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Call Center Automation for Health Plans
In the new normal, contact centers face many challenges impacting their ability to deliver optimal customer experiences. According to a study by ICMI, the industry is experiencing a 58% agent churn rate, causing significant disruptions in contact center operations. The shift to remote and distributed staffing strategies has led to a 39% increase in workforce management systems usage. Contact centers must support call routing from live and asynchronous chat, robotic process automation (RPA), digital process automation (DPA), and chatbots to keep up with the changing landscape.
Focus Areas for Call Center Automation
Call centers are adopting new technologies to enhance and automate operations. One focus area is AI self-service, which involves designing customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) for omnichannel interactions using digital experience platforms (DXP). Conversational AI, email intelligence, smarter bots, intelligent search, and digital humans are tools used to build a platform for self-service.
Another focus area for call center automation is AI analytics. This involves using cloud-native analytics and business intelligence tools to analyze data and provide insights into call center operations. AI-driven agent dashboards, chatbot analytics, and agent experience analytics are some of the tools used for this purpose.
The third focus area is the agent experience. Call centers can redesign their processes and workflows, optimize their agent desktop user interface and experience, and integrate computer telephony with service and customer relationship management platforms. Additionally, implementing intelligent search can help agents quickly find relevant information and identify knowledge gaps, leading to better training opportunities.
AI Self-Services
AI-powered self-service solutions are revolutionizing the way businesses handle customer inquiries. Conversational AI and digital customer service representatives are making it easier for companies to scale their customer service operations while reducing customer wait times. By using intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants, companies can handle a larger volume of inquiries and route them to the appropriate agent quickly and efficiently.
Cognitive search and email intelligence are also powerful tools for enhancing self-service options. With semantic search capabilities, customers can easily find the answers they need by searching against an enterprise content management system. Similarly, email processing intelligence can help to identify the content of emails, classify them, and extract relevant information, allowing for more accurate and efficient responses to customer inquiries.
Smarter bots with capabilities such as robotic process automation, transcription, translation, object detection, and intelligent document scanning further expand the range of self-service options available to customers. With digital human avatars that use facial recognition and emotional intelligence, self-service can now provide a hyper-personalized touch point for customers, enhancing their overall experience.
AI Analytics
AI analytics is a critical component of call center automation. Call Center AI (CCAI) is a cloud-based solution that leverages artificial intelligence to extract insights from historical call logs. By transcribing calls and identifying key topics, sentiment, customer satisfaction, and agent efficiency, CCAI can predict customer outcomes and provide visualizations of the model outcomes using QuickSight.
Chatbot analytics is another AI-based tool that measures actionable process improvement opportunities and improves the containment rate of the bot. It leverages AI/ML models to understand the caller’s mood, containment effectiveness, coverage, and dialogue abandonment. Chatbot analytics allow businesses to identify performance gaps and improve them through training.
In addition to CCAI and chatbot analytics, agent experience analytics is a powerful AI-based tool for identifying areas of improvement. It captures clicks from an agent’s desktop using task mining tools and leveraging process mining tools to identify unique process flows and variances. Businesses can identify problematic patterns, gaps, and areas of improvement.
Agent Experience
In addition to enhancing agent productivity and customer satisfaction, a modern contact center must also focus on agent experience. Process and workflow redesign, agent desktop UI/UX, and computer telephony integration to service/CRM platforms are all key factors in creating a positive agent experience. Intelligent search can also be leveraged to identify training opportunities, allowing agents to develop their skills and knowledge continuously.
Agents can focus on more complex and challenging customer issues by providing a user-friendly interface and automating repetitive tasks. This results in higher job satisfaction, leading to increased retention rates and a more experienced workforce. Incorporating intelligent search and other automation tools can reduce burnout and stress-related issues, leading to a more positive work environment. A focus on agent experience also directly impacts customer satisfaction, making it a critical component of any successful contact center strategy.
Despite the sheer volume of metrics available for tracking operational activities, contact centers are struggling to deliver on key business goals. The challenge lies in optimizing performance amidst the plethora of data. Contact centers must balance tracking the right metrics and achieving their business goals. Additionally, over-reliance on solicited feedback hinders delivering optimal customer experiences. Contact centers must connect the dots between unsolicited feedback in call recordings, transcripts, agent notes, and chat transcripts to gain context and quantify issues. By doing so, they can better understand customer pain points and deliver more effective solutions to meet their needs.
About the Author
Avantika Sharma
Currently the Global Head of Healthcare at Brillio, Avantika Sharma is a strategic Senior Executive with experience in Digital Consulting, Customer Experience, and Product Strategy. Her passion is to solve complex problems and focus on driving innovation that can provide affordable care to people across the globe. She is also an advocate for Women in Tech and the importance of elevating women to leadership positions in the tech and healthcare industries.
