Insights of contact centers experts to achieve customer loyalty

Contact centers are on the frontlines of bringing to life the customer loyalty hopes and strategies a brand has. As seen in CX Network’s 2021 Contact Centers report, to ensure audience retention objectives are realized, businesses must equip contact center staff with the tools, training, resources, culture and information needed to create loyalty winning, meaningful experiences for customers.

As flagged by our research panel in the recent Contact Centers report, Voice of the Customer (VoC) data is paramount for guiding contact centers toward the provision of excellent customer service, helping transform strangers or casual customers into loyal fans. These VoC initiatives will shed light on the best tools to deploy and how to lean on the utility of digital channels and chatbots to optimize the effectiveness and morale of agent workforces. As seen in the 2021 report, to access the budget and resource needed for these customer journey upgrades contact center leaders will first need to successfully demonstrate the returns on investment (ROI) available from these improvements.

Showcasing some of the key learnings from CXN Live: Contact Centers, this eBook explores the role of chatbots in enquiry volume spikes, empathetic digital transformation and the data-led approach to making meaningful contact center upgrades.

“Agents want to help people and want to feel like what they are doing matters. The best way to encourage this is to give them work that is meaningful.”

Micah Citti, customer service operations lead at ESPN

How ESPN used a chatbot to tackle enquiry spikes

Micah Citti, customer service operations lead at ESPN, reveals how the worldwide leader of sports evolved to handle the overwhelming enquiry surges triggered by Fantasy Football.

On joining ESPN 16 years ago, Citti was tasked with using his many years of CX experience to bring the group’s contact center into existence and provide ESPN sports fans with world-class service.

Routinely, in the months of August and September, Fantasy Football – a competition inviting users to build a team of real-life professional American Football players, with points scored or lost depending on the actual performance of those individuals – would trigger what Citti describes as a ‘tsunami wave’ of contacts from customers. This was to such an extent that ESPN had to triple its contact center headcount to field the influx of traffic. The high costs associated with this approach pushed ESPN to explore alternative ways to handle the surge.

Root cause analysis and solution implementation Journey mapping trend assessments of Fantasy Football queries revealed recurring themes triggering customer confusion. In most cases there were very high volumes of simple queries, login issues, league creation questions and rule clarification.

The Voice of the Customer and the Voice of the Employee (VoE) was mined for ideation purposes, which inspired templates responses for live chat, SMS and email, FAQs enhancement with how-to-videos and user interface upgrades. Once all these levers had been pulled, Citti and his team explored the potential of chatbots. The aim was to preserve or increase customer satisfaction, alongside increasing self-service usage to reduce the amount of mundane Fantasy Football questions agents needed to handle.

Citti and his team evaluated the market for the chatbot products and approaches available in relation to their budget. Next the parameters of the ‘fanbot’s’ role were defined to address basic, high-volume questions instead of complex, high-risk enquiries. Agents were included in this launch process to stress-test the fanbot’s implementation.

“When you bring your agents into these sorts of processes they become champions of the customer, because the last thing an agent wants is to create more work for themselves,” says Citti. “A poorly implemented chatbot is just going to make their lives harder, so having agent input is only going to make your product that much better.”

Check out: Top five CX trends

Results

In quantifying the success of a chatbot, Citti notes that deflection rate is a staple metric to quantify how effective the chatbot is at absorbing customer support burden away from agents. Just over two years after its implementation, the ESPN fanbot is achieving a 65 percent deflection rate, which exceeds its initial target of 50 percent.

Citti links this healthy deflection ratio directly to the increase in seen in ESPN agent satisfaction. “The reason why is that agents want to help people and want to feel like what they are doing matters. The best way to encourage this is to give them work that is meaningful,” says Citti. “Helping troubleshoot issues with a live stream broadcast, for example, is much more meaningful to an agent’s life rather than answering how to reset a password for the 15th time in a day.” Lesson High volumes of customer contacts around a certain topic are prime for automations that can improve the lives of your contact center staff as well as your target audience.

Contact center system switch halves call abandonment rates

With the help of Talkdesk, payment and billing software provider PaySimple overhauled its unreliable legacy contact center solution which was damaging the satisfaction levels of its 17,000 B2B customers.

PaySimple’s legacy contact center solution was plagued with outages and was notoriously hard to manage from both the administrative and agent perspectives. Reporting was slow, tough to customize, and the technology lacked the needed visibility into key business intelligence metrics to improve agent efficiency and customer call routing.

After it became clear their existing contact center vendor had no intention of providing future updates, PaySimple decided to switch providers. Market assessments led PaySimple to partner with Talkdesk due to its user-friendly interface, its dedication to feature innovation and its ability to seamlessly integrate with external solutions such as Salesforce and Slack.

Talkdesk’s offering enables PaySimple to automatically route calls to the most suited agents based on the time of day, skillset and queue status. Its VIP line function gives priority to customers of a high lifetime value to jump call queues. Talkdesk’s reliability and robustness ensures continuous uptime and as well as the ability for PaySimple to accurately improve customer experiences through agent training with live call monitoring and realtime dashboards.

Within just a few months of switching to Talkdesk:

• Call abandonment rates dropped from 12 percent to 5.5 per cent
• Customer hold times have reduced and PaySimple’s NPS score has risen
• Agent productivity has grown especially as employees no longer need to individually log every call, which saves them an estimated 30 minutes a day
• Improved metric reporting and data access allows PaySimple to make insight-driven improvements to customer experiences

Key lesson

Staying ahead of evolving customer expectations requires nimble technologies that are easy and fast to scale. Low code to facilitate integrations, leveraging automation, self-service and AI capabilities to deliver consistent customer and agent experiences are essential elements for maximizing the performance of today’s contact centers

Digitally transforming with precision and empathy

Helen Cassar, senior director of customer service at Maltese mobile network GoPLC details the empathetic digital transformation of its contact center.

Historically, GoPLC’s contact center was primarily focused on handling calls from customers, these being a mixture of routine enquiries as well as technical support requests from frustrated customers stuck without internet or phone service. In Q3 of 2019, only nine per cent of GoPLC customers utilized the Malta-based provider’s online access, according to Helen Cassar. After assessing this distribution GoPLC sought to assist customers more efficiently by encouraging them to try digital channels.

The biggest step forward in digital channel adoption from GoPLC customers was seen from the introduction of WhatsApp as a communication channel for its customers. Cassar explains: “Our customers are quite familiar with WhatsApp so there was not much education needed because WhatsApp is very well known across the globe and is very user friendly.” The period of Q3 2020 to Q4 2020 saw the largest jump in digital channel usage for the telecoms provider, which GoPLC directly links to the introduction of WhatsApp as a means of contact for customers with the brand.

To inform the digital transformation of its contact center, GoPLC turned to the Voice of the Customer for guidance. Research focus groups identified the need for enhanced self-service channels to empower customers with access and control to complete tasks and locate information. As a result, the telecoms firm invested in creating two self-service apps – GoApp and MyGo – for customers to activate services, access information, pay bills and report faults. Cassar notes that this visibility provides: “…ease of mind for customers because they can see the products they have with Go and can contact us through WhatsApp directly using these apps.”

GoPLC’s contact center agents also received access to a new integrated omnichannel CRM that removed duplicated effort for customers by recalling information from previous queries and equipping employees with extra visibility. Chatbots were introduced across all digital channels to save agents from simple queries that did not require human attention.

Check out: Omnichannel experts insights

As a result of the transformation GoPLC has seen the following results:

• As of Q2 2021 35 per cent of queries are solved digitally
• 75 per cent of customers are utilizing GoApp
• 60 per cent of bundles are purchased online
• 90 per cent of bills are paid online

The success of the digital transformation has also rested in GoPLC’s choice to build the digital skills of customers and employees to support individuals through the changes. Content such as how-to videos and FAQs pages were created to build online literacy to ensure lack of understanding would not damage the transformation’s progress.

Key lesson

Empathy is a vital ingredient for any successful transformation, stress-test your transformation plans from the perspectives of the various stakeholders impacted by the changes, including your contact center staff.

Using insights as the North Star to reach meaningful CX upgrades

Mark Billingham, group customer care and CX director at The Very Group (owners of retailer Littlewoods), explains how insights are used by the UK’s second biggest online retailer to make meaningful contact center upgrades.

After beginning its life as a catalog retailer, The Very Group has evolved to stand as a 100 per cent digital retailer, which Billingham notes has required significant business and customer experience transformation.

On identifying where to start with CX transformation, Billingham notes: “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.” Through a data-led approach, over the last three years the retailer has managed to remove 15 million calls annually from its contact centers via process fixes, first contact resolution improvement, AI integration and self-service channels. The group’s AI chatbot answers around 250,000 customer queries a month.

Building the North Star vision

To locate and capture insights that are credible enough to guide a business strategy and contact center upgrades, Billingham notes that The Very Group started by dedicating itself to understanding 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”.

Data sources that The Very Group tap into include text analytics, voice analytics, agent feedback, scripts from chatbot’s customer conversations, NPS surveys, a UX lab visited by customers in person and it’s All Ideas Matter tool – a digitalized portal that captures VoC and VoE data. Users are invited to express ideas or observations and tickets are automatically submitted to the CX team who investigate the issues, interacts with the ticket creators and manages the case through to resolution.

All of these sources combine to give The Very Group visibility on the current top five customer painpoints, which directs the retailer’s focus. These painpoints have a strong influence on Very’s NPS scores and the five points are communicated to the board every two weeks to assist with achieving buy in for particular contact center improvements.

Outcomes

This approach has inspired and enabled the launch of the retailer’s new CRM roadmap which is replacing legacy systems to improve customer interactions. Another improvement was applied to the workforce infrastructure post the onset of Covid-19. With the eventual lift of lockdowns and social distancing restrictions advisors expressed they missed face-to-face interaction with colleagues. Business leaders transformed the business to operate with a hybrid model converting portions of contact center hubs into dedicated spaces for advisors to socialize with each other. Office time is utilized twice a week for colleagues to interact, receive in person training and also communicate needed CX improvements.

Reflecting on the achievements won over the last three years from this insight-led approach and bringing data to the board, Billingham notes that brand NPS has increased by 20 points, The Very Group has been recognized in the Nunwood top 100, customer churn rates have lowered, and its customer base has expanded in size.

Key lesson

Do not rely on gut feelings and assumptions, a dataled approach is the fastest path to making meaningful contact center improvements

Final remarks on contact centers

As demonstrated by the experts in this ebook, when armed with clear data-led strategies and a customer-centric mindset contact center leaders can achieve uplift in KPIs and metrics that can directly impact business objectives.

These achievements and quantifiable metrics will allow the contact center to prove internally to management that it is a profit-generating center. A team that does more than just react to customer requests and concerns, but proactively acts to ensure pleasant customer experiences are commonplace.

This reputation will be valuable currency for attracting buy-in and evidencing ROI for future technological upgrades or CX initiatives. Readers are encouraged to emulate the learnings from the eBook’s experts in their own CX strategies moving forward.

Key takeaways from the report

• Do not rely on gut feelings and assumptions, a data-led approach is the fastest path to making meaningful contact center improvements
• High volumes of customer contacts around a certain topic are prime for optimizations that can improve the lives of your contact center staff as well as your target audience.
• The system switch that empowered PaySimple to halve call abandonment rates
• Stress test your transformation plans from the perspective of the various stakeholders impacted by the changes, including your contact center staff

Read the full report here