Why Siloed Automation Strategies Fail

By Harry Chang
May 16, 2022

Automation is a key component of modern customer service strategies, but when implemented in isolated silos, it can lead to significant challenges. This article delves into the pitfalls of siloed automation and identifies five critical problems that businesses often face:

Problem #1: Customers get frustrated: Disjointed automation systems lead to inconsistent and frustrating customer experiences.
Problem #2: Chatbots are merely familiar: Limited chatbot capabilities fail to engage and resolve customer issues effectively.
Problem #3: Data gets lost: Fragmented data systems cause inefficiencies and inaccuracies in customer service.
Problem #4: Processes are not agile: Rigid and outdated processes hinder the ability to adapt to changing customer needs.
Problem #5: Agents suffer: Inefficient tools and fragmented workflows burden customer service agents, reducing their productivity and morale.

Addressing these issues requires a holistic approach to automation, ensuring seamless integration and coordination across all customer service channels.

How a Holistic Automation Solution Brings Customers Familiar Experiences

Picture contact centers as a house. They must be maintained, adapt to their users, and, every so often, undergo some remodeling. For years, contact centers have been trying to accomplish all of these tasks by implementing automation to save customers time and modernize experiences. But up until now, they’ve had to lay a foundation brick by brick, and channel-by-channel.

Unfortunately, contact centers provide a service that can’t be shut down for construction – they must remain open 24/7, no matter what’s being built or replaced. This means that an ad-hoc approach to automation – piecing together standalone solutions offered by several disparate vendors – often results in customers receiving disjointed experiences.

Where they may expect one process over the phone – say, stating their zip code to verify their identity – they may find an entirely different process over text, like having to hunt down an account number they’ve never used just to receive service. Customers have gotten used to hearing “please listen closely as our menu options have changed” for years on end.

For contact centers, laying the foundation for an automation strategy has created a never-ending game of cat and mouse, where managers are constantly evaluating separate vendors and taking on expensive, time-consuming projects in an attempt to automate common customer service requests across each channel. In the end, they only see marginal productivity gains, if any.

The pitfalls of using disparate automation vendors can disrupt everything – from customer experiences to years of technology roadmapping. Here’s how:

Problem #1: Customers get frustrated

Customers deal with hundreds of different contact centers every year. Within a single brand, however, they expect a consistent experience that doesn’t waver in its usability. When they don’t receive it, they’re quick to question the value of a brand, and the stats show it.

49% of consumers, on average, use three to five different communication channels to contact customer service. (Microsoft Dynamics 365, 2020) Source
89% of customers are retained by companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement. (Invesp, 2019)
75% of consumers look forward to a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels–social media, mobile, online, in-person, or through the phone. 73% will likely change brands if they don’t get it. (Salesforce) Source

Problem #2: Chatbots are merely familiar

For the last few years, contact centers have had dozens of vendors to choose from when it comes to chatbots, but none for voice solutions that’s truly been reliable and enhanced the customer experience. On the contrary, Replicant focused on building Contact Center Automation that’s purpose-built for voice first to address the fact that while 76% of customers prefer placing a phone call to contact customer service, it remains the most frustrating automated customer experience out of all the channels.

Over the past few years, we have perfected our AI platform to offer the most natural human-to-machine conversations ever crafted. In the last few years alone, Replicant’s Thinking Machine has automated over 30 million calls for some of the world’s largest and most beloved brands.

Now, the same conversation engine that finally cracked the code on voice powers a full Contact Center Automation platform – one that can resolve issues across voice, messaging, and other digital channels. This gives contact centers the brand-new ability to partner with a solution that finally prioritizes Voice. Leaders can now rely on a single, integrated solution to automate across all channels in any language regardless if it’s voice or messaging.

Problem #3: Data gets lost

One of the most damaging impacts of a standalone, channel-by-channel automation strategy is the risk of data loss. Without a unified protocol for retrieving and viewing data, contact centers are unable to understand their total customer experience by means of data. Replicant allows contact center managers to visualize conversations across channels in a single dashboard. They can view conversation transcripts for every customer interaction, across all channels in an end-to-end dashboard that lets contact center managers monitor conversations, analyze insights from conversation data, and take action immediately by updating conversation scripts to create an optimal customer experience.

Problem #4: Timelines are off sync

Standalone, channel-by-channel automation strategies can take years, without ever fully being implemented or showing a return on investment. This creates enormous risk when partnering with a new vendor, as project timelines get reshuffled as new market challenges arise, like that of the past two years with the pandemic and great resignation. It can also destabilize siloed channels, as customers deal with new rollouts and more software bugs. With Replicant, contact centers can scale the best of conversational design across every conversation flow with Replicant Powers – pre-built components that make it easy to design optimal conversations without heavy development. They can also seamlessly integrate with existing agent workflows and contact center and CRM software to automatically handle escalations, create cases, log summary notes, and resolve tickets.

Problem #5: Agents suffer

Piecemeal automation approaches lead to tool fragmentation for agents requiring them to learn new, disjointed technologies and high operational overhead for call center and IT teams who bring the implementations together. But more importantly, they don’t solve agents’ biggest problem: there’s not enough of them to answer every call, chat and text. With Contact Center Automation, agents team up with a solution that can fully resolve repetitive, tier 1 requests that make up the bulk of their workload.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see why so many contact centers have struggled to achieve true digital transformation with automation at the forefront given the lack of options they’ve had access to. With Replicant, contact centers can finally break out of the insurmountable challenge that is piecemeal, standalone automation.

Replicant’s AI platform allows consumers to engage in natural conversations across voice, messaging and other digital channels to resolve their customer support issues. It provides an out-of-the-box foundation that scales up or down instantly, can be implemented in weeks and handles millions of customer support interactions a month.

Most importantly, it safeguards against channel-by-channel automation deployments that can end up costing businesses millions of dollars.

With Replicant, contact centers finally have the ability to holistically transform their customer service experience, while avoiding the common pitfalls of standalone, disparate automation solutions – request a demo today!