Scale the Magic of Your Local Neighborhood Café
Close your eyes and picture some of your most memorable experiences as a consumer – the kind of moments that keep you coming back as loyal 'regular'. Chances are that at least one of those involved a local business where you and the merchant can almost reach each other's minds. For me, I'm unflinchingly loyal to my neighborhood café. Every Saturday they personalize my breakfast taco order so that I'm confident that mine will have a spicy kick, yet my oldest daughter will be drama-free with a no-frills quesadilla. If we sit outside at night they start us off with just the right drinks for the weather – and never forget a water bowl for our golden retriever. In short, they've made me a customer for life.
If you are a large enterprise, how do you capture and scale the magic of that local neighborhood experience across thousands of agents in your contact center and earn lifelong customer loyalty? Of course, there is no simple answer, but smart routing between customers and the best agent for any situation is a critically important foundation. By matching your customers to the best agent for any given interaction – and giving them full customer journey context – you're on your way to replicating the magic of local.
Common routing across all channels
Adding non-voice channels to your call center to become 'multichannel' is now table stakes. It lets your customers reach you in their 'channel of choice'. But what happens when they don't choose the best channel for their situation? That's where you need an ACD with true omnichannel, allowing a customer or agent to combine multiple channels at once (e.g. chat and web co-browse) or elevate from one channel to another (e.g. from social to voice). In fact, 4 out of 5 customers want you to guide them to the most effective channel and few enterprises truly deliver this today.
Context of customer and her journey
Providing well-skilled agents with the context to truly personalize each interaction is essential to providing the personalized experience that can rival your neighborhood sandwich shop. Agents need help on two fronts to make this a reality: 1) full customer profile (e.g. from CRM) and history of the customer journey with your brand, including this recent interaction; and 2) have it presented in one simple user interface. It's impossible to have a personalized conversation if the typical agent is toggling between the 5-7 screens on average, according to Aberdeen research.
Clean handoffs between bots and people
Artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots or natural language IVR are an increasingly popular way to provide fast service at a lower price point than an agent call. The challenge is that even the best AI self-service options have containment rates of about 50%. So it is crucial that your contact center software can quickly route that chatbot or IVR conversation to a live agent with full history so that the customer doesn't have to repeat himself.
Chemistry between customer and agent
Some people's personalities just "click" better than others. One of the reasons that you likely keep going back to your favorite café is rapport with the staff or owners. Fortunately, you can also use customer behavioral profiles to match them with the most effective agents, at scale. With our pending acquisition of Mattersight, you'll be able use a customer's communications style as an attribute to route them to the best agent for whatever goal you want to achieve, such as minimizing average handle time (AHT) or maximizing customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Change and scale quickly
Just as your local café can quickly add hot tomato soup as a special if an unexpected cold front blows in, enterprise contact centers often need to adapt to change quickly – and at scale. Make sure that your ACD and IVR infrastructure is agile enough to elastically scale for your peaks and valleys of traffic and you have the flexibility to change routing rules, IVR flows, combine queues across sites (especially in disaster recovery or other volume spike). Teleflora, a leading national florist, realized that they had been missing out on 64% of orders on peak Mother's Day weekend before the moved their contact center to the cloud with CXone.
Replicating personalized service and customer loyalty of your neighborhood favorite at enterprise scale isn't easy. With smart routing from NICE inContact CXone, you and your agents can gain a powerful edge in the fight for customer loyalty.