Empowering Contact Centres: Embracing Customer Choice

Introduction

In today's business landscape, contact centres play a crucial role in shaping the overall customer experience. Customers appreciate the personal touch of interacting with experienced agents who tailor their service. However, contact centres face challenges due to the evolving demands of customers who prefer self-service options. It is imperative for organisations to adapt quickly to meet these growing expectations. In many cases, customers resort to making phone calls when their requests cannot be fulfilled through digital channels or automated processes. Starting a customer journey on the wrong foot often leads to frustration. Therefore, organisations need to enhance their customer interactions and empower their front-line and customers to adapt to omni-channel experiences.

Despite the availability of digital channels for customer interactions, numerous organisations continue to face challenges in successfully transforming these interactions. This prompts us to question why such struggles persist. Are organisations overly reliant on chatbots and AI as a panacea? Can customer interactions be improved without undergoing complex core system transformations or making significant CRM investments? Moreover, how can we equip the operational front line with the agility needed to adapt to omni-channel experiences? Lastly, how can contact centres effectively prioritise and enhance the vital experiences delivered through voice??

Challenges

Contact centres operate in highly demanding environments, constantly striving to enhance the customer experience while working with limited resources. Some of the top challenges they encounter include:

• High attrition rates among staff members.
• Large call volumes clogging phone lines for simple customer queries.
• Lack of integration among various tools, leading to increased average handling time (AHT).
• Volatile voice channels resulting in long wait times.
• Insufficient reporting and analytics capabilities to drive improvements.
• Contributing to poor customer satisfaction and metrics.

Technology serves as a critical component in achieving a harmonious blend of personalised voice interactions and convenient digital experiences. However, organisations must be cautious not to unintentionally compromise the customer experience while integrating digital technology into their operations. Failure to ensure seamless integration can result in a disjointed experience across digital and voice channels, leading to customer frustration.

Why aren't customers using other channels more frequently? One common reason is the lack of adoption, which can be attributed to various factors such as poor user experience design, inadequate resolution of queries to their satisfaction, or heightened concerns about security risks and scams. While chatbots powered by AI have been widely hailed as a silver bullet solution in the contact centre market, their adoption has yielded mixed results. Although chatbot technology continues to improve and is a crucial element in the future roadmap of contact centres due to its speed, automation capabilities, and availability 24/7, it is essential to recognise that chatbots, similar to voice channels, should redirect customers to other channels when necessary. This redirection could involve summarising the conversation in a system of record, transitioning to a more secure communication channel, or guiding the customer to a more appropriate interface, such as a smart form, to optimise the overall process experience.

A recent study by Qualtircs as a part of their 2023 Contact Centre Trends, when customers are left unsure if their issue has been resolved, CSAT drops 26%. We cannot afford to leave a customer uncertain through any channel.

It is not uncommon for contact centres to grapple with outdated manual "workaround" tools or solutions as they await the realisation of extensive enterprise transformations. This prolonged wait can be taxing, cumbersome, and detrimental to the customer experience.

Thankfully, modern platforms offer a swift solution for transforming customer interactions. By focusing on the seamless orchestration of customer experiences across all channels and harnessing automation capabilities, these platforms enable organisations to expedite their evolution. The key lies in pinpointing targeted pain points for both the business and customers, and subsequently crafting a clear roadmap for change that delineates the progression towards a desired target state.

In a recent market study titled 'Future of the Contact Centre 2021: A Forecast' conducted by Customer Contact Week Digital, two predominant pain points were identified in contact centres. The study revealed that 51.28% of respondents experienced frustration due to fragmented and disconnected contact centre systems and tools. Additionally, 42.65% of respondents highlighted the need for seamless integration and an omni-channel experience across various communication channels. To address these pain points effectively, technology solutions must prioritise integration, simplicity, and alignment with the contact centre’s operating model.

Solutions

Over the course of several decades, modern cloud-based platforms have undergone remarkable evolution, propelling them from traditional customer channels like voice and print to versatile multi-channel omni experiences.

A customer experience platform of this nature focuses on the following key aspects:

• Simplicity of implementation: The platform leverages modern technology that is straightforward to implement. It allows for rapid deployment, enabling organisations to set up environments in a matter of hours and implement essential business processes within days.
• Personalised and dynamic online forms: The platform offers personalised and dynamic online forms, empowering customers to self-serve. By tailoring the experience to individual needs, it enhances convenience and efficiency.
• Support for diverse digital communication channels: The platform enables seamless communication across various digital channels, including SMS, email, chat, and messenger services. This ensures that customers are informed throughout their journey, promoting a connected and engaging experience.
• Smooth channel transitions: Customers can seamlessly transition between different channels based on their preferences and requirements. For instance, they can initiate an interaction through a web form, receive updates via email, and continue the conversation through a digital chat channel. This flexibility optimises the customer experience and eliminates friction points.
• Centralised process orchestration and automation: The platform facilitates a consistent customer experience by centralising process orchestration and leveraging automation. This streamlined approach ensures that interactions are handled efficiently, leading to improved customer satisfaction and operational effectiveness.

To summarise, a comprehensive customer experience platform simplifies implementation, offers personalised self-service options, supports diverse digital communication channels, enables seamless channel transitions, and fosters consistency through centralised process orchestration and automation.

Below is a diagram that shows the opportunities to use these types of platforms to transform the contact centre process. ?

Customer Experience Platforms (CXM) offers a comprehensive solution for customer experience management in contact centres, delivering remarkable outcomes in terms of customer satisfaction, operational efficiencies, and agility in adapting to ever-changing competitive and regulatory landscapes.

Here are some notable benefits and capabilities of CXM platforms:

• Reduce Average Handling Time (AHT) by up to 70%: The platform streamlines processes and automates repetitive tasks, resulting in significant time savings and faster resolution of customer inquiries.
• Increase Straight-Through Processing (STP) by up to 80%: By leveraging intelligent automation and seamless integration with systems, CXM platforms enables a higher percentage of requests to be processed without manual intervention, leading to improved operational efficiency.
• Ability to drive end-to-end digital campaigns with 2-way interactions in a matter of days or weeks: The platform empowers contact centres to swiftly design, execute, and monitor digital campaigns, engaging customers through interactive and personalised two-way interactions across multiple channels.
• Complement other critical investments such as chatbots for various channel needs: CXM platforms seamlessly integrates with chatbot technologies, augmenting their capabilities and enabling consistent customer experiences across channels.

With CXM platforms, contact centres can harness its full enterprise capability to drive customer satisfaction, enhance operational efficiency, and adapt to dynamic market conditions. The platform's track record includes impressive achievements in reducing AHT, increasing STP, enabling rapid digital campaign execution, and synergising with other essential investments like chatbots to meet diverse channel requirements.

CXM platform capabilities have proven to be highly beneficial for front-line teams and the promotion of customer self-service, yielding tangible advantages across various industries.

CXM platforms bring measurable benefits by accelerating processes, reducing costs, and enhancing the customer experience. By leveraging digital channels and integrating online forms, the platform enables organisations to address complex challenges efficiently and achieve favourable outcomes within shorter time frames, all while maintaining financial prudence.

At its core, CXM platforms are a unified platform that anchors the seamless orchestration of the customer experience. It allows organisations to initiate their transformation journey by starting small, realising tangible returns on investment, and then seamlessly progressing to the next stage outlined in their roadmap. With its user-friendly interface and intuitive features, modern CXM platforms are designed for effortless adoption, ensuring that organisations can swiftly integrate and leverage its capabilities.

So how does CXM platforms address the contact centre pain points listed above:

Pain point: High attrition rates among staff members.

Solution: Address this challenge by implementing self-service options and automating interactions suited for digital channels. This approach allows agents to focus their efforts on high-value experiences and complex customer needs.

Pain point: Large call volumes clogging phone lines for simple customer queries.

Solution: Mitigate this issue by encouraging self-service solutions that empower customers to find answers to their queries independently. By offering robust self-service options, organisations can reduce the volume of calls and alleviate the strain on phone lines.

Pain point: Lack of integration among various tools, leading to increased average handling time (AHT).

Solution: Overcome this challenge by providing an integrated platform that incorporates out-of-the-box omni-channel capabilities. The platform should include comprehensive process orchestration and automation features, facilitating smooth interactions and reducing AHT. Additionally, integrated two-way interactions enable seamless communication and enhance efficiency.

Pain point: Volatile voice channels resulting in long wait times.

Solution: Alleviate this challenge by promoting self-service options and automating interactions suited for digital channels. By empowering customers to find answers and resolve simpler issues through digital self-service, agents can focus on more complex and high-value interactions, thereby reducing wait times.

Pain point: Insufficient reporting and analytics capabilities to drive improvements.

Solution: Address this challenge by leveraging CXM platform capabilities for full traceability, reporting, and analytics. The platform should provide comprehensive insights into all customer interactions, enabling organisations to make data-driven decisions and drive continuous improvements in their customer service operations.

Pain point: Contributing to poor customer satisfaction and metrics.

Solution: Enhance customer satisfaction and overall metrics by offering customers the choice to engage through CXM platforms. Ensure a seamless flow between outbound and inbound channels, allowing customers to transition effortlessly based on their preferences. Robust self-service options should be available, empowering customers to find resolutions independently and improving their overall experience.

Conclusions

Transforming contact centres from legacy systems and traditional operating models to modern and agile setups is possible. It begins with a willingness to embrace change and adopt a platform that can effectively orchestrate the customer experience. Strategic planning and a roadmap focused on transitioning customers to digital self-service are crucial, with a continuous focus on the customer experience. Starting with small, high-volume interactions and validating the benefits before moving on to other customer focus areas ensures a successful transformation. Technology should serve as an enabler for modernising the operating model, centred around delivering exceptional experiences for customers and colleagues.