The Perfect Couple - Digital and the Contact Center

The last 9 months have been a huge journey across every business and the pandemic has both accelerated and forced an extremely agile approach to do business. In many cases processes have been built that didn’t even exist before and this has brought about the convergence of the new channel with the old channel, digital, and contact center.

There have been some amazing stories that have emerged from these two channels working together and those stories ranged from how the contact center has helped quickly identify broken processes in e-commerce self-service, to how harnessing the voice of the customer in the contact center is continuing to shape how in-person business can safely and with customer confidence, resume. 

The output of both of these stories has been a win-win for the customer and business.

This year the customer has been forced through the needle of an online world, as it was at one point the only channel to buy from. This is true of the retail sector for example when her preferred choice of retail stores will have been closed, but in so many cases I have seen the emergence of a whole new brand of contact center with agents both supporting customers through self serve and also actively selling products, upsells and cross-sells over the phone.  Indeed, I have seen retailers that have rapidly re-engineered their agents to be able to shift between support to sales mid-conversation and we are seeing huge gains. We have always talked about serving our customers wherever they are but this has never been more critical.

Retail has seen some great examples of rapid customer-driven innovation coming from the contact center from customers requesting refinements for more COVID measures for curbside pickup, to greater flexibility with the length of time offered for returning items and more availability for home delivery and the story continues to evolve to drive retailers into thinking seriously about using the contact center as a serious sales channel, not just there to pick up when things don’t go quite right.

For many other channels, digital has moved from being just a channel to being your entire brand, and businesses quickly realized that digitization was just phase one of the digital journey and that to move forward and improve your brand, organizations need to unlock, blend, and share insights and learnings captured within the call center so they are leveraged across the enterprise. The digital refinement and ability to grow was dependent on gathering rapid insights from the contact center to unlock a variety of issues from broken processes, customer self-service expectations, and customer hand-holding to navigate digital service.

For digital, the contact center has been a treasure trove of data where we find rapid signals as to the root cause of digital deflection. Contact center agents have been upskilled to both handle this channel failure and also in many cases, they are equipped to walk through digital training to aid a customer in serving themselves and are a primary source of digital customer innovation as customers call and say “I just tried to do this on your website but couldn’t”. 

The real power in the “digi-con” experience of course is in the data to enable you to understand very quickly any pain points and not just fix them but understand the customer impact to help make longer-term roadmap decisions. Impact analysis underpins all good change management programs and now with AI-driven speech and text analytics, we can fully understand the size of an issue which will determine operational improvement priorities.

In digital we can see in real-time what a customer is doing and with surveys and chat sessions we can get an understanding of some level of frustration and can offer suggestions for additional support or redirect to other sources and this often means a call to the contact center for human intervention. It is at this point that the journeys can be brought together and the true sentiment and satisfaction are understood. 

When I look at the scale of this impact of bringing digital and contact center together it has shown some remarkable results such as notifying a telco that the new online bill is not making sense to customers and driving a 15% increase in calls to the contact center driving up customer effort and a considerable cost of call handling. Something like this is a one hour piece of work to fix a million-dollar problem if it isn’t identified quickly. Or simply learning that a poor flight booking navigation on a website was driving down conversions and customers were churning to competitors. Indeed, the majority of customer irritants are quick fixes but without bringing these channels together, a business may take months to even understand these pains.

The power of unifying cross channel data and driving AI analysis through multiple channels and customer journeys is now in the hands of the analysts. Your customers want you to know them and finally, you can show them that you do.

RACHEL LANE Contact me directly to learn more about how to bring your digital and contact center data together to create a meaningful journey analysis.