Let’s talk about friction. The truth is
friction can be a positive force for many things. It generates heat, helps us slow down when needed and ensures we “stay on track”—quite literally.
When it comes to the overall customer experience, however, friction is the ultimate hindrance to a smooth customer journey.
Customers share a common goal with the companies they choose to work with: a desire for a quick resolution of their issues or fulfillment of their needs. With each journey being unique, there really is no cookie cutter approach for resolution. Unfortunately, friction is the all-too-common ground across all types of customer journeys; it creates a challenge for businesses.
These stalling points – let’s call them
hotspots – are the points in the customer journey where customers experience a delay in getting a response to their questions or completing a desired action or goal, which leads to confusion and frustration. Identifying and addressing these hotspots is critical to improving the customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction.
The good news for organizations is: they can get to the heart of the issue by gaining the necessary insight, applying practical tips, and proactively using knowledge to remedy those “hotspots” in their environment.
What are the top 5 CX hotspots
Where are the primary hotspots that impede the experience? The truth is they’re often hiding in plain sight.
The most important first step an organization can do is identify those problem areas. Taking stock of the
hotspots in the customer journey is critical to improving the customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction. Here are the top five hotspots to exceptional CX:
Next steps to leverage digital-first CX
Now that you’ve identified how the customer journey is getting waylaid, start by using these digital tools to ultimately remove hotspots:
Be proactive
Once you’ve identified potential points of friction, make sure you tee up a proactive remedy. Start by transforming your website into a proactive portal. Get ahead of consumer needs. For example, if a customer looks to an insurance company website with a question about which policy covers what, consider whether setting up proactive notifications that will provide background and information just when the consumer needs it might benefit both can receive push explanations with more information to help them make the right choice.
I recently replaced an older printer. Getting the new one set up was a breeze (15 minutes on a Sunday night), and the experience made me accept a potential upsell to automate ordering ink, where the printer would send a notification when ink levels were running low. That’s convenience I would even be willing to pay more for. See how reaching out proactively benefits your consumers and your business?
Reporting and dashboards
Maximizing the data you have available will help clear the path of friction. Many consumers just choose to give up, remain silent or – worst case – pay the competition a visit, up after not getting the information they want, but those who do provide feedback help identify friction points. Leveraging
reporting and dashboards using surveys, feedback forms and more moves you closer to detecting the areas with high abandon rates, frequent requeues and repeat contacts.
Be mindful that frequent channel changes can cross channels, such as when a customer sends an email, then calls and then starts a chat can be an indicator that something is not going as it should. Investigate why there was no first contact resolution (FCR), monitor drop-out rates for self-service and listen to and analyze the
voice of the customer (VoC). That’s why it’s critical to have a good tech infrastructure.
AI-powered analytics
Using
AI-powered analytics can help identify friction. All interactions are reviewed and AI recognizes common threads in the interactions. Provide the best experience for every customer by understanding who they are, what they need and how to prepare your agents to deliver exceptional CX.
For example,
a company that wanted to augment the customer experience by adding self-service options was able to reduce queue times by 10 seconds, decrease handle time and recoup its initial investment just one week after implementing the new self-service options with AI technology. A
local government council in New Zealand found success using NiCE CXone’s omnichannel capabilities so agents could switch between channels, which increased their efficiency and improved customer satisfaction by 24%.
Support your agents
Getting agents’ perspectives helps you to better understand consumer needs with an extra layer of invaluable insights and data. At the same time, supporting your agents using perspectives offers an added layer of real-time data.
Real-time interaction guidance provides agents with immediate feedback all the time. It would be cost prohibitive to hire enough supervisors to help and coach agents continuously. But automating support with integrated, easy-to-understand prompts and offers specific recommendations to steer the conversation while it’s happening to stay on track might be worthwhile to consider. Being an agent can be a tough job, so having your own “personal digital supervisor” reduces the burden on your “in-person” supervisors while still helping agents provide better CX—especially for hard-to-train soft skills.
Agent Assist Hub might be another option to think about: there is AI-powered ways to automate providing agents with knowledge, tips and tricks that they can use to help customers in real-time.
Proactive knowledge management will be especially valuable for agents that are still learning, but even your most experienced experts can likely use a helping hand every now and then.
Interaction data
Using
smarter self-service enables you to analyze historical conversational data from voice and digital interactions to identify and extract the best conversations based on those with optimal outcomes, such as the highest customer satisfaction, lowest average handle times and most first contact resolution. Applying actual interaction data to determine why so many self-service interactions fail and identify the most promising interactions for self-service resolutions optimizes experiences by replacing the guesswork with a data-driven, empirical approach to self-service applications.
Get tips from contact center leaders to wow your customers
Take the next steps now to get your organization up to speed with digital CX tools by learning the latest strategies to be the delight and wow in your customers’ lives.
Read our
Are you always on? eBook for tips from contact center leaders about:
- Charting predefined customer journeys and use metrics to anticipate needs and proactively guide them to answers
- Meeting customers at the beginning of their search queries at any digital entry point
- Leveraging AI to enhance self-service channels and allow for customer-driven, fully contained interactions
- Using data, metrics, and technology to fuel solution tactics for future interactions
