Mevin, Author at ClaySys Technologies

Why Do You Need Contact Center Automation?

Posted on April 13, 2022April 13, 2022 by Mevin

What is contact center automation?

The Contact Center is an important part of the infrastructure of every huge organization that deals with a large number of external or internal customer service requests. The main purpose behind contact center automation is to successfully manage those interactions without the intervention of a human agent and by using intelligent algorithms.

Human operators are still part of the companies, assisting customers from different parts of the world, becoming a new customer service strategy. Customers mostly experience contact center automation in the form of voice and chatbots. There are also other contact center operations like customer service portals, virtual assistants, voice and chatbots that play significant roles in such operations.

Characteristics of Contact Center Automation

Powerful automation initiatives have many characteristics that drive customer call center expectations. Here are some of the characteristics of customer call center operations:

Use of natural language

As a key element of contact center automation, conversational AI allows customers to communicate any intention or query they have, through spoken or written means. This type of approach changes the model of self-service from running a user interface to engaging in a natural conversation with a partner.

Omnichannel experience

Contact center automation can extend to many touchpoints including phone, messenger, text messages, chatbots in websites, and more. Supporting omnichannel helps customers receive answers they want, where, when, and how they need them. The customers assume those experiences to be steady and uniform throughout all channels so that they do not need to repeat themselves when they snap between platforms and agents. Excellent in-class performance enables smooth swapping between channels.

Quality assurance technology

This makes it easier to monitor core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which helps in improving sales, minimizing churn, and improvising the performance of agents. The potential to accentuate trends and identify patterns creates live insight that enhances decision making.

Enables multi-experiences

Consolidating visual components and point-and-click UI components with language-based communication makes human-machine interaction more effective and convenient for various tasks.

High Discourse flexibility

Contact center interaction is often unstructured and unpredictable and different from filling out a form. Interacting with a contact center involves different strategies, expressions, and accents because each customer is different. Contact center automation needs to address the ambiguity of human communication in order to increase the number of successful journeys and reduce stress.

Data analytics and reporting

This is significant for a well-functioning contact or call center. It allows using advanced and live analytics to set it up quickly and easily, rather than depending on supervisors to assess the customer experience and agent performance.

Predictive analysis

Predictive analysis allows managers to analyze customer-contact center interactions to understand what makes them thriving or unsuccessful from a customer perspective. In-depth reviews enable the creation of better processes and predict future requirements. For example, you can evaluate the volume of calls, average handling time, and customer satisfaction in the pre-holiday season to better expect the resources required for the upcoming season.

Benefits of contact center automation

Increase customer satisfaction

Automation facilitates immediate engagement with qualified inquiries to recognize and authenticate the customer. In most cases, with the help of a virtual operator, customers can completely manage their requests within moments. Issues related to passwords, copies of statements, and other problems can be managed with the integration of natural language processing (either chat or phone) and smart processes that connect customers and data at the back-end. Contact center automation covers every important data (e.g. customer account data and query type) and redirects customers straight away to a qualified agent using intelligent routing. This not only reduces the waiting time for customers but also lessens the average handle time because of pre-qualified, authenticated customers who are sent to the most suitable agent.

Boost in efficiency

Reducing the average handle time (AHT) is one of the major benefits of bringing Contact Center to the automation list according to the business perspective. AHT explains how long it takes a human agent to ‘handle’ a contact on an average scale. It is usually between 240 – 600 seconds depending on the usage situation and business area. Therefore, any reduction in AHT can have a significant impact on KPIs in a matter of seconds. Additionally, human agents filling reports, updating databases, sending out emails can cause errors. Automation removes these burdens from the human agents and allows them to move faster to the next customer.

Obtaining revenue opportunities

All contact centers need to balance appropriate service quality and labor costs. AI-powered automation will help you move the needle towards increased customer satisfaction and better returns without raising the contact center costs. There should also be a balance in conflicting goals: service level and cost of staffing. Simply put, reducing waiting time will help increase customer satisfaction (which will eventually lead to higher returns) – but a spike in labor costs can exceed profits easily. Conversely, reducing contact center costs by prolonging the waiting time can lead to loss of revenue and decreased customer satisfaction. Conversational AI allows businesses to harness the power of multiple digital channels and reach new customer segments without bringing a proportionate increase in the costs of the contact center.

Employee satisfaction

Though automation leads to a reduction in AHT, its main objective is not to eliminate and replace human operators. Instead, when automation grips, normal attrition is enough to narrow down the number of employees. Since virtual agents can only manage simple and well-defined issues, most Human Contact Center agents find more job satisfaction while dealing with intricate queries that require more training and expertise. Moreover, most employees are relieved from repetitive tasks: no agent likes to ask the same ID questions to a large number of customers during their shift.

Wrap Up

Automation is very helpful to a larger extent and will become an important component in every contact center. With AI and related technologies evolving and growing at a faster pace, call center automation will continue to stretch out across all possible industries. Call center automation is not the final option for businesses, but it is a way to assist agents to do a better job by saving money and time. Human workers are a necessary component for a growing number of interventions that go beyond simple requests.

Using RowDetails Property in a Search Grid

Posted on May 25, 2013June 4, 2019 by Mevin

This blog will explain you on the RowDetails property in search grid.

RowDetails Property

To get the “Row Details” in search grid, select either “On Select “ or “Always’ option from the Row Details drop down.

Figure 31

A new tab named “Row Detail” will be displayed next to the general tab of the search control.

Figure 32

Click on the “Row Detail” tab. A sub form will be displayed inside the search grid as shown in the figure 33.

Figure 33

Click on the “ToolBox”. “Details View Tools” displays

Figure 34

Hyperlink, Label and TextBox controls are available. Drag the desired control into the detailed pane. I have added the row details as shown in the below picture. Background color of these controls has been changed for better understanding.

Next step is to bind these controls to the desired columns.

For search grid, we have 8 data types (String, Integer, Decimal, Date, DateTime, Image, ImageURL and FileDownload). All the link data types (ImageURL and File Download) must be bind to the “Hyperlink” control in the Details View Tool bar. All other data types can be bind to either TextBox or Label controls.

After configure a search (Refer Section 4 for how to configure a search), map the row details controls with the desired columns. Click on the row detail control which we drag into the form in the above step. Property section will be opened. Select the column which we want to map with the details view control, from the “Data Binding” dropdownbox as shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 35

Preview for RowDetails=On Select

By default the first row will be shown in detail mode. When click on any other row that will be shown in detail mode.

For RowDetails=Always

All the rows will be displayed in detail mode.

Introduction To Exception Management in ClaySys AppForms

Posted on May 25, 2010June 11, 2019 by Mevin

ClaySys AppForms V 1.0

Introduction to Exception Management

An exception is an error or failure that occurs when a program is executing. Generally, an exception describes an event that was unexpected. For example, an exception will occur if a program requests more memory than the operating system can provide. This error is known as an Out of Memory Exception.

The Exception Class Hierarchy in C#
When an exception occurs normal processing of the code ceases immediately. An object is then generated that contains information relating to the error. This object is an instance of an Exception class. The most basic of the exception classes is System.Exception, the Exception class defined in an Exception the Systemnamespace.

The exception classes are organized into a hierarchy with Exception at the top. Beneath the basic Exception class are two further classes, SystemException and ApplicationException, both in the System Namespace. The SystemException class has further derived subclasses, each representing a specific type of exception that can be raised in response to a system error. The ApplicationException class is a base class from which custom application exceptions may be derived.

ASP.net Applications
WCF Applications
Silverlight Applications

The exceptions will be handled only from the View layers; in case of an inner exception it will be thrown to the view and handled from there. There can be performance related issues if we bubble up the exceptions in each layer.

The general form try-catch-finally in C# is shown below:

try
{
// Statement which can cause an exception.
}
catch(Type x)
{
// Statements for handling the exception
}
finally
{
//Any cleanup code
}

In the ClaySys AppForms application, the exceptions will be logged into

1. Event Log

Log to a SQL Table

1. Event Log
The event log will be used for Error logging by the ASP.net applications and the WFC application. This is to ensure that the server side errors logged to the event log of the server which threw the exception. These exceptions will also be saved to the SQL Table.

2. Log to a SQL Table
All the exceptions (including server side exceptions) will be saved to an error log table from the ClaySys AppForms Silverlight application. In case of an exception on the server code, after the exception is logged to the event log, the exception details will be returned in the format of an xml as follows:

<Error>

<Status>Error/Success</Status>

<Source>System.Data.OLEEBConnection</Source>

<Message>An Error occurred while connecting to the Database</Message>

<StackTrace>at System.ServiceModel.AsyncResult.End[TAsyncResult](IAs…..</StackTrace>

</Error>

The Exception details will be sent to the client, from where we will be appending all the attributed that caused this issue, which will be saved to Silverlight isolated storage, and a background process will be used to move the data to the server. This XML will be sent to the error tracking table for further investigation on the reason for the exception.

Handling Exceptions in Silverlight applications

If you want to log exceptions occurred on the client-side to the server-side you need to add a Service which can take the exception message and store it. Silverlight supports different ways of passing data to the server. For example, Web Service, WCF Service, Service operation via WCF RIA Services or just passing data to an ASP.NET Web Form etc.

When an exception occurs in the Windows OS we will see a dialog with the exception and also detailed information. The error message to be logged will be shown in a ChildWindow when an exception occurs, for example a window like this:

There will be a user friendly message displayed to the user; if they need more details they can view the exception details. The exception details window is configuration based so, if the administrator do not want the end user to see the actual stack trace, or any other details, they can hide them.

If the user clicks on Send, the exception details will be sent to the server, which will insert the details to the exception log table. If the service fails, the exception details will be saved to the Isolated Storage of Silverlight plug-in in the browser. The application will try to save the details next time when the user logs in to the application. The flow of the exception management is as follows:

In Case of exceptions in the server

In Case of ClaySys AppForms Silverlight Exceptions

The administrator user will just have to go to the error log view in ClaySys AppForms to identify the issue reported to the end user.