Innovating to maintain pre-pandemic CX standards
The pandemic was an incredibly tough period for contact centers, with staff unable to work in the office and many home-working setups proving inadequate for handling large call volumes. As a result, brands were left scrambling to respond to customer queries. While many customers were willing to initially lenient and forgiving of these challenges and their impact on experience and service, Dr Nicola J. Millard, principal innovation partner at British Telecom (BT), notes that customers are no longer quite so understanding.
“Expectations of customer experience have bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, so using the pandemic as an excuse for bad service will not wash with customers now,” she remarks.
The key to delivering quality CX in world where customer preferences and expectations have permanently shifted, according to Millard, is innovation. Businesses can tap into new technologies and strategies, such as proactive service or CX in the metaverse, to ensure that customers are engaged and their post-pandemic expectations are being met.
“Faced with complex and emotive demand, contact centers are having to be innovative. Not all these innovations have worked, so having the humility to admit that this is the case and learning from mistakes is key to future progress.”
“There are also new technologies, for example, proactive service that can push some of the demand out of the contact center, and such solutions will come into their own over the coming years and decades. We could see augmented reality for remote diagnostics and, pushing further out into the future, customer experience delivery in the metaverse using photorealistic avatars,” Millard concludes.
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Applying customer insights to transform your contact center
One way to ensure that your contact center meets the needs of customers is to listen to them. Customers are more than willing to tell you what is or is not working in your contact center and how you can best meet their needs.
Mark Billingham, group customer care and CX director at The Very Group, explains that this is the strategy that the online retail operator has adopted.
According to Billingham, The Very Group started by ensuring it understands the reasons driving customers to contact the retailer “to ensure we have the best possible chance of understanding how to fix the most important issues first for our customers”.
The Very Group leverages data from text analytics, voice analytics, agent feedback, chatbot scripts, NPS surveys, in-person customer UX and its ‘All Ideas Matter’ tool – a digital portal that captures voice of the customer (VOC) and employee (VOE) data.
“All CX transformations should start on solid foundations, and for that you have to remove waste, you have to fix the processes that are broken within your contact center and remove unnecessary friction for customers,” he remarks.
Within three years, The Very Group was handling 15 million fewer calls annually, thanks to process fixes, first contact resolution improvement, AI integration and self-service channels. The business’ chatbot is now so integral to customer service that it is handling 250,000 customer queries a month.
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Applying AI to enhance business intelligence
While customer data is invaluable for informing contact center optimizations, ensuring that the business has the capacity to analyze the data that customers provide is an entirely different challenge. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being utilized in contact centers due to its ability to rapidly analyze enormous data sets, far larger than data sets that humans are capable of analyzing.
Devon Mychal, senior director of product marketing for Talkdesk, notes that the contact center is home to a vast wealth of customer data that is currently underutilized.
“The contact center is one of the best sources of business intelligence available to organizations, but today it remains largely untapped,” Mychal says.
For businesses that utilize chatbots to communicate with customers, a constant stream of voice of customer data that informs on customer sentiment and the effectiveness of customer service efforts is continuously being collected. In many cases, these chatbots can even handover to agents in the case of a transfer, providing all of the necessary information for the agent to pick up right where the chatbot left off.
By empowering agents with intelligence in this way businesses are able to ensure that customer queries are handled as seamlessly as possible, removing the necessity of asking customers to repeat their issue again and again. Information on customer sentiment also allows agents to enter calls with the right approach to avoid further angering frustrated customers.