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How to Meet Customer Demand, Flatten Call Spikes, and Lower Contact Center Costs With Automation

Protect Your Contact Center From Rising Unpredictability Using Automation

Scaling contact centers with human resources has been a tried and true tactic for growing customer service. 

But recent challenges in hiring, retaining, and forecasting demand have shown the many limitations and frustrations with this method. Human agents are expensive, hiring and training them is time and resource intensive, and having enough agent capacity at all times is nearly impossible – especially these days.

Contact centers that rely on human agents to scale will continue to be reactive and frustrate customers with hold times.  Alternatively, contact centers that adopt Contact Center Automation already have the ability to quickly adapt to changes, are more operationally and cost efficient, and see higher customer satisfaction.

Here’s how scaling your contact center with automation gives customer service organizations an advantage.

Meet demand 100% of the time, without compromising on quality

There have been multiple studies on wait times and customer expectations, and the findings are clear. Customers are willing to wait just a few minutes or not at all. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed consumers said they’re willing to wait two minutes or less before they hang up. Over 13% said no hold time is acceptable. 

Contact Center Automation enables contact centers to meet customer demand 100% of the time, without compromising on the quality of customers’ experience. It provides contact centers a 1:1 agent-to-customer ratio at all times, so customers never have to wait on hold. Their call or chat is immediately picked up.

Replicant leverages proprietary transcription, inference classification, and named entity recognition models as well as a high-performance Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine with built-in continuous learning. 

The result: a 96% peak inference accuracy, rich context from unstructured inputs, and a 20-millisecond response time. Replicant delivers conversations that regularly return higher CSAT scores than live agents.

Spikes in call volume are flattened

Repetitive requests are usually the types of requests you’ll receive an outsized volume of when experiencing a spike. Airlines are a perfect example of this. When flights are canceled due to weather, airlines experience an influx of customers asking to rebook their flight.

Having a scalable capacity flattens these spikes, since Contact Center Automation acts as the first line of defense in taking all incoming requests. 

While some requests may require a live agent, automation drastically reduces the amount of requests that human agents need to take. 

This helps prevent agents from being overwhelmed. With a 90% success rate in resolutions, and 50% reduction in average handle time, Replciant is able to minimize escalations, while making handoffs that do take place faster and more efficient than ever.

Increase your speed and flexibility of ramping capacity up or down

You’ll rarely ever get a heads up that allows you to plan and adjust your capacity. When contact centers are reacting to fluctuations in days or weeks, it can negatively impact customers’ perception of your brand. 

With Contact Center Automation, your capacity adjusts in minutes because you’re no longer increasing or decreasing the number of human agents. 

Automation can quickly ramp up in response to higher call volumes and scale back down just as quickly when volume goes down, keeping costs predictable and controllable.

This speed and flexibility enables companies to grow their customer service faster. Since agents are only handling a fraction of all request volume, you can rapidly acquire new customers and ensure they’re supported no matter what challenges arise. 

Cost becomes predictable

Forecasting and scheduling requires contact centers to commit to a certain amount of agent capacity and pay for that amount. This is a fixed-cost model that locks you into paying for whatever you’ve anticipated. If you’ve underestimated, you’ll also need to ask for more budget, which you may not get.

When contact centers can instantly scale their capacity with demand, costs become predictable too. You’ll only pay for the capacity you use, which is the amount of time the Thinking Machine is on the phone with customers.

Replicant makes it easy to design and test flows with low-code, drag-and-drop conversation components called Replicant Powers that come pre-built with design best practices. Comprehensive integrations work out-of-the-box with any CRM, CCaaS, and telephony stack. 

And, enterprise grade scale provides a secure, high availability infrastructure that runs 24/7 with 99.95% uptime commitment, redundancy, and HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI, and GDPR certifications.

All this means that your ROI can begin compounding as soon as you deploy – in weeks, not months or years.

Lower costs

Contact centers that adopt Contact Center Automation have lower costs. Aside from only paying for the capacity you use, you don’t pay for wait times and calls are 50% shorter. Scaling with automation is a lot cheaper than scaling with humans. Even compared to a highly optimized BPO, automation is about 55% cheaper.

Having no wait times, the perfect amount of customer capacity at all times, and reducing customer service costs by half no longer needs to be a dream. Contact Center Automation enables you to achieve these results today.

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