Is Your Contact Center Technology Failing Your Customer Experience Needs?

The two key customer experience challenges that plague organizations today include:

• Protracted hold times when customers try to reach you
• Very little integration between digital channels and conventional voice communication

Added to this, you have high staff attrition that puts a spoke on every strategy that you come up with to enhance customer experience.

In my mind, both of these are technology-related challenges that have to be addressed proactively.

How Do You Go About Doing This?

Customer service can become very expensive, especially when there are people involved in providing them. Besides, it can lead to frustration when the queries are not resolved on time.

When you look at it, about 80% of the queries that customers ask are transactional, which can be easily handled by self-service channels. This would free up your agents’ time to handle more complex queries, which helps in reducing hold times.

Is There a Way to Get Your Self-Service Capabilities Right?

Here is a five-step process that you can follow to get your self-service right.

Step1

Begin with FAQs that cover all the foundational questions like who, what, where, why, when, and how of the customer journey.

Update the FAQ section regularly.

Step 2

Create a knowledge base that covers support documentation, user manuals, how-to videos, and support articles.

Link the knowledge base with your product page and support page, which would make it easy for customers to source.

Step 3

Create an online community where your customer segments can interact with each other. This can be in Quora style, where customers can post their queries, and other customers can provide possible answers to them.

This will build a database that can find its way into your FAQs and knowledge base sections regularly.

Step 4

Implement an AI-driven chatbot.

It would get all the transactional queries right most of the time, and it would direct complex queries to the most appropriate FAQ, knowledge base, or community portal query.

Besides, your chatbot should be capable of qualifying a query and seeing if it is something that the bot itself can serve or if it should divert it to a human agent. Provide an option for the customer to seamlessly switch to talking to an agent while conversing with the bot.

Step 5

Measure the effectiveness of each of these channels by using customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, customer effort scores (CES), and resolution rates.

You can also ask open-ended questions as a follow-up to your CSAT, CES, and resolution rate measurements.

These five steps would help you address 80 to 85% of the queries, freeing up the agent’s time to handle complex queries. This would considerably help address the first challenge of protracted hold times.

Now, let us look at the second stated challenge.

How Do You Ensure Integration Between Your Digital Channels and Voice Communication?

Let us look at the different channels that organizations use to help their customers reach them.

It includes voice, email, chat, SMS, chatbot, website, mobile, and social. Except perhaps voice, everything else is a digital channel.

We have to ensure that all of these channels you offer are integrated.

Let us look at how you can ensure integrations between all of your channels.

You are looking at an omnichannel strategy where all your channels are integrated as a part of the contact center platform, and in turn, they are integrated with CRM, helpdesk, ERP, and other best-of-breed IT systems.

Here is a six-step process to get the integration right:

Step 1

Understand your customer segment and their demography. This would give you an idea of what channels they prefer to communicate with you.

Ensure that you are present in all those channels to service them.

Step 2

Create a detailed customer journey. This would allow you to visualize customer’s various touchpoints and interactions with your brand.

Identify moments of engagement, decision-making, and potential drop-offs. This will help you strategically understand the friction points and position your experience differently at each stage of the customer’s journey.

Step 3

With an understanding of your customers and their journey, you would know what channels to choose and serve.

You should choose the channels wisely. You have to allocate resources to manage these channels, define SLAs for each channel, and comply with them.

Step 4

Ensure that you have tight integrations with your existing CRM, helpdesk software, and other best-of-breed IT systems.

This would help you provide a single view of your customers to your agents, irrespective of the channels they are servicing.

With this, the agents are empowered to resolve customer queries easily as they have access to all the customer interactions.

Step 5

Ensure cross-channel coordination.

When your customers are browsing your website, would they be able to talk to tech support or a customer support agent using the click2call feature on your website?

When interacting with a chatbot, would your customer be able to choose to interact with a human agent seamlessly?

Would your customers be able to add items to the shopping cart and access them at your physical stores?

Step 6

Monitor and measure the effectiveness of the omnichannel strategy. You should measure conversion rates, engagement metrics, and customer satisfaction scores.

This would help you see if friction points continue to exist, and you can address them actively.

Implementing an omnichannel strategy by integrating all of the channels and interfaces allows your agents to have a single view of your customers. They don’t have to juggle between multiple screens and scamper around for information to provide your customers. This helps improve your agent engagement considerably, thereby reducing attrition to a large extent.

Besides, implementing self-service channels and adopting AI has become a necessity for contact centers to ensure that human agents are available to address complex queries. This would mean that customers don’t have to worry about protracted hold times, and at the same time, the agents won’t feel overwhelmed with transactional queries, reducing the attrition rate.

Addressing the challenges of protracted hold times and integrating digital channels with voice indirectly helps address the agent attrition rates in contact centers.

Technology plays a key role in ensuring exceptional customer experiences. So, choose them wisely.