Automation has rapidly become a popular technology across many business departments ranging from customer service and contact center to sales, marketing, and back-office. It’s not a new innovation, but with growing computing power and more sophisticated machine learning algorithms, automation capabilities have become more efficient than ever before — especially over the past five years. To this point, findings from Aberdeen’s June 2020 The Intelligent Contact Center survey revealed that automation is the second top technology contact center and service leaders plan to incorporate within their activities over the next 12 to 18 months.

What is Automation?

As an industry analyst covering vendors in the contact center and customer experience space along with end-user adoption and usage of technology, I’ve been monitoring many different technologies, investment plans around them, and how firms use them to achieve desired results. When it comes to automation, a common misconception many end-users hold is assuming that automation and AI are one and the same. For research purposes at Aberdeen, we define AI as the use of automated reasoning and decision-making capabilities based on insights uncovered through machine learning algorithms. We define automation as automating execution of tasks (e.g., copying / pasting data from one system to another) and workflows (e.g., customer routing) based on the insights gleaned through machine learning algorithms. As such, automation is enabled by AI, but it’s a subset of broader AI capabilities.

Why Are Firms Investing in Automation?

One of the main factors driving contact center and CX leaders to increase their adoption of automation is the pursuit to reduce costs. To this point, Aberdeen’s May 2020 Business Agility survey found that the third top strategy contact centers deployed to address the impact of COVID-19 on their business was incorporating automation capabilities to reduce costs and decrease errors from manual and repetitive processes. In other words, faced with the need to control and reduce costs, contact center leaders are leveraging automation capabilities that aim to address customer needs. This is where the question of “myth or reality?” comes in: Can contact centers fully address their needs by using automation only?

Results from Aberdeen’s October 2020 AI in the Contact Center survey determined that firms using automation capabilities do indeed improve their CX results while simultaneously improving their operational efficiency. They utilize automation in a myriad of tasks, including forecasting and scheduling of agents, next-based action guidance on the agent desktop, customer workflows and within their chat bot and other self-service interactions. When firms use automation holistically across all these activities where there are too many repetitive tasks or tasks require minimal critical-thinking skills or empathy, they observe the greatest benefits. And those activities that require critical-thinking such as expanding into new markets, opening new call center locations, changing KPIs to measure business results, and addressing more complex customer needs are handled by humans through agent-assisted channels such as phone, email, and live chat.

Is Fully-Automated Contact Center a Myth?

So, automation isn’t a myth. It works when it’s implemented as part of a well-crafted AI strategy and used to manage more repetitive and manual tasks to free-up agent and supervisor time — allowing them to focus on areas where their skills make a difference.

But the notion that a contact center can be fully automated is indeed a myth. But why?

A fully-automated contact center means that the entirety of customer needs can be addressed through digital employees / bots without any involvement from humans in the case of escalation. It also means that these capabilities allow contact center leaders to eliminate their entire agent workforce and replace them overnight with out-of-the-box bot functionality provided by a ‘fully automated contact center.’ This idea allures business leaders as it gives the impression that they can eliminate their labor costs in the contact center and cut down telephony / other technology costs without sacrificing their operational needs such as addressing customer requests.

The reality, however, is much different. Not all customer needs can be addressed through bots. While bots with automation capabilities can be used to address simple issues such as account balance checks, delayed payment requests, or address changes, more complex issues (e.g., discussing the details of an account plan, adding different users with varying features on an account, discussing and updating coverages) require human critical-thinking and empathy that bots enabled through AI capabilities simply don’t have. Furthermore, firms operating across different markets serving customers in different languages and cultures must also adjust their service delivery in alignment with these cultural and regional nuances that again, automation capabilities struggle keeping up in the absence of direct involvement and monitoring.

Key Takeaways

So, in short, automation has become top-of-mind for contact center and CX leaders for good reason. When used effectively, automation is a critical enabler for firms to reduce costs, minimize inefficiencies, and create happy customers.

However, it’s important to remember that automation is an enabler and not a driver of contact center activities. It’s ultimately the humans in the contact center that implement automation in the right places to achieve its full benefits. It’s also humans (both agents and supervisors) that are the last resort when automation capabilities may not evolve in perfect alignment with broader market and customer needs, that step in to address more complex customer requests when automation fails to do so.

As such, we recommend companies think of automation as yet another tool within their toolbox to build an Intelligent Contact Center and abandon any illusions that all aspects of contact center activities can be fully automated to reduce costs. This is the mindset that Best-in-Class organizations in Aberdeen’s Intelligent Contact Center research hold, enabling them to maximize their performance and the get the most out of their technology spend — including that on automation.