Picture this: you are managing a contact center of a leading university. It’s admissions time, and you are inundated with calls, emails, and social media queries from students and parents about courses, accommodation, etc. You have to scan through all the data for the correct information, offer proper guidance, and ensure all the queries are answered satisfactorily. 

Sounds overwhelming, right?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to one of our clients. 

Our client, a university, had an extensive website of over 3,500 pages! Their contact center received thousands of queries on admission, courses, fees, accommodation, and more. They were overwhelmed by the barrage of inquiries, and it took time to respond as they were still using manual methods to retrieve information from the large volume of web pages.

At InovarTech, we built a custom chatbot with the help of Copilot and trained it on the university’s website content. So, whenever a question was asked, the chatbot could assist the agent by searching for the information on the website and quickly providing contextually relevant responses. This improved their response time and the agent’s productivity.

The university is one example of Copilot's potential to revolutionize contact center productivity.

There are more use cases where your enterprise can use Copilot to enhance customer experience and agents’ productivity.

But first, let’s understand what’s affecting the productivity of contact center agents.

Challenges of Contact Center Agents

In a fast-paced world, customers expect a quick resolution to their queries. However, contact centers face the following challenges that prevent them from offering seamless customer experience.

• The high attrition rate among agents

The average attrition rate among contact center agents is projected to be around 31.2% by the end of 2024. Some enterprises had a worrying 85% attrition rate. This means enterprises have to offer continuous agent training, which is both cost-intensive and time-consuming. It also affects the productivity at the contact center.  

• Limited visibility into customer data

Contact center agents often don’t have a 360-degree view of customer data as it is available in silos. They spend a lot of time retrieving information about the customer. The lack of holistic customer data makes it hard for agents to provide personalized and timely responses. 

• Language barriers

The language barrier is a major concern for enterprises with a global presence. Contact center agents could struggle to address customer queries effectively due to their lack of understanding of local languages. This could lead to miscommunication or misinterpretation of messages and impact customers' overall experience in that geography.

• Lack of subject matter expertise

Sometimes, agents struggle to respond to complex queries requiring specialized knowledge. They may also not have easy and full access to the internal knowledge base. This results in agents giving inaccurate or incomplete customer responses, thereby causing customer dissatisfaction. 

How Does Copilot Improve Contact Center Productivity?

Microsoft’s Copilot is an AI-powered tool that provides real-time resolutions to customer queries and automates time-consuming tasks. 

Here’s how it can boost the agent’s productivity and enhance the customer’s experience:

• Automates time-consuming tasks

Remember the university we mentioned at the beginning? With 3,500 web pages, agents could not provide accurate or timely responses. They had to look up information manually. This is a common problem with enterprises storing an enormous volume of information. The contact center agents spend a lot of time finding the correct information. 

Copilot can resolve this challenge by automating time-consuming tasks. For example, in the university’s case, Copilot extracted the correct information from all those pages and enabled agents to provide a contextually relevant response. They didn’t have to spend time searching for information. Besides that, Copilot can summarize emails and transcripts and even help draft customer emails. Copilot’s automation capabilities help the agents manage large volumes of queries and free up their time to focus on more interesting, value-added tasks.

• Improves the response time

Agents no longer need to spend time switching between multiple systems to gather customer data. Copilot can seamlessly integrate with existing CRMs and third-party systems like Workday and Oracle. This will help agents access comprehensive customer data in a single interface and provide a more informed and tailored response to the customer. It can generate responses by understanding customers’ queries, identifying the issue, providing solutions, and recommending the next steps to agents. For example, Copilot can retrieve information about the customer’s account from Salesforce during customer interaction and provide a real-time response to the agents. This can improve the response time and boost the agents’ productivity.

• Makes internal knowledge base accessible

Given the high agent attrition rates, contact centers have to train new agents for three months to prepare them for the new role. This can be time-consuming, especially if the contact center has a backlog of queries. To add to the woes, a new agent might not be well-equipped to handle a customer query if they have limited access to internal resources. Such situations could lead to customer dissatisfaction. 

Copilot can help mitigate this issue by understanding the problem and providing all the relevant resources to the agent. For example, if the query concerns a network problem, Copilot can extract content related to networking issues for the agent. It can also help the agent draft the right response to the customer in real-time. With Copilot’s help, the agents can start the new role faster, reduce the backlog of queries, and decrease the waiting time. 

• Personalizes responses

Agents don’t have to fret about language barriers anymore. Copilot provides multilingual support that enables agents to address the needs of a diverse customer base in their preferred languages. This level of personalization can help agents respond to customers more efficiently. 

Take Lenovo, for instance. They implemented Copilot and provided a chat capability through which customers could interact with agents using one of the nine chosen languages. AI would automatically translate the questions into English, enabling agents to understand the queries, respond, and translate the response to the original language. This automated and personalized response in the customer’s preferred language has saved the agent’s time in translation, but more importantly, it increased the customer’s satisfaction by 95%. 

Conclusion

Today’s customers want quick solutions to their queries. The Average Handling Time (AHT) expected from an agent is around six minutes. With limited resource access and an ever-increasing volume of queries from different channels, enterprises face difficulty tackling the queries on time. That’s why a Copilot is so essential. From automating manual tasks to enabling agents to respond to queries faster, Copilot is revolutionizing contact centers’ productivity.

However, to make the most out of Copilot, you have to integrate with the systems and workflows you follow in your enterprise.

That’s where InovarTech comes in. We integrate your business processes and enterprise software, such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Azure, with our Copilot services. This can help enterprises discover data, locate documents quickly, grant agents access to the knowledge base, and improve agents' productivity and performance.

For more information about our Copilot services and to kickstart your AI journey, contact us.