Digital customer experience
At CXN Live: Contact Centers 2020, Bernard Slowey, worldwide support leader, digital customer support at Microsoft offered attendees a closer look into how the multinational technology giant has shaped its approach to digital customer support.
After detailing Microsoft’s vision: to empower its customers to achieve more, Slowey outlined the framework that was constructed to achieve this mission, which places the customer at the center and focuses three key areas:
- Empower me to prevent and resolve my issues
- Help me quickly when I need your expertise
- Advise me how I can achieve more
Slowey noted that ‘empower me’ represents a key stage for Microsoft as 70 per cent of customers prefer to digitally self-serve before contacting customer support. In light of this, Microsoft implemented a virtual support agent (VSA), that utilizes AI to assist customers.
However, Microsoft made the initial mistake of implementing the VSA as a separate entity to the traditional support channels, meaning there was no continuity when customers were transferred between the two. Slowey notes that once the two were connected and integrated, the VSA became much more successful as agents were able to advise on its performance. It managed to streamline issue resolution time by over 50 per cent in some cases.
Slowey went on to offer further examples of how Microsoft have leveraged technology for customer support, demonstrating the power of machine learning for real-time, verbatim speech analytics, which allow Microsoft to analyze whether support calls are positive or negative and begin to understand why.
To access the full range of insights from Bernard Slowey, watch the full session on demand at CXN Live: Contact Centers 2020.