7 Call Center Automation Tools Shaping the Industry's Future: 2024 Trends

That’s from Convoso’s CEO and Co-founder, Nima Hakimi. It’s a thought that neatly sums up why call center automation trends are so important in 2024: Because without automating their operations, businesses in lead gen and outbound sales will struggle to deliver the efficiency, growth, and ultimately, scale they need to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

Hakimi went on to say that implementing technology isn’t always easy. “But once it’s implemented and you get the hang of it, you can take things to the next level.”

And that’s what this article is all about—helping you take your contact center to the next level.

Below, in this guide to contact center automation trends in 2024, we analyze 7 of top automation solutions that are helping to deliver maximum efficiency at today’s top call centers.

This trend article is part of the series, “Outbound Contact Center Trends,” helping you stay current with issues, technologies, best practices, and strategies that impact your business. Our aim is to provide tools and guidance that will improve productivity, efficiency, and ultimately profitability for your sales and lead generation team.

The drive to automate aspects of call center operations, sales processes, and service delivery is nothing new. Business leaders of all stripes have long recognized automation’s central role in driving impactful increases in efficiency, productivity, and profit.

However, with the era of AI (and a potential “Fourth Industrial Revolution”) upon us,  automation-focused initiatives have once again become a central focus for many businesses, call centers included.

In fact, one recent study projected that that the rate of automation present in agent interactions will increase by 5 times, and a rate of 1 in 10 interactions by 2026, compared to only 1.8% of interactions back in 2022. This acceleration should come as no surprise when, in 2022 and 2023, respectively, surveys found that 91% and 68% of contact center leaders were making automation capabilities their top investment priority.

The key statistic underlying the push for automation to consider though is not what contact centers are investing in automation or how many of them are doing so, it’s the simple matter of why they’re doing so.

It goes back to the quote from Convoso’s Nima Hakimi: they’re automating operations because it’s helping them achieve scale. How much scale? Well, consider Gartner’s estimate hat conversational AI technology will reduce contact center agent labor costs by $80 billion in 2026.

That’s a lot of savings—and a lot of potential for scale. And as we’ll see below, as we cover the top ways that automation tools are entering today’s contact centers, there’s much more potential beyond just conversational AI.

Autodialer software is the foundation of automated, efficient call center operations. This call center automation software automatically places calls using an operation’s database of contacts, with the goal of connecting agents with more prospects or customers.

Yet while automatic dialing is the key function of an autodialer, it is the multiple supporting features available that will help manage call center performance and improve ROI. And as we’ll see below, many of these features can introduce further degrees of automation—and even greater efficiency—at your call center.

QA—the process of auditing operations and services to ensure they meet company standards—is crucial to running an outbound call center.

From dialing tactics and dispositions, to agent conversations and compliance, a high-volume call center is a mind-bogglingly complex operation to keep track of. So much so that keeping tabs on it all can be quite tedious for the teams involved in QA.

Even worse, it might just be impossible for some call centers to actually keep track of it all.

That is, until now.

Automation is revolutionizing how QA is done—starting with how much of it gets done.

With the help of conversational AI that can record, process, and understand human language, the latest QA tools are able to analyze not just some but all conversations held in a call center.

What’s more, these automation tools can quickly (and independently) identify positive and negative trends within these conversations and deliver insights that streamline agent coaching and feedback.

Rather than focus on a small number of conversations, managers and agents dedicated agents to QA can now take in the full breadth of activity at their sales or service operations. In addition to scale, though, they can also use automation software to unlock granularity with ease.

As Balto CEO Marc Bernstein covered in a recent webinar, call center employees can ask questions of their AI systems using natural language and rapidly identify data points and insights.

Instead of sifting through mountains of data and transcripts, trying out differently layered filters in order to come up with actionable information, they can simple type into a search bar “Show me all of my calls where…” something specific happened—where a rebuttal failed, a disclosure was missed, or a introduction’s tone was off. In return, the AI will deliver complete results, and it can even offer a succinct summary of feedback to save yet more time (and money).

Every outbound call center manager knows that each of their agents has different skills. However, many dialers don’t necessarily let them play to these different strengths. Intelligent, skills-based routing capabilities change that.

Managers can define agent skills, like language proficiency or specific product knowledge. Then, using information from their CRM record, the dialer will automatically route leads to the agent best qualified to handle the interaction.

Meanwhile, for businesses whose agents are dialing into multiple states, smart routing can ensure that customers are only routed to agents who have the licensure they need to remain compliant.

All told, skills-based routing can support improved compliance and performance, helping ensure that the right leads find their way to the right agents. And as sales expert and consultant Jason Cutter puts it, you can make sure that you drive maximum momentum in your sales process:

“When certain reps are doing well, you want to keep feeding that hot hand. You need to make sure you have the technology in place to do that.”

In outbound sales, timing is everything. If you’re dialing a high volume of leads manually, though, there’s no efficient way to make sure you’re only dialing the right leads at the right time. After all, agents have a lot on their plate. With workflow automation software, you can develop a customized approach to lead follow-up and have your dialer do most of the dirty work.

Workflow automation can be set up to incorporate a custom cadence of calls, texts, emails, voicemail drops, and more that work in tandem to increase the chances of contact and conversion. Best of all, with behavior-based rules, the automated schedule can respond whenever customers take further action as they move through the sales funnel.

According to Nima Hakimi, a dialer with workflow automation can make all the difference, offering the ability to tailor different approaches to leads from different quality sources. “With high-intent leads vs. low-intent leads, you’re going to have different strategies around them,” he says. “Your dialer should have the capability to automate that process.”

“In an environment like a call center, you have to make decisions quickly,” says Nima Hakimi. “If you don’t, any extra minutes or seconds can cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.”

Advances in reporting and call center analytics mean that call center decision-makers can get the information that they need to make the most of every second, right at their fingertips and in real time. With automated reporting, gone are the days of sifting through seemingly endless spreadsheets and making manual calculations—only to find out that negative impacts to ROI have been made.

As Brian Spurgeon, Contact Center Director at Long Home Products told us, Convoso’s robust reporting tools help him identify critical changes in performance at the speed they need:

“Reporting is so easy with Convoso. I can get that [data] in seconds…It’s one of our key principles here that data and facts set you free from emotion and Convoso helps us do that.”

We discussed conversational AI’s incredible abilities with respect to call center QA above. But the advances in conversational AI have an even more powerful automation application that call centers can’t afford to miss in 2024: the intelligent virtual agent (IVA).

IVA solutions like Voso.ai from Convoso can serve as an extension of your staff of live agents, handling voice- and text-based conversations with remarkable, life-like fluency. By interpreting the intent of customers’ voice or text messages, the best IVAs available today can respond effortlessly to deliver excellent service or accelerate a sale.

In 2024, this essential call center automation tool will help call centers nurture leads and increase call backs. It will offer 24/7 availability, serving as an answering service or appointment setter based on the needs of an operation. Ultimately, it will help teams greatly increase their capacity and hold many times more quality conversations with their customers, in the channels of their choice.

We began this guide to contact center automation in 2024 with one crucial word: scale.

Each of the call center automation tools we’ve discussed above has the potential to deliver increased scale to your call center. At the heart of this potential, however, is improved efficiency. More precisely, efficiency in three key areas: for your leads, agents, and managers.

“When world-class call centers do things well, it’s when they’re efficient in all three of these areas,” says Hakimi.

Look for dialer software that delivers the automation you need to match the efficiency of these world-class call centers.