What is a Workflow?
A workflow is the series of steps a product or task goes through before it's completed. It will consist of multiple steps that may be conducted by multiple people and systems, and is often represented visually by a flowchart. Businesses often try to optimize workflows by automating them where possible and adding features like alerts to draw attention to steps in the workflow that are out of compliance.
Contact centers are becoming increasingly sophisticated with automating workflow tasks. Because labor costs are high, workflow automation represents an opportunity to reduce these cost by making tasks less labor-intensive. In addition, automating mundane workflow tasks will free up agent time to address more sophisticated tasks. Automation is often use for collecting basic customer data in an IVR prior to routing call to a live agent, or to streamline post-call tasks, such as filling in forms. Additionally, workflow automation can help eliminate the double-entry agents sometimes have to do to keep multiple systems up-to-date. This has the added benefit of increased accuracy. Workflow automation can also alert managers about problems so that they can spend less time monitoring stats and more time working with their agents.
Some other examples of automated contact center workflows include:
- Automatically sending an email invitation to complete a customer satisfaction survey upon the completion of a call.
- Automating the review of the subject lines of incoming emails and the subsequent routing to the appropriate agent group.
- Integrations between automatic call distributors (ACDs) and workforce management systems can automate intraday adjustments, reducing the need for manual intervention
Automating contact center workflows is not a new idea, however, as artificial intelligence usage in the contact center continues to expand, it will offer more and more opportunities for innovative automation.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact (or call) center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, areporting and performance management.
Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes.It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.