service from a contact center. For example, customers contact the contact center for information — to request or cancel service, make a billing inquiry or register a complaint — and the minutes start to tick by. The call may be held in a queue awaiting the next available frontline employee. When the call is eventually answered, the FLE needs a frustrating array of identification information and, upon learning more about the query, may need to forward the call to another FLE to process the request. Worst of all, this time and effort can still result in the original reason for the call not being adequately resolved.

There can be a lack of clear communication — perhaps from poor frontline employee training. Or, some excellent FLEs are unable to resolve a customer query the first time because they have insufficient information on their screens. Many customers complain of inconsistent follow-up or no follow-up at all, and inappropriate product or service proposals that fail to fit their needs.

If these problems are annoying for customers, they can be devastating for the companies involved. Contact centers are often a company’s primary interface with its customers. Long calls aren’t just costly in financial terms — they also impact the business in terms of reputation, brand and quality. Frustrated customers walk away and find an alternative provider, perhaps even airing their grievances on social media.

When we consider that the work of a frontline employee requires strong communication and persuasion skills, patience, empathy, the ability to work under pressure and recommend innovative solutions, the ability of FLEs to succeed is hampered by mundane obstacles such as:

• High call volumes
• Lack of knowledge and data about the customer
• Stressful work environments (e.g. too many screens to navigate, rising customer frustration)
• Inability to fully address customer’s purpose for calling

In fact, 75% of frontline employees’ time is spent doing manual research, and only 25% is spent on “valuable customer interaction.” (source: IBM)

Contact center attended automation utilizes software robots that reside on a frontline employee’s desktops and are designed to work collaboratively with frontline employees in real-time. These desktop robots can automate certain tasks on behalf of the frontline employee, freeing them up and increasing their capacity to take on more complex, higher-value work.

• New contact center automation technologies connect your workflows as well as data flows across your existing tools and applications (modern and legacy)
• They come with pre-built integrations for other contact center technologies such as chatbots, IVR, CRM and AI
• They offer unique contact center capabilities, such as a customizable employee console
• Provide high-quality Citrix and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure automation that reduce maintenance costs