Empowering the Agent Experience

It was a pleasure to host our good friend Tony Lama, Worldwide VP of Contact center sales @ Twilio. He joined me as part of our 5 tips in 10 mins coffee break series on Smarter Contact Centers. Below is a summary of advice from Tony. Recording replay here

1. Don't lock your customer into self-service

Instead of focusing on customer experience and what would get callers to their desired outcome faster, companies have traditionally built labriynths of IVRs around process and agent queues. Nothing worse for an agent than getting a call from a frustrated customer who was desperately fighting the system to get to an agent. There has to be an easy path to resolution (regardless of AI or human) instead of endless IVRs. It's ok to acknowledge that the AI and the human agent will work as a team to resolve the issue for the customer, and their partnership has to prioritize fastest path to outcomes. 

IBM Services has been helping clients build hyper personalized voice virtual agents that are aware of the context and can understand the customer's concern in natural language instead of rigid complex IVRs. We make AI smarter to look for any signs of aberration, and proactively transfer to an agent to get them to the desired outcomes faster.

2. Context and Continuity

Moving way beyond traditional screen pops to much richer information at the agent's fingertips on why that customer may be calling is incredibly important. In addition to reducing Average Handle Time (AHT), increasing First Call Resolution (FCR), it also creates a deeper rapport between agent and the customer. eg. Lyft went from a legacy environment of 11 different siloed applications on agent’s desktop into 1 single pane of glass to more effectively serve both riders and drivers. Continuity is particularly important in regulated industries where the voice virtual agent typically gathers critical information upfront and from enterprise systems that should be seamlessly plugged into the agent's desktop to make the handoff very smooth.

3. Automate the Agent Experience

While the agent is serving the customer, there are so many opportunities to optimize the experience with AI and Automation with products like Watson Discovery and custom ML models. It doesn’t have to be an all or none. The agent workflow could be a 10 step process, and we may have APIs to gather information for steps 3 and 4, or automation scripts for steps 7 and 8 that can be orchestrated to help reduce the overall agent effort. For our clients, AI has proven to be a very effective co-pilot to augment the agent workflows.

4. Importance of inspecting and iterating

Transformation of customer care is a crawl, walk, run process. It requires building into the culture that customer care is a dynamic problem and requires regular inspection and iteration. Twilio Flex allows brands to build tailored experiences for customers, agents and supervisors. With Flex as a platform, brands are leveraging assets from IBM, to continuously enrich the Customer and Agent experience. Delivering exceptional care requires a shift of culture and mindset from a user and consumer of technology to one of a builder. This could be a dramatic shift for call centers that are used to buying expensive legacy software from legacy vendors. With versatile tools like Twilio Flex combined with IBM’s AI & Automation assets, agents can now collaborate with developers in real-time to define and rapidly prototype where AI can be most effective for them. Brands like CenturyLink, Bradesco and Natwest (RBS) have been enriching their agent experience with IBM Watson and constantly iterating and improving it.

5. Work from anywhere

As we know, the pandemic has accelerated the shift to work from home for call center agents. But it's increasingly more than just work from home - it's work from anywhere and the ability for any employee to deliver customer care. Twilio and IBM are uniquely positioned to allow brands to view customer care as a responsibility for the entirety of the organization, not just call center. We are on a mission to empower every employee; be it at a retail store, back office, or a technician on a truck roll or support call; to be able to collaborate on delivering an exceptional experience. Together we can fully leverage a diverse mobile workforce to address the needs of the customer of tomorrow.

View the 4-part Series, 5 in 10: 5 Tips to Improve Your Contact Center in 10 minutes at the recording links below:

1. Contact Center Landscape with ICMI [replay]
2. Empowering Agents with Twilio [replay]
3. Customer Experience First with Salesforce Service Cloud [replay]
4. Unlocking AI with Salesforce Einstein [replay]

Read more about IBM's Smart Contact Center here and Twilio's Flex platform here.