Your contact centre is a major customer touchpoint and must deliver a seamless customer experience (CX) – consistently. Great CX is key to improving customer acquisition and retention with 86% of consumers willing to pay more for better customer experience. According to Salesforce, 84% of customers feel that experiences are as important as the actual products and services.
But with customer service now the top marketing differentiator, teams are required to deliver outstanding service, and quickly. But doing so raises an age-old question: should your agents take time to deliver gold-star service to each customer. Or should agents do what they can to cut down call times and avoid keeping people waiting in a queue?
While the latter strategy will improve AHT and reduce queue times, how will it affect customer satisfaction and loyalty? No customer wants to feel that they’re an interruption who needs to be dealt with as fast as possible.
But what if it was possible to find the right balance in delivering both exceptional CX and efficiency? Thanks to automation, it is. The solution is to implement automation that will give customers the option to choose the type of help they want and reduce the time your team spends performing administrative tasks.
The idea is to find the balance in serving some people faster, thereby freeing up agents to spend more time with customers who have complex issues or need more help. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Here are a few uses of automation that can improve the customer experience and that of your agents.
Direct customers to self-help areas
The goal for many organisations is for the customer journey to start and finish on the website. However, customers will often contact an organisation through other channels – webchat, email, voice and sometimes at the same time – because they can’t easily find answers on the website.
While chatbots can’t completely take over human interactions, they work well for first-level support and answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), so agents can focus on resolving complex issues. A chatbot can act as a virtual assistant and direct customers to the correct section of the website or relevant resource. If the assistant is unable to answer a request, they can then route the customer to a live agent with the full context of what the customer was interested in.
By choosing to implement an AI-powered chatbot, over time, it will become quite useful at handling an array of questions and processes. Chatbots powered with AI can be used for a wide range of applications. The more a bot is used, the more it learns, which makes it ideal for things like password resets, redirects to correct forms, and providing answers to common queries.
Consolidate systems in the cloud
A major challenge for contact centres is integrating the various applications and tools they’ve added to their processes over the years. Often, each technology acts independently, and agents must be able to seamlessly navigate multiple platforms and communication channels – in real-time – across the customer journey. Cloud-based solutions can help to solve this problem by integrating resources and simplifying operations.
The healthcare industry has already greatly benefited from cloud-based systems. Before cloud-based solutions, healthcare professionals relied on numerous systems and databases that didn’t effectively link up – this resulted in delays for patients and, in some cases, loss of data during transfer. Cloud services have made it possible to effectively integrate these systems and improve overall performance.
Live monitoring to help agents deliver better service
Speech analytics in the contact centre is certainly not a new concept, but with only 23% of organisations using this technology, its vast potential is yet to be fully utilised. With real-time speech analytics (RTSA) solution, you can monitor customers and call centre agents alike to help agents to deliver a better service experience whilst they’re on a call.
In a clever use of AI, RTSA technology listens and analyses what’s being said and how, stress levels, speech clarity and script adherence. It can also provide live feedback to advisors, team leaders and quality assurance teams. Within seconds, a tailored next-best-action guidance message can appear on the agent’s desktop. RTSA also has the capability to search for and provide an agent with missing information to give to the customer during the call.
Smart data management to reduce validation time
One of the top customer frustrations when calling into a contact centre is when they have to repeat personal details over and over again to gain access to their details. There are two solutions that can substantially reduce the time this validation process takes. Both are excellent time savers for customers and team members alike, as well as eliminating customer frustration.
The first is to have customers complete their authentication details on their mobile phone using the PCP automated mobility feature, while they’re waiting in the call queue. The second is to use robotic process automation (RPA) to enable agents to enter all necessary data into all fields, across all associated systems with a single entry. RPA has a near-zero per cent error rate, greatly reduces handle times and brings consistency to the customer experience.
Embrace automation and reap the benefits
CX automation should be viewed as a significant enhancement in the customer contact areas of all organisations, not as a threat. It’s a valuable way to support the highly skilled role of the customer service team. When designed and integrated correctly, it assists agents to work smarter, not harder.
Want to learn more about the latest CX trends? Speak with us today and discover how GSN is helping organisations to digitally transform and make every connection count.