Elevating Customer Experience: The Technology Way

The customer experience (CX) is full of challenges and opportunities for organizations. It depends on how you view your CX.

Customer-focused organizations like Zappos view interactions with customers as an opportunity to enhance their relationship and provide outstanding experiences.

Does every organization think of customer interactions that way?

I dread having conversations with customer service personnel. Some of the reasons are:

• Long wait times
• Inability to understand my problem statement. I will have to repeat it many times.
• You are put on hold multiple times during the call, and the agent returns to check on the information I share.
• Agents struggle to get questions answered clearly and directly
• Too many transfers
• Need for following up again to have a resolution

Most organizations fall short of customer expectations.

These are the findings of the Customer Research Survey Report conducted by Interactions:

• 76% say they expect better customer service than they get today
• 50% believe companies are trying to get them off the phone as quickly as possible
• 55% say that customer service is deteriorating
• 49% want to reach customer care through a channel of their choice
• 49% want their customer service experts to speak in a conversational tone and not keep it formal
• 36% say that being unable to talk to a human agent when they have a complex issue drives them crazy

How Does Contact Center Technology Help in Enhancing CX?

Contact Center technology can address all of these challenges and pitfalls. A thoughtful and technology-driven approach can make a company stand out in providing exceptional CX.

Focus on Resolutions and Not Average Handling Time

Most contact centers focus on Average Handling Time (AHT). They want their agents to get off the call as quickly as possible so they are available to handle the next call.

Instead of handling time, focus on providing resolutions and monitoring the resolution time taken by agents. This will be a better metric for organizations to measure, as it is directly proportional to customer happiness.

Omnichannel Experience

Based on your customer profile, make yourself available on those channels where your customers will likely interact with you.

Ensure that you integrate all of these channels. Besides, integrate your CX technology with other customer interaction systems like CRM, ERP, Helpdesk, Invoicing, etc.

This would provide a truly omnichannel experience, where your customer-facing resources will have a single view of all your customer interactions.

With this, agents will be able to resolve queries clearly and directly.

Self-Service Platforms

Most queries that come to CX are transactional. They don’t need a lot of intelligence to resolve.

Self-service platforms like FAQs, self-running videos, and Chatbots can answer most of those queries.

For that matter, most of your first-level interactions can be handled by bots. However, once customers think they need to talk to someone, the platform should allow them to switch to an agent directly without going through the bot.  

Voice Analytics

Only 2% of the recorded calls are viewed by supervisors and managers. Remaining 98% lies on the storage servers.

Using an analytics solution, analyze those recordings that would throw up a lot of intelligence – reasons for customer dissatisfaction, mis selling, and compliance issues.

All of these would help you structure your agent training to address and resolve customer queries better.

Workforce Management

Every channel must be serviced, and you must appropriately staff yourself based on the expected customer service requests.

Workforce management will allow you to direct queries to the right agents with the right skills at the right location at any given time. It doesn’t matter which channel the question comes through – chatbot, IVR, website, email, or regular phone calls. You would be directed to the right agent with the necessary skills to address your need.

List Management Services (LMS)

Slice and dice the data using List Management Services (LMS) to make sense of them. 

LMS can help you massage and mine the data. You can sort, filter, review, and enrich the data and make it actionable for your stakeholders.

You can write your own rules to extract the data you need. It functions as a central repository – a connection point for all outside inputs and allows intelligence engines to draw upon it for advanced decision processing.

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The right Contact Center technology can make all the difference, allowing customers a more seamless communication experience with human agents and virtual assistants.

Combining the above mentioned technologies will ultimately give consumers a better experience and improve CX.

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