Spring is a time of renewal – and along with that comes the annual ritual of spring cleaning.
When we talk about spring cleaning, what we’re really talking about is the art of tidying and transforming. Why not apply that same mindset to customer experience? Take this opportunity to spruce up your customer experience strategy by looking at whether it’s measuring up to today’s consumer expectations.
As famed organization expert Marie Kondo suggests: the ultimate goal of tidying is to “spark joy every day and lead a joyful life.”
Start by focusing on these six focus areas to take a cue from Marie Kondo and start sparking joy with a digital-first strategy during the entire customer experience from beginning to end:
1. Clear the cobwebs: Scale up efficiency with self-service options
To truly attain joy in the customer experience, proactive engagement should top every business leader’s agenda and prepare for positive results to follow. Studies have found firms with proactive engagement see a boost in happier and more loyal customers—not to mention greater operational efficiency, and revenue growth while decreasing their service costs at the same time.
As reported in Aberdeen’s recent report, Proactive Outreach: Generate Customer Loyalty & Boost Your Finances, 51% of firms have already incorporated proactive outreach, including sending alerts, reminders, post-interaction surveys and more to help customers get their needs addressed.
Proactive engagement users enjoy 3.9x greater YoY improvement in decreasing customer complaints, and 60% greater YoY improvement in decreasing customer effort score (CES), according to Aberdeen.
Firms that are currently using proactive engagement but still not seeing this level of performance should immediately start evaluating their proactive program, especially since AI technology is advancing at a fast pace that’s revolutionizing the proactive landscape.
A complete and contextual view of CX and operational data along with artificial intelligence (AI) can help build and execute intelligent and automated workflows designed to hyper-personalize each proactive engagement.
This can be gauged by the number of contacts a customer needs to make in a relatively short span of time to address an issue as more contacts for a service issue represents poor CX outcomes.
For example, a utility services provider can use proactive outreach to inform customers in a specific area of a recent outage that the company is aware of the problem, and that it’s working to address it. This reduces the need for customers to contact the business and seek resolution, and it can continue to keep the customers updated about when power will resume.
Read more in Proactive Outreach: Generate Customer Loyalty & Boost Your Finances.
2. Give your vision a makeover: Prepare for the consumer of the future (omnichannel)
Like any good makeover, the goal is to emerge even better than before and elicit “oohs and aahs.” Getting that reaction for customer experience requires putting artificial intelligence first and forefront to finesse CXi (customer experience interactions) and meet customers at their preferred digital doorstep.
In ContactBabel’s new Putting AI and Automation to Work in Contact Center Operations, 79% strongly disagreed that AI would be irrelevant to their contact center—marking the highest percentage ContactBabel has recorded. In addition, 65% of survey respondents strongly agree AI will be used to support agents.
People needing service or support typically starts in a digital channel. In fact, NICE found 81% of consumers say they prefer self-service. The challenge they face is sometimes they get unrelated search results, find a site without critical information, or encounter a “basic bot” that fails to answer even simple FAQs.
That’s not only a bad bot – it’s bad business.
Tips on leveraging an omnichannel strategy to get into the right mindset for preparing for the customer of the future are featured in the new ContactBabel report. Learn how to turn the tide on such a disjointed customer journey by maximizing artificial intelligence for a smoother customer experience with the 4 A’s of AI to reduce customer churn, maximize efficiency, and turn customers into lifelong brand advocates.
Analysis
AI tools can improve the accuracy and effectiveness of outcomes without a need for constant human-led input.
Anticipation
AI can predict the best action to take based on past interactions, including an answer from the knowledge base, the correct prioritization and routing of a call, or the prompting of an agent to ask a specific question or make a relevant sales offer.
Augmentation
AI can round up relevant information from numerous sources in real-time to provide enhanced information to human agents or the self-service system, leading to a more likely successful outcome. Look to AI to also update relevant systems and right-size business processes.
Automation
In some cases, there may not even be a need for an agent for a particular interaction. An AI ecosystem may monitor the interaction in real-time, leveraging sentiment analysis to determine if a live agent needs to join to achieve a resolution.
3. Declutter the customer journey: Implement proactive service to stop customer churn
Making the transformation to proactive service requires getting rid of all the clutter that can prevent a customer from wanting to do business with your brand. Clutter is the friction holding back customers from a leap forward in their journey.
About one-third of consumers will walk after one bad experience, according to PwC. Contact centers focusing more on agent-assisted interactions rather than providing a superior self-service experience should understand that they're delivering the experience that consumers want.
Achieving frictionless CX to offer customers their ideal experience requires approaching the customer journey orchestration with predictive intent:
- Use predictive behavioral routing which analyzes past interactions and behaviors to match customers with the right agent every time.
- Chart predefined customer journeys with customer journey analytics and dive deeper into root cause issues with interaction analytics to make data-driven decisions on where to improve the customer experience.
- Determine the touchpoints where customer service tends to stall by analyzing common pitfalls such as dropped calls, bounce rates, and low customer sentiment scores.
- Extend the right answers to customers before they even ask for them by leveraging AI models that use data from search engines to guide customers to the right information.
For example, a major appliance company that shifts its strategy to predictive intent can use analytics to discover that most customer requests are focused on repairing appliances or replacing parts. With this knowledge, they add an option for repair requests to their virtual assistant and chatbot scripts to speed resolution while reducing handle time and costs.
The appliance company learns from detailed analytics (or reading this blog!) that most customers start their journey with a search engine. So, the company increases marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to rise to the top of search results. As they work through their search ratings, a report shows that the company’s appliance repair webpage is experiencing a high bounce rate. This helps them identify the need to revise the webpage content so visitors can more easily find the information they need.
Read the Are you always on? eBook for actionable tips.
4. Put souvenirs in a scrapbook where they belong: Update legacy systems
Holding onto souvenirs from a trip or special event is how many of us remember those experiences. Just make sure they go into a scrapbook where they belong. This should be how an organization thinks of outdated legacy systems when cloud-based tools are available now.
More than half of respondents in ContactBabel’s 2023 Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide felt to some extent that their existing irreplaceable systems were holding them back. As a general rule, legacy applications are expensive to maintain, rewrite or replace—and without the right kind of technology, difficult to integrate with other desktop applications.
A key question is whether contact centers can simply replace the legacy systems with more up-to-date applications while duplicating the functionality? Of those contact centers that use legacy systems, only 32% told ContactBabel that this is too expensive an option.
And if legacy systems are critical yet some businesses do not want to replace them, have they at least been fully integrated with other desktop applications? Two-thirds of respondents to ContactBabel who use legacy systems disagreed or strongly disagreed that their legacy systems were fully integrated with other desktop applications.
The bottom line is there’s a definite market need to have the capability to merge with newer technology to improve performance and reduce the cost of customer contact.
What are some tips to accomplish this? There are opportunities to trim unnecessary elements of the calls—from identity verification through system navigation to post-call wrap-up. Often 40% or more of an agent’s time is spent doing something other than communicating with customers, according to ContactBabel.
Agent desktop optimization to place the right things on the desktop at the right time in the conversation without disrupting the underlying system functionality has gained in popularity, especially in very large contact centers with multiple, complex processes and legacy systems, and this can lead to a greater focus on optimizing associated back-end processes.
Interaction analytics gives businesses a major opportunity to understand why customers are calling, and to gain real commercial insight. With AI-enabled analytics, the opportunity to increase functionality and prioritize and take action against known customer experience improvement opportunities has never been higher.
Open systems and infrastructure now make the implementation of automated identity verification and CTI-like processes far more cost-effective and simpler to deploy. Linking with cloud-based CRM applications, the agent desktop can unify the legacy applications within a single customer view, significantly reducing agents’ post-call wrap-up activities and overall call handling time.
Unified, native infrastructure with flexible API options brings together underlying functionality and automation the agent needs on each specific interaction, presenting them with a single user experience. While they focus on the customer need, the technology does the work to update relevant databases as opposed to forcing agents to have multiple applications open and many manual tasks just to handle one customer interaction. This reduces manual agent errors, and shortens wrap-time by automating relevant back-office processes for a specialist knowledge of legacy system navigation.
In the ContactBabel guide, respondents said call recording, IP infrastructure and touchtone IVR are most likely to be upgraded or replaced in the next year, with a significant number of respondents using workforce management and outbound dialers also looking do so. Many legacy call recording solutions are moving to the cloud, removing the need for on-site storage and maintenance, security management and improving operational flexibility.
Read more insights in ContactBabel’s 2023 Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide.
5. Find ways to bring the outside in: Upgrade tools to capture customer satisfaction
Like opening a window to let in fresh air, upgrading tools to increase customer satisfaction will refresh your CX strategy.
Personalization has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have; customers expect omnichannel personalization to tailor engagements based on their past interactions.
Of course, personalization requires real knowledge of your customer to help anticipate when and why they need service.
In the 14 innovative personalization ideas for the digital-first customer eBook, leading CX experts offer insights on the impact of personalization on experience and loyalty, best practices and fundamentals for contact center leaders and real-life examples of personalized customer experience.
Beyond evaluating interaction data for opportunities to improve the customer experience, companies should regularly survey and seek customer feedback, capturing this information to address and make improvements.
Customer feedback can be extremely effective in personalization, especially when agents take ownership of finding the best solution. Customers will feel heard and seen when their feedback leads to personalized acknowledgement of an inquiry, status of the change, and updates along their customer journey. Likewise, agents will feel more engaged and challenged to provide service excellence when their compensation is directly tied to customer satisfaction measures.
Creating a formalized way to capture agent feedback not only helps agents be part of the solution, but it also captures more immediate insights from interactions.
Closing the feedback loop by training agents on what to look for and how to address it, or by automating improved outbound communication that regularly updates customers on status, for example, results in the kind of personalization and proactivity that improves customer loyalty and lifetime value to the business.
Top ways to use AI include leveraging customer journey analytics to identify negative aspects of the journey and improve your processes and products, as well as identifying topic-oriented trends that are relevant to customers. Integrating the customer relationship management platform with contact center software will automatically provide customer insights—helping agents personalize each interaction.
Technology can also provide contact centers with customer-based satisfaction scoring, which is more informative than traditional feedback surveys because it scores every transaction.
AI sentiment and agent soft-skill behavior scoring helps CX programs by enabling supervisors and agents to see how they can improve behaviors shown to impact customer satisfaction. It also helps voice of the customer (VoC) programs by delivering sentiment scores after every interaction.
Real-time coaching can deliver agent support and behavioral coaching to help improve empathy toward customers, where managers can monitor how agents are doing during interactions and offer support when needed.
For a roadmap of how to train agents to be empathetic, read Be the wow: A guide to creating the most empathetic contact center eBook and discover how AI can be a valuable resource to help agents with situational empathy. Organizations that use technology to revamp CX can increase customer satisfaction by 15% to 20%, reduce the cost of service by 20% to 40%, and boost conversion rates and growth by 20%, according to McKinsey Digital.
6. Whistle while you work: Increase agent engagement, introduce gamification
Keeping agents interested and engaged is closely tied to improved customer satisfaction. But is it easier said than done? Not with the right approach.
Coaching fosters confidence and boosts performance rates. In fact, one study found 70% of variance in agent engagement scores and motivation stems directly from management.
With customer experience a top business priority, it’s vital that contact centers become connectors, friction removers, and places where answers and empathy are within reach. Managers and supervisors should reinforce how agent performance aligns to business goals every step of the way.
In addition, onboarding directly influences agent engagement and retention, which ultimately reduces call center costs, so it’s smart to formalize a proper onboarding process.
Through automated quality management (QM) tools, such as automated call scoring or performance monitoring, it’s easier for supervisors to quickly surface coaching opportunities instead of manually sifting through interactions for a helpful example. Delivering personalized, bite-size training immediately keeps learning on track. Though agents might feel a lot of pressure to reach KPIs, sometimes managerial oversight can feel overwhelming without continued positive reinforcement.
Automated scorecards can be used to measure and monitor quality assurance (QA) and performance metrics for individual agents. Without scorecards to accurately measure performance, contact center managers and agents don’t have a clear picture of agent performance or where they need to improve to advance and align with company goals. It’s also important that agents have online access to scorecards so they can track their progress in real time. They also get a fair picture of their performance, and that feedback prepares them for more complex customer interactions.
Self-evaluation is also a powerful QM coaching tool that leads to delivering consistently great CX. If agents conduct self-assessments, they gain insight or discover new ways to handle customer contacts that lead to faster resolution.
Voice and digital channels have become steadily more crucial in managing customer relationships and generating revenue. McKinsey found these customer touchpoints occurred two to four times more frequently than traditional in-person interactions even before the pandemic hit, and the spread continues to widen.
Digital transformation underscores the need for call center agents to deliver consistent, great CX. Hiring, training, measuring, and retaining the best agents who are experts in communicating in a digital-first marketplace drives customer retention and revenue.
For example, HireRight, the world’s largest provider of pre-employment screening services, was on a mission to improve agent engagement. Its legacy on-premises system with multiple disparate solutions was leading to dismal agent engagement (just 10%). So, how did they go from 10 to 80? HireRight used CXone Performance Management to motivate agents and improve performance using gamification, including contests to allow the agents to improve metrics and receive a reward when they hit specific goals. Adding gamification drives agent engagement. Read the full case study for details.
Find more tips and insights in the Ultimate CX Agent Guide.
