Analytics, Cloud, Omnichannel, Goals

Customers want to be able to get in touch with you, when they want, in their channel of choice.  They expect fast personalized service, highly trained agents, and quick resolution.  Therefore, you must be effective in handling their requests efficiently and ensuring that they are satisfied at the end of that interaction. 

The important thing is how do you set your processes, technology and people practices so that you could meet these evolving expectations. You do not want to change just for the sake of it. Look at what works and be open to new ways of doing things and stay up to date on the emerging technology.  Your customer journey map should be solid, and your entire organization should be behind it.

Some key best practices are:

Leverage analytics to provide great customer service.

This will require tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) through dashboards that will be visible to all employees.  These KPIs should not be serving as carrots to drive agent behavior but focusing on improving the customer experience. I have seen way too many agent scorecards that are diluted by having the wrong and numerous objectives on it.  AHT is the perfect example if it is not managed and measured properly.  Agents could have high AHT because it is a system/training issue, or they have low AHT because they are ending calls quickly without fully addressing the customer issue.  The key will be to introduce metrics that drive behaviors that result in loyal customers.

You will also need to integrate analytics and insights to better support the frontlines so that they could then personalize the experience for each customer.

1. Collect, analyze, and gather data from all available sources internally and externally to produce actionable insights.
2. Use this intelligence to proactively address customer issues or predict customer needs before they arise so that you could update your self-serve options, train your agents, or upgrade your product or service.
3. Tweak your KPIs and dashboards based on customer pain points.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will also be critical in the mining process of customer insights by allowing you to predict future behaviors and automatically assigning the right agent for each specific case.

The cloud is your friend

Instead of investing in your own customer provided equipment (CPE), it is probably a better idea to invest in cloud solutions.  This is what high performing centers have already been doing for years.  No sense in investing in your own equipment when you could get a suite of products in the cloud that you could customize to suit your needs and future-proof your contact center.

If your CPE is coming to it’s end of life or if it’s no longer serving its purpose, with all the new technology and functionality available on the cloud, then it’s time to take a serious look at making the move.  There are still many contact centers that are slow to adopt because they are not fully aware of how it could benefit them.

A cloud solution will make your contact center scalable and has allowed business continuity during this pandemic.

Drive towards an omnichannel solution

Your goal should be to drive towards an omnichannel solution that would be seamless to your customers.  You should be providing consistent service to your customers whether it be over desktop, email, chat, instant messaging, social media, mobile, phone or in person. All your systems should be integrated so that they operate as one coordinated system.

Customers not only expect for you to service them in their channel of choice, but they also want quick and efficient responses.  It should not matter what channel they reach you in, the experience should be consistent across the board for them.

This means looking at your:

1. Email response system
   • Intelligently route emails to the agents with the right skill sets when occupancy is low.
   • Make sure email is integrated to your CRM system
2. Telephony
   • Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is a key technology here that must be optimized
3. Strong CRM system that gives you a holistic single view of the customer
   • This is where an omnichannel support solution comes into play
4. Analytics and Insights
5. Chat – agents
   • Live or video chat enables instant support exactly when your customer wants.
6. Web self-serve options
   • Do not do it solely for financial benefits.  It should be a well thought out comprehensive strategy that includes video, FAQs, chatbots, infographics, etc. and that makes it easy for customers to reach an agent if they choose to.
   • Do not make customers repeat information that they have already shared through self-serve.  Your agents should have access to this and their historical information.
   • Use AI chatbots to handle first point of contact with seamless transition to agents if necessary.  They could also service to replace the traditional IVR.  Optimize AI’s capability of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning so that it understands customer statements instead of having them go through the press 1, press 2 jungle.
7. Seamless transition between online and live agent
   • Connect your customers quickly to the right agent while the intent is hot
8. Mobile service
   • You must look at how you can integrate the use of mobile apps into your customer support channel strategy to provide a personalized and efficient customer experience.  This is where you customers want to be and will continue to grow, so you might as well join them there.  This channel’s adoption will even overtake mobile chat, social channels, and the traditional telephony.
9. Co-browsing capabilities
   • Enables agents to diagnose the issue faster and provide quicker resolution
10. Social monitoring and response including engagement in forums
    • AI tools can help your social monitoring strategy through sentiment analysis of customer data (specific words and phrases) along with predictive analysis to route the calls accordingly based on the customer emotion

Be clear on your contact center goals

The goal of your service center should be to:

1. Have a strong customer journey map that focuses on the customer experience in everything you do.  Be willing to tweak and modify any existing customer journeys to meet shifts in customer expectations.  This is the only way you are going to rise above the competition and build loyalty to your brand.
2. Prioritize availability to your customers on their channel of choice to meet their expectations.  Some expect you to always be on.  Use contact center software to provide your agents a complete history of the customer across all channels.
3. Provide a personalized experience through your omnichannel solution
4. Look at ways of providing faster service without impacting the customer experience.  This means addressing the long hold times.  This could be leveraging your AI driven IVR effectively, give the caller the option to call them back instead of having them hold, or optimizing self-serve options.
5. Provide consistency in service and information through in-depth training, coaching, and quality monitoring of your agents
6. Call efficiency (lower AHT) will result if you have empowered agents that have real-time access to customer data and intelligence to resolve issues quickly and proactively.  This will also mean not asking customer to repeat information that they have already input into your IVR.  Nothing more annoying than having to input so much information only to be told by the agent that they did not get that information and must ask you all over again.

To be successful and stay competitive, you must have the right tools, agents with the right competencies and an organization that truly focuses on the customer experience.  This is what will differentiate you from your competition and ensure your long-term financial success. 

Always keep in mind that there is always room for improvement.  Go after smaller goals instead of being paralyzed by trying to make massive changes all at once.

Call centers of the future will be predictive, and data driven.  We are on our way already.  Do not get left behind.