Time is money, therefore time saved = money saved.

Tasks that take several minutes can be automated and completed in milliseconds.

It’s time to automate, clearly.  But what time can be automated? 

The pathway to customer experience (CX) automation is not a straight line.  It zigs and zags, starts and stops, has roadblocks to overcome and pitfalls to avoid.  It’s a path contact centers must go down, but that doesn’t mean you need to navigate it alone.

The MotionCX service team is made up of contact center industry veterans with decades of experience across diverse industries.  Our experience in the BPO industry includes sales, technical support, and general customer service contact centers.  We leverage this experience to guide our clients on the right paths for automation, and we deliver positive results.

In this multi-part series, we will dig into the opportunities to automate customer interactions, in whole or in part, and also look at the costs of such automation and its ROI.

In this week’s article, we will start with the steps common in most service interaction flows, and the time taken at each step.  Next week, we’ll explore the ways to use automation and generative AI to assist agents and customers, reducing effort, time, and cost, so stay tuned!

Customer Interaction Analysis: A Time Study to Guide CX Automation

Most customer service interactions follow a similar flow:

At various steps, it’s necessary to interact with other applications and databases to look up information or to enter information and initiate actions.  Each of these steps takes time.  For a person, it may be a few seconds or several minutes.  For a bot, it’s milliseconds. 

What Takes Time?

This pie chart reflects common buckets of time related to the interaction flow of a common service inquiry,:

At a glance, we can see two very large pieces of the pie on the left side. These are often the tasks that are more difficult to automate. They require more contextual conversation between the agent and the customer, or they require access to systems that are not open for API integrations.

A Tag Team Approach to CX Automation

The best option is to leverage an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) to help gather information, assist with data entry and summarization, and take some of the workload away from the customers and the agents.  Then a clean hand-off from the IVR to the agent, with an AI-generated summary of steps already taken and actions needed, sets the stage so the agent can handle more complex actions in systems where APIs are not available.

The smaller pieces, from 11 o’clock to 5 o’clock, represent tasks that are most likely to be automated.  Here’s what the chart looks like if we recast it as a split between an IVA and a live agent:

The IVA has an opportunity to handle nearly 50% of the interaction, moving time and effort from both the agent and the customer, and reducing data entry errors as well.

Next Steps to a Better CX

There are different types of automation and varying costs associated with them.  In our next post, we’ll discuss the steps in the call flow that can leverage generative AI and the steps that can be fulfilled with workflow automation.  That will lead to a cost/benefit analysis and ROI.

Can’t wait to talk about it? Click here to schedule a discovery call with the MotionCX strategic solutions team!