Contact Centers

Customer service is more important than ever in this uncertain market. And businesses are under immense pressure to meet rapidly shifting consumer expectations and foster customer loyalty.

A customer-centric business strategy, focusing on the customer experience (CX), can be a differentiator. And digital transformation is a vital part of the equation.

Central to this strategy is enabling the personal connection with customers. When customers contact companies, it is usually because they couldn’t find what they wanted online. Or they have challenging and/or emotionally fraught issues (like a credit card transaction denial) they want to speak to an agent about.

It makes sense that CX continues to be heavily tied to emotion, with even minor improvements to a company’s customer experience quality making a difference. According to Forrester, 54% of customers who report feeling valued and appreciated were willing to forgive brands when they make mistakes.

A company’s first line of defense in protecting CX is its customer service contact center. But furnishing that emotional connection between customers and agents is becoming challenging in this light labor market with the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting,” retirements, or workers’ opportunities in other fields.

The Future is IA

Improvement on the CX front is critical for businesses to remain viable long-term, with digital solutions that offer personalized and seamless customer interactions.

While most organizations seem to recognize the importance of digitalized CX, with, according to McKinsey 77% reporting they have established digital platforms, only 10% also say those platforms are fully scaled and adopted by customers.

Developing a solid automation transformation strategy can seem like a daunting task. Companies’ growing awareness of the need to digitalize amid insufficient human resources is driving no-code adoption rates.

Software bots known as digital workers assist agents and are managed via an intelligent automation (IA) platform. IA is the combination of artificial intelligence (AI), business process management, robotic process automation (RPA), and other complementary technologies. It allows organizations to optimize workflows and streamline processes.

Intelligent automation, especially the AI component, enables an unprecedentedly proactive and tailored CX experience. It’s something that today’s savvy consumers have come to expect, giving companies that embrace it a competitive advantage.

How IA Optimizes the CX

As businesses seek a solution that seamlessly connects human employees and digital workers, a comprehensive and flexible IA platform is key. It enables companies to reengineer processes quickly and accurately. The solution should also enable scaling across the enterprise for maximum business value.

The result can be impressive. Certain IA-powered solutions can help organizations deal with the overflow of consumer issues by reducing call times by up to 75%, reports our datasheet.

The bottom line is that digital workers free human customer service agents from mundane tasks, giving them more quality time to spend on critical, difficult, and emotionally-charged customer issues. This is key to providing an excellent CX that builds customer loyalty.

How does an IA platform help reduce resolution times and enable collaboration between digital workers and human agents?

Customer service agents are given a 360-degree view of every customer they interact with, as digital workers source information from across systems and databases, then provide it to the agents in a single, easy-to-use, consolidated interface. Agents can rapidly resolve issues with all the required information at their fingertips.

Digital workers deal with simple customer requests, which enables service agents to give customers with more complicated enquiries the time they need and deserve.

Such service is critical for customer retention and only made possible by scaled automation. A backlog of customer tickets are dealt with thanks to faster resolution times and digital workers’ end-to-end resolution of simple cases, not to mention the ability to operate at full capacity 24/7.

You can turn any email into a workflow with communications mining automation. By combining AI and natural language processing, you can extract valuable information from emails, calls, notes, chats, tickets, and so on, to better understand your customers’ needs and your internal processes.

When companies automate decision-making insights, it helps accelerate time-to-value and eliminate wasted opportunities.

CX Automation in Action

Digital solutions that increase productivity have a positive impact on the CX.

For example, one of our clients, power company DTE, unlocked new efficiencies by automating the ability to cross-check errors in bills. Now bills requiring human review have been cut in half, and a further 35 processes across customer service, finance, HR, and corporate have been automated, saving DTE 250,000 hours per year.

Another client, the financial management firm Invesco, gained back three million minutes by automating many front-office and back-office tasks. Digital workers also help complete 10,000 daily transaction reports for client services per month, thereby greatly reducing the time needed to complete a report. This frees up resources to focus on value-added client work.

Beyond the Contact Center

More time for your employees means more time for your customers. By implementing business process automation to assist with logistics management, businesses realize cost and time savings to give organizations more time to service customers.

Organizations should combine RPA with AI for data management. Digital workers consolidate data and provide reliable analytics to empower human workers to make value-adding decisions and drive innovation to better the CX.

With this, workers no longer have to manually comb through reams of information. For instance, a mortgage provider could use business process automation to improve operational efficiencies, leading to customers being serviced faster.

Anyone who has applied for a mortgage knows it’s a longwinded and painstaking process, requiring endless paperwork. Traditionally, workers processing applications must collate and manage the paperwork, ensuring the correct information is delivered to the right party.

With digital workers, much of this can be automated. Digital workers can automate checks, offer searches, generate paperwork, and distribute the appropriate version to the correct party.

Automation also fills in or highlights any missing gaps. Collaborating with a digital workforce enables providers to process more applications than humanly possible while also giving hours back to employees. Human workers can then use this time to address more complicated case matters beyond the capabilities of digital workers.

Getting on the Right Side of the Competitive Gap

The CX is the fastest-growing priority area for customer care leaders and today’s challenges are unlikely to be solved, says McKinsey, at scale without AI and data analytics.

End-customers have more options than ever before, and a company’s degree of digitalization is one of the leading factors when it comes to customer loyalty. With advanced technologies like AI, machine learning tools, and RPA on an IA platform, businesses can deliver consumers a fast yet thorough and tailored experience.

The benefits of digital CX for enterprises are multifold: they attract and retain more customers, enhance worker satisfaction rates and cope with staff shortages, along with boosting ROI and operational efficiency. No-code solutions enable businesses to drive digital transformation despite the tech skills shortage.

Business models across industries are changing to accommodate rapidly changing consumer behavior. Those companies that fail to adapt risk being pushed out. But those that do transform will stand the best chances of success.

The opening months of 2023 were gloomy with a tightening job market and a slowdown in business activity fueling fears of a recession.

Organizations across nearly every industry have been focused on increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction, reducing costs, and maximizing value.

Meanwhile, senior management are facing increased pressure by ever-more-demanding shareholders to generate more growth and increase shareholder value, to meet but better yet exceed Wall Street expectations.

This economic and business environment presents many challenges, but it also gives contact centers a tremendous opportunity to showcase their value.

The biggest factor in customers’ minds when it comes to contact center satisfaction…was agent empathy.

The Qualtrics XM Institute surveyed more than 33,000 consumers in 29 countries around the world to find out what contact center leaders need to do to win. Let’s take a look at the data and four key contact center trends that will shape their operations and business.

1. Empathy overtakes speed and efficiency as the top customer satisfaction driver.

Not surprisingly, satisfied customers spend more. Driving customer satisfaction has always been a core tenant of any contact center but organizations will be doubly focused on improving those CSAT scores in 2023.

The biggest factor in customers’ minds when it comes to contact center satisfaction wasn’t short wait times or efficient service, as you might expect. It was agent empathy. Agent empathy has almost twice the impact on satisfaction versus wait times.

While “empathy” has become the corporate buzzword flavor du jour, the research shows building that human connection has a massive impact in the contact center. But a large swath of customers (42%) aren’t happy with the empathy currently shown by agents.

That’s an unacceptably high percentage with major financial implications. Research from Qualtrics finds that globally, organizations risk 6.7% of their revenue or $3.1 trillion, when they lose customers due to poor experiences like bad customer service.

Any contact center that is not supplementing its core operational data like AHT with metrics that measure how empathetic its customer service interactions are is making a big mistake.

Companies will need to invest in omnichannel text and speech analytics that can capture customer sentiment, effort, emotion, and intent. They also need to provide agents with real-time guidance and reminders to show empathy during customer interactions.

2. Agent wellbeing takes center stage.

You cannot talk about building empathetic relationships without taking into account the experience of the people responsible for the organization’s customer service.

Agents take the brunt of customer dissatisfaction when things aren’t going well. 60% of agents said customers became ruder and more aggressive during the COVID-19 pandemic. And one in five (20%) think about quitting every week, according to Qualtrics research.

On top of that, nearly half (46%) of contact center agents do not believe their leadership invests in their team or function. Over a quarter (27%) do not think they are provided with the tools or training needed to be successful.

Contact center agents are human too. Measuring them only in terms of operational efficiency is likely to damage morale and push even more agents toward quitting.

Qualtrics research found that 33% of customer service agents felt their performance was not fairly evaluated. And only 41% said they were incentivized to offer personalized, empathetic experiences to customers: two key drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Many contact center teams weren’t even provided the flexibility to work from home during the height of the pandemic. Just over half (55%) of contact center agents reporting they were afforded that ability: much lower than the percentage (76%) reported by contact center managers.

The number of center agents forced to work mostly or full-time in the office is likely to increase in 2023. However, Qualtrics research shows only 13% of office workers want to return to the office full-time.

Contact center leaders will need to address these gaps and invest in measuring their own agents’ wellbeing. They need to place an emphasis on providing service agents with the tools and incentives to implant empathy at the heart of every customer interaction.

3. Contact centers rely more heavily on unstructured feedback.

When 63% of customers say companies need to do a better job of listening to their feedback, it’s a clear sign there is a gap in the status quo.

The days of relying on a CSAT survey are over. Contact centers need to do a better job collecting and acting on different kinds of unstructured feedback generated from the myriad of customer calls, chats, posts, and texts to truly understand what’s happening in their business.

In fact, 80% of customer data is projected to be unstructured by 2025, reports VentureBeat. Yet most companies harvest only a tiny bit of insight from these critical interactions.

Going forward, contact centers will put a big emphasis on bringing all their data streams together. They will be using conversational analytics that helps agents surface customer sentiment and intent hidden in speech, chat, email, and other interactions with customers: and do this on a large scale.

In a down economy, customers will be even more discerning about how they spend their money. And the companies that demonstrate an ability to listen to and act on their feedback will win their loyalty.

4. Centers find the right balance between in-person and digital service experiences.

Today it’s a given that customers want to be able to interact with brands on a myriad of different channels and most people today prefer to interact with brands over digital channels.

However, there are still many cases where customers want to deal with a living, breathing human. The data surfaces a number of clear examples:

Designing a seamless omnichannel experience is fairly complex. Organizations need to maintain a consistent brand voice and experience across all their engagement channels while providing distinct, optimized journeys suited to the format of each channel.

Each channel you add creates new opportunities for bugs or flaws to crop up in a business’s operations, from shipping or returns to marketing and branding. The same can be said for omnichannel customer service.

Contact center teams will need to tap into preference data to further outline which interactions are more appropriately handled by a live agent versus a chatbot or self-service channel.

Defaulting to digital will not work. Leading organizations will design the service experience with each unique business use case or service challenge in mind.

Advances in natural language processing enable new contact center solutions that are savvy enough to quickly diagnose customer intent and channel preference. This allows contact center teams to make swift, meaningful changes to their customer service journeys.

For example, these solutions provide the intelligence necessary to help a chatbot determine when a live conversation with a real service representative is needed to solve a truly complex customer issue. While also summarizing the key points about the customer’s problem to the agent in real-time so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves.

Ultimately, contact center success will be centered around an organization’s ability to design and improve experiences that meet – or exceed – customer expectations.

Customers are telling businesses what to do, but organizations will need to uncover these answers in their unstructured data.

Contact center and customer experience teams need to collect as much data on their customers’ journeys across all their channels. With it they can analyze and outline the types of interactions that are essential to customers’ success at key moments, how customers feel about their experiences, and how their behaviors change as a result. And the impact on business results.

Finally, contact centers need to incentivize and prioritize empathy across all customer service interactions: they shouldn’t forget that agents need support to provide the kind of service that will win loyal customers. To accomplish this centers should invest in intelligent technology that automatically demystifies customer intent, identifies solutions, and automates the next-best-actions.

With the right approach and technologies the contact center is uniquely positioned to become a core driver for both customer loyalty and business growth during an uncertain time.

A few years ago, only 15% of customer interactions relied on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled chatbots, automated emails, and virtual agents, reported Gartner. In 2022, that number rose to more than 70%.

Customer preferences and tools that can effectively execute the promise of voice-of-the-customer (VoC) strategies have contributed to the exponential spike.

For background, VoC is the cumulative feedback a brand receives from customers at different touchpoints in their journeys. These touchpoints span various channels and interaction modes to accurately illustrate customer expectations, needs, preferences, and demographic.

VoC also includes customers’ thoughts on product improvements. Through grasping a solid understanding of them, organizations can more easily spot emerging trends and implement necessary upgrades.

How Businesses Capture VoC Data

Surveys and webforms are common ways that businesses gain feedback from customers. However, with modern tools such as AI-enabled virtual contact center agents, companies can secure VoC data in natural, voice-and text-based conversations.

One example is online chat tools. A live chatbot on your website is a great way to collect real-time customer feedback. It also reduces the possibility of customers feeling unsatisfied with the service and offers them real-time support.

These chat services offer text analytics and sentiment analysis to help businesses track and review interactions to understand VoC better. These tools work together to help companies find actionable meaning.

However, these AI-enabled tools are only effective in delivering VoC strategies if they’re well designed.

For when poorly designed, these tools can miss the mark. They can annoy customers and employees, prove unproductive, and ultimately be ticking time bombs if they’re not enabling brands to proactively respond to changing customer preferences.

Defining Conversational Design

Businesses can ensure their AI-using tools effectively capture VoC data through Conversational Design.

Conversational Design examines human conversations and works to ensure that these communication tools are intuitive and match customer personas.

Conversational Design aims to make AI-enabled interactions with digital systems feel more natural. It can greatly improve Conversational AI, a form of intelligence that facilitates real-time, human-like communication between a person and a computer (e.g., a customer and a virtual contact center agent).

A live chatbot…is a great way to collect real-time customer feedback…and offers them real-time support.

Conversational AI can “learn” human nuance, but it needs to be programmed to effectively respond in a way that resonates with customers. Because of this, strong Conversational Design is vital to successful VoC strategies and to broader customer experience (CX) approaches.

Businesses can implement Conversational Design in their contact center solutions to ensure chatbots, automated emails, and other virtual agents can handle customer interactions.

For example, let’s compare an AI-enabled virtual agent with and without Conversational Design.

Without Conversational Design

Let’s say a customer calls a contact center to check their account balance. At the end of the call, the virtual agent asks the customer, “Are you satisfied with your service?” The customer replies, “No.”

This virtual agent might then say, “Thank you for your feedback! We will route you to customer support.” Though this response is not technically wrong, it doesn’t mimic a real conversation and doesn’t meet the customer’s needs.

With Conversational Design

A virtual agent with Conversational Design handles this scenario differently. At the end of the call with the customer, the virtual agent might ask, “Are you satisfied with your service?” and the customer says, “No.”

By leveraging Conversational Design, companies can ensure that AI-based tools are built to facilitate human-like conversations with customers.

This virtual agent might ask additional questions to understand why the customer was dissatisfied. For example, it might say, “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet your needs. I will route you to a human agent who can offer you a discount.”

The information the customer provides to the virtual agent can then be reported to the business and used to improve service in the future. The data might also inform an automated email to follow up with the customer about their experience and future service.

By leveraging Conversational Design, companies can ensure that AI-based tools are built to facilitate human-like conversations with customers.

Conversational Design also helps inform simple interactions to ensure the chatbot or virtual agent uses the correct terminology based on the industry or a specific customer’s communication preferences.

Companies can also ensure these tools match customer personas and are an extension of the brand’s identity. For without a thought-out persona, a virtual agent can seem hollow and unengaging. Creating an identity modeled after your brand engenders user empathy and reflects the personalized engagement customers might receive from human support agents.

When AI-based tools are designed to interpret and respond using dialog that’s consistent with a brand’s identity and a customer’s persona, the data can lead to a more robust VoC strategy.

Three Ways Conversational Design Improves CX

Conversational AI is raising the bar for CX by transforming how humans interact with digital systems. Outlined below are three ways Conversational Design can improve it.

1. Self-Service Capabilities

Conversational Design helps brands enhance self-service resources and allows companies to serve customer needs better. Data reveals that 65% of customers prefer to solve issues independently.

Contact centers can deliver round-the-clock customer support using well-designed, AI-enabled virtual agents. Customers can resolve issues, find answers to questions and/or complete routine transactions without having to wait on hold or talk to a human agent.

2. Contextual and Streamlined Interactions

By leveraging intelligence from AI-enabled tools, brands can deliver contextually aware CXs.

For example, an intelligent virtual agent can predict a caller’s identity using the phone number used to initiate the call.

Once the caller’s identity is confirmed, the virtual agent can utilize data from past interactions to understand why the customer might be calling. This contextual information can improve the CX by making it personalized.

AI tools that are equipped with Conversational Design can interpret customer requests and conversations easily. As a result, customers may experience less frustration having to repeat their questions and find resolutions faster.

3. Understanding Customer Intent

Conversationally designed virtual agents understand what callers say and how they say it.

Identifying tone and deciphering between a happy or frustrated caller enables the virtual agent to offer unique and personalized support. If they sense a customer is frustrated, the virtual agent can pivot their approach to ask questions and provide solutions to mitigate further frustration.

Businesses can design these tools with machine learning and natural language processing to enable them to learn with every customer interaction.

Understanding a customer’s intent during a call can help identify the specific issue that needs to be solved and how best to approach it. This insight can also inform future employee training.

VoC strategies are increasingly valuable as brands look to respond to customer preferences and demands.

Conversational Design should be a roadmap that guides businesses’ VoC CX strategies. Without Conversational Design, organizations miss opportunities to strengthen customer relationships, streamline communications, improve service, track feedback, and build stronger brand loyalty.

Understanding a customer’s intent during a call can help identify the specific issue that needs to be solved…

With a deep understanding of customers’ opinions of the company, decision-makers can hone other business areas to meet customer needs. Satisfied customers will become enthusiastic ambassadors for the brand, which will lead to better brand perceptions and, likely, more customers.

“The here and now” is an idiom from the 1800’s that means “at this moment.” When it comes to the front line of any Contact Center, “the here and now” is where the customer “interaction” or “experience” takes place. Many components make up the total experience (i.e., both interaction and transaction). They all collide when the front line interacts directly with the customer in “the here and now.”

Let’s look at the importance and use of vocabulary when it comes to managing the interaction and delivering on the Customer Experience. The choice of the best rapport-building words and phrases contributes to the efficiency of the contact, the agent’s confidence, and the customer’s overall experience.

Regardless of contact channel, today’s agents handle many complex activities and situations that require problem solving. The words agents use when interacting with customers become a critical success factor to a great Customer Experience. There is a huge risk to that experience when agents focus on CAN’Ts. Can you think of a couple of reasons why that is? Customers want solutions to problems! They want action, attention, caring, empathy, resolution and often the agent needs to restore their confidence. When met with lists of obstacles, (can’ts) customers feel frustrated and continue to lose confidence. Frustration fuels escalations, delays, ugly social media blasts, reductions in retention, and potential loss of market share which ultimately damages profitability.

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” —Winston Churchill

I propose that positive word choice, also known as “transformational vocabulary,” be considered a strategic communication option. This is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have. Are your coaches able to coach to such a skill? Job aids with “positive phrases that work” is a start, along with proper coaching to contextualize the use of the phrases and to inspire the use of words that manage the interaction. For example, if a caller says they are “frustrated,” a well-trained agent can literally reduce the intensity of the caller’s emotions by responding, “I understand your concern.” Concern is a more manageable state than frustration!

My work takes me to Contact Center operations in a variety of industries. I have been privileged to witness hundreds of customer interactions and transactions. There is one simple yet powerful phrase that can greatly assist customers, trainers, and ultimately agents in response to issues, concerns, or problems. The phrase is very much a part of “the here and now,” yet I am surprised by the infrequency of its use. An agent’s reply of, “Here’s what I can do NOW” is easy, to the point, and keeps the agent thinking in terms of possibilities.

Imagine this phrase as a principal component of agent education! What a yield that would be! Building and conducting ongoing scenario-based discussions around the use of this action phrase has tremendous potential. The power is twofold. First, it cues the agent to think in terms of what CAN be done as opposed to what CAN’T be done. It also offers the customer a positive option to explore. Customer Experience is about problem solving. So far in my life experience CAN’Ts don’t solve problems; CANs do. They didn’t write a book about the Little Engine That Couldn’t!

The words agents use when interacting with customers become a critical success factor to a great Customer Experience.

My thinking is that if agent education included a distinct leaning towards “Here’s what I can do” it would spark and foster critical thinking. Communication practices in which conversations are guided through a lens of possibility (CAN) provide for a more thoughtful engagement. This results in a “branded experience” that contributes to the desired Customer Experience.

The use of CAN does not mean saying YES to every request made by a customer. However, regardless of the absurdity of a request, alternatives do exist. CAN behavior expands beyond the actual phrase, “Here’s what I CAN do.” The phrase acts as a catalyst to the agent in terms of their own response to a customer that is frustrated, anxious, disappointed, etc. What goes on behind the scenes (i.e., in your head) carries an enormous amount of weight when it comes to what comes out of your mouth. The CAN phrase may act as a communication “filter” to minimize negative reaction and maximize positive pro-action.

Consider the power of questions rather than inflammatory CAN’T statements. (These include “I can’t,” “They won’t allow it,” and “No one else has had this problem.”) Asking additional questions rather than leaping to telling the customer what is not possible and often interrupting the customer mid-phrase softens the conversation. Open-ended questions work best: “May I ask for additional details around …?,” “Would it be all right if I …?,” “Are you familiar with our …?,” and “What would it take to make you feel better about the experience?”

Once we enjoy genuine clarity around the situation, the ability to identify the true source of frustration is enhanced. This allows for a more targeted CAN response such as, “David, I CAN understand your concern around the amount of time this has taken; here’s what I CAN do now.” Even when the offer is totally contrary to the request, a new discussion emerges. In this case, the agent has asked questions and discovered that the actual situation is not causing frustration. It is the time it has taken! What a totally different driver!

An agent’s reply of, “Here’s what I can do NOW” is easy, to the point, and keeps the agent thinking in terms of possibilities.

Keep in mind that agents must not be “scripted” to robotically utter positive phrases. You can’t script intimacy. Excellent educational activities allow powerful words and phrases to transform everyone’s style to produce results consistent with the promise and goals of the brand. The linkage of these elements is primarily the responsibility of leadership. Avoid giving it short shrift by demanding a scripted response; educate for an integrated response. Only then will everyone’s interaction be their own. Everyone needs their own voice.

Consider educating, discussing, and adjusting communication skills for all involved in the Customer Experience. Focus on “Here’s what I can do NOW.” Adding “now” to the phrase adds power, urgency, and immediacy. It is a genuine call to action; few customers will object to at least listening to the options. And an entirely new conversation begins. File this under Call Control! A positive Customer Experience is a communication-based outcome and the effectiveness of CAN over CAN’T is such a powerful tool.

Let’s face it, the role of Contact Center agent revolves around “the here and now.” When customers reach out for assistance, they want immediate attention, supports, and solutions. Each interaction presents an opportunity to make a positive impact by addressing concerns in the present moment. By embracing “the here and now” mindset, agents provide real-time assistance by actively listening to the customer and delivering timely resolutions. It is in these moments that the power occurs to create exceptional experiences and hone strategic communication skills.

Rushing off one flight to get onto another with a one-hour layover that turns into four hours once you get to the check-in counter for your connecting flight. With the kids getting restless and the layover potentially going from four hours to seven, it’s easy to feel flooded with emotions.

But don’t worry, you tell yourself, help is available! Reach into your pocket for your phone and search for the customer service number of your airline.

Yet when you do, you then tell yourself this mustn’t be right. The countless search results don’t show a phone number, just the self-service options.

I know I left you stranded there, but it’s just one of the stories I’ve encountered when companies deduct from the customer experience (CX).

The customer is integral to any business, and we should develop self-service options around the customer for transactional issues such as hours of operation or shipment status. However, emotional and/or challenging concerns must still be directed to your customer service team, which helps customers get what they want based on their terms.

It goes without saying that the call center agent is still the hero, and self-service options are their sidekicks, providing fast, convenient, and 24/7 solutions to customers. They allow companies to improve customer satisfaction, reduce wait times, and free support agents to concentrate on more complex tasks.

The following are the five main self-service options to consider.

1. The IVR System

IVRs are the automated telephone systems that enable callers to interact with a computer-operated system via dial tones from keypads or voice commands. They can direct calls or offer self-service options.

…we should develop self-service options around the customer for transactional issues such as hours of operation or shipment status.

IVRs can be the most helpful or as irritating as nails on a chalkboard. Ever called the customer service number to receive the message, “tell me how I can help in a few words?” You say, “check account balance,” and the IVR says it’s transferring you to planet Pluto. And how many times have you pressed the advised number or said “Operator” to reach a live agent before it actually does?

Drawing from experience with IVR implementations, adding new options, and testing, to name a few, I’ve noticed that these points help to improve its functionality.

• Mapping the flow. This method is essential for improving usability, identifying potential areas for improvement, conducting testing and optimization, and encouraging collaboration among team members.
• Simplicity. Make the IVR system straightforward and user-friendly with specific and understandable prompts. Avoid using technical terms or language that could confuse customers. Limit the number of options to reduce customer frustration.
• Speak to an agent. Usually, callers know that pressing zero will take them to a live agent, so try to create some familiarity for the customer as some folks will always prefer to speak to a person rather than go through the various prompts.
• Personalization combined with self-service. Utilize customer information, including purchase history or past dealings with the business, to tailor the self-service experience and present information relevant to the caller, such as shipment tracking or payment status.
• Monitor and continuously test. Conduct periodic testing and evaluation of the IVR system, considering customer and agent feedback. Monitor the performance of the IVR, call volume, wait times, and abandonment rates to identify areas needing improvement and optimize the system for better performance.

The new shiny toy coming off the assembly line is Conversational AI. This innovative technology allows humans and machines to communicate using natural language. This technology can imitate human-like conversations using machine learning (ML) algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), and speech recognition.

The first time I experienced a Conversational AI-directed interaction, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In this demonstration, the technology performed a verification of the caller’s voice and passcode. Then it transferred funds from one bank account to another.

I listened to the level of empathy, tone of voice, and filler words, such as umm, ah, and so on, as the Conversational AI interacted with the caller. It wasn’t human, but I couldn’t tell the difference.

2. Chatbots

Chatbots are computer programs that employ NLP and ML to communicate with customers via text messaging. They offer helpful information, respond to queries, and perform basic transactions.

A well-planned and tested chatbot can help customers get what they want quickly. The same best practices for an IVR can be followed when developing a chatbot for a website or social media.

Several platforms are available to develop these bots today, such as Microsoft Bot Framework for more involved bots, a simple bot using power virtual agents (PVA), etc. When considering a platform examine the following:

• Bot’s purpose.
• Your budget.
• Ease of development.
• Scalability regarding hosting and handling a large volume of inquiries.
• Integration with your platform.
• Available training and support.

Lastly, the bot’s knowledge base needs to be comprehensive, allowing it to learn, be up-to-date, and be well organized to retrieve the necessary information efficiently.

3. Knowledge Bases (KBs)

Knowledge bases (KBs) are online repositories of knowledge containing answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), troubleshooting issues, and product/service information in a centralized location. They are another way to provide customers with the information required for simple questions.

Again, drawing from the time I’ve spent creating countless pieces of training and KBs, here are a few high-level tips:

• Identify common customer inquiries.
• Organize the KB in a logical and intuitive way.
• Use simple language and frame content in the active voice.
• Use clear headings and subheadings.
• Be consistent with the writing style, such as fonts and color.
• Break information into digestible chunks.
• Include quality visuals such as screenshots and videos.
• Provide background explanations and real-world examples to help users understand the purpose of performing the tasks.
• Make it searchable.
• Start steps with an action verb such as click or select.
• Avoid making assumptions about the user’s knowledge and provide the necessary information.
• Test the instructions.
• Keep the KB up-to-date.

I highly recommend anyone tackling this task to utilize the expertise of a technical writer, such as the ones provided by Briljent. The distinction between employing a technical writer and going it alone is like day and night: you get a much better, more professional result.

An additional tip, some of the material on your website’s KB can be used for your chatbot, or your chatbot can direct users to the KB for further context.

4. Self-service portals

These are online platforms that allow customers to access their account information, and update details. On them they can perform various tasks such as placing orders or scheduling appointments without picking up the phone.

Some of these tips seem like no-brainers, but some fall through the cracks leading to consequences such as the portal missing the mark regarding user experience (UX) to costly security risks.

• Train users on using the portal through guided tours or more in-depth self-paced training and manuals based on the portal’s features.
• Use two-factor authentication, such as a password and a security token.
• Encrypt all data in transit and at rest, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
• Allow administrators to restrict access based on a user’s role and responsibility, like for an insurance billing portal.
• Use the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) or other measures to prevent automated attacks.
• Employ simple and intuitive user interface (UI) with some contrast to alert users that they are logged into the portal. Stay consistent with styles, font, alignment, and color, to name a few.
• Provide feedback to users when they complete a task or when an error has occurred and directions to fix it.
• Provide web chat, if possible.
• Regularly update, test, and maintain the portal. Provide users with information if and when the portal will be unavailable due to maintenance.

From the time I’ve spent creating and updating self-portal courses and system testing, here are a few considerations:

• Document the new feature, such as its position on the UI and functionality.
• When adding a new feature, create it in the test environment and then test it before promoting it to the next environment.
• Make sure to update all manuals and training once the feature is available.

Train your call center agents to assist customers with troubleshooting issues, such as account unlocks, password reset, or simple navigations.

To help our agents, we implemented the following, which has reduced the AHT due to the time agents take to research the information:

• My colleague, David Sluss, created a simulator of one of our portals. It’s a PowerPoint replica of the portal. This guides agents in performing various steps, such as claim submission, and verifying payment history, to name a few.
• Our call center offers tier-one support for another portal. Here we provide our agents with easy-to-follow instructions and demonstration videos to resolve various issues, from unlocking a user’s account to adding a member to their portal.

How did we do it? We interviewed agents, listened to calls, and spoke to leaders and the quality assurance (QA) analyst to understand the common questions. Then we got to work on how we could help agents, through training, resolve these issues.

All these steps are documented in the KB, but some callers prefer speaking to a live agent.

5. Mobile applications

Mobile applications or apps give your customers the convenience of self-service options from their smartphones or tablets. They can book a ride or check an account balance with just a few taps. Here are some tips for developing a self-service mobile app:

• Design for simplicity, make use of icons that the user understands, and maintain consistency throughout the application.
• Ensure that the app performs well on all devices and platforms.
• Keep customer’s data safe.
• Enable offline usage, if possible.
• Personalize content to the user.
• Customer support through the application.
• Stay up-to-date to improve performance and test regularly.

Self-Service Recommendations

No matter which self-service option you choose, ensure that it serves a specific purpose or goal, such as a doctor verifying member eligibility.

To effectively determine the purpose of a self-service option, start by understanding your customers’ needs. Research and analyze customer behavior and feedback to gain valuable insights into customer requirements.

Based on this information, you can then define the goals and scope of your self-service option. Studying your competitors’ self-service options can help determine what works and what doesn’t.

After identifying its purpose, use a sample group of customers to test it and gather feedback on usability, effectiveness, and overall CX. This will help you improve and ensure it meets your customers’ needs.

It’s also essential to keep your audience in mind when selecting and designing a self-service option. For instance, younger generations like Millennials and Gen Z may prefer self-service options through mobile apps and chatbots.

To effectively determine the purpose of a self-service option, start by understanding your customers’ needs.

Recently, a colleague shared her experience of receiving a sudden surge of calls for password resets and unlocks, which persisted for a few days. She proactively asked one of the callers why they weren’t using the password self-reset portal, only to discover that the site was down. As soon as the portal was fixed, there was a notable reduction in call volume.

This incident shows the importance of staying attuned to your agents and monitoring self-service options, especially during an increase in call volume, particularly for issues resolved by your self-service options.

This scenario teaches us another lesson: when customers realize that one channel is not working to their satisfaction level, they will switch to another. However, they may sometimes never return to the channel because they don’t trust that the option will help.

I must add that it’s crucial to emphasize the importance of using high-quality data to ensure a quality self-service option. And if you opt for an omnichannel solution, ensure it houses all customer interactions and leverages them to gain insights into customer behavior. This is essential for delivering a seamless and personalized CX while understanding customer preferences, to name a few.

Finally, I cannot stress enough the necessity of testing all of your technologies, processes, and yes the agents who are using them (see box). Testing is important because it shows that you care about what your customer receives as the end result. It’s better to identify the defects before your customer does to improve on their experiences with your company.

Self-service options can certainly be convenient and efficient. Still, there are situations where the assistance of a human being is invaluable in resolving an issue. A certain level of comfort and reassurance comes from interacting with another person, especially when dealing with complex or emotionally charged problems that technology simply cannot replicate.

In these instances, having an actual human to offer guidance and support can make all the difference in finding a satisfactory solution. Therefore, it is critical to tightly, and seamlessly, integrate self-service as the first point of contact for customers with live agents. By doing so you will tap the full power of self-service to provide a truly valuable CX.

The Need to Make the Best Customer Connections

Table of Contents, July 2023

FEATURE ARTICLE
The Need to Make the Best Customer Connections
By Brendan Read
How contact centers can productively respond in the face of higher CX expectations.

SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT
Upland Software
By Linda Harden
An executive interview with Denis Francoeur, Upland Software.

SELF-SERVICE
The Power of Self-Service
By Mark Pereira
Transactional inquiries made easier for customers and companies.

IDIOM INSIGHTS
The Here and Now … A Most Opportune Moment
By Kathleen M. Peterson
Where the customer “interaction” or “experience” takes place.

VOICE OF CUSTOMER
Why Conversational Design is Essential
By Rebecca Jones
How Conversational Design enhances the CX.

CUSTOMER LOYALTY
Opportunities for Contact Centers
By Fabrice Martin
Focus on empathy, wellbeing, unstructured feedback, and balance.

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
How Best to Support the Customer Experience
By Colin Redbond
Intelligent automation can successfully support CX-focused business strategies.

CHATGPT-4
Looking (ChatGPT) 4-Ward
By Eric Carrasquilla
How ChatGPT-4 changes the customer conversation.

GENERATIVE AI
Deploying Generative AI Just Right
By Yochai Konig
How to strike a balance between innovation and inevitable issues.

CONVERSATIONAL AI
The Human-Touched CX Magic of Conversational AI
By Joe Havlik
How AI humanizes and personalizes chatbots and makes them mainstream.

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS
What to Know About Large Language Models
By Bill Schwaab
How to leverage LLMs in the contact center.

In today’s uncertain, disruptive, social, and highly competitive economy, customer experience (CX) counts, and in more ways than one. Yet providing customers with the experience they i.e., we expect—for each of us is a customer—is becoming easier said than done.

We appear to have higher expectations for a superior CX; we are acutely cognizant of our value primarily as buyers but secondarily as influencers, one that perhaps is overstated. We also have less tolerance of brand promise underdelivery.

Yet staffing shortages and rising labor costs make it increasingly difficult for contact centers to find and retain quality agents. The new normal of hybrid working has added complexity in managing people and processes.

And while there are new technologies, most notably artificial intelligence (AI)-driven ChatGPT, that can provide higher quality automated assisted or self-service experience they have their own issues, like accuracy.

Caught in the middle of these issues are the contact center industry routing and automation/self-service solution suppliers. They have been working diligently to meet and anticipate their customer demands with sought-after features and functionality. We have turned to them to obtain their insights on how best to connect with customers.

Here are our conversations with:

• Laura Bassett, Vice President, Product Marketing, NICE CXone
• Jono Luk, Vice President of Product Management, Webex by Cisco
• Alain Mowad, Director of Product Marketing at Talkdesk
• Jessica Smith, Head of CCaaS Product Marketing, 8×8
• Mike Szilagyi, General Manager, Product Management at Genesys

Q. What changes have you seen with the demand and use of inbound customer contact solutions?

Laura Bassett:

Customers’ frequent use of technology during their day-to-day and their drive for instant gratification has led to an increased demand for self-service options to support live agents in handling a variety of different customer requests. These range from password changes and shipping questions to more complex situations.

In the last several years, contact centers have shifted to deploying more automated, AI-powered self-service solutions to improve the customer and employee experience and operate more efficiently. This trend has been driven by the increasing availability and sophistication of AI-based chatbots that can provide accurate and personalized responses to customer requests.

Meanwhile, contact centers are continuing to invest time and resources in training live agents to assist customers that require personalized assistance for complex queries and issues. These trends are likely to continue in the future as businesses recognize the importance of digital customer service and invest in the necessary technology to meet customer expectations.

Jono Luk:

Inbound customer contact solutions have changed how businesses think about customer retention and the customer lifecycle.

Customer interactions are now seen as ongoing relationships instead of as one-time events, meaning the need for improved CXs is more important than ever.

“Inbound customer contact solutions have changed how businesses think about customer retention and the customer lifecycle.” —Jono Luk

It’s essential businesses leverage the past history of customer interactions to assist customers today, as they will expect their interaction history to be accounted for at every step for a more seamless experience.

Alain Mowad:

Demand for inbound customer contact solutions has largely shifted to self-service and digital channels. A number of factors have contributed to this shift.

• Customers across all demographics are opting for self-service first, predominantly via web and mobile apps. When a customer can’t find what they need via self-service, they prefer connecting with a business first by using digital channels (chat, SMS, social messaging) with calling becoming a last resort when all other channels are exhausted.
• Customers today expect answers quickly and with the least amount of effort. Businesses that fail to meet these expectations can expect those customers to churn to a competitive brand far more easily than before.

What’s more, these same businesses are faced with growing pressure to reduce costs and maximize efficiencies all while continuing to provide an excellent CX to drive customer retention and loyalty.

This means adopting several key strategies:

• Increasingly leveraging AI automation across digital and voice channels to increase the self-service rate.
• AI-based agent assistance to allow agents to handle assisted interactions more efficiently.
• Call deflections to digital to reduce wait times and allow more interactions to be handled by the same pools of agents.
• AI-powered quality management (QM) and journey analytics to gain key insights into areas to improve efficiencies and increase customer satisfaction.

Jessica Smith:

There’s been a shift in preferences towards the use of digital channels and digital self-service options versus relying on human agents to provide customer support.

This really comes down to customer expectations: customers want fast, easy, and consistent service. Digital self-service is quickly becoming the best way to meet these needs while still providing high quality service that keeps the interaction personalized, humanlike, and effective. This kind of service has the ability to improve performance within the contact center as well as experiences for the customer.

Mike Szilagyi:

As the most popular channel, voice interaction continues to grow, but we are seeing digital channels grow at an even faster pace.

Email overtook voice as the most used channel for CX this past year, which is surprising, given people’s preferences for fast responses from service. While that is in contrast to what we would expect to see, it tracks to the overall increase in digital channel engagement.

Both chatbots and messaging app interactions about tripled in use since 2017. Customers are looking to engage with companies on their terms, and as the customer base increasingly is dominated by digital natives, I don’t anticipate this trend slowing down.

Q. Has technology changed or is changing, and if so, how and why, and what are the benefits but also the challenges?

Laura Bassett:

The technologies behind inbound customer contact solutions are constantly evolving, driven by the need to provide better and more efficient CXs.

As organizations look for ways to streamline and improve operations, customers are continually demanding digitized and smart customer service. Meanwhile, agents are constantly searching for increased job satisfaction and a better employee experience.

Here are three examples of changing technologies:

• 1. Advancements in AI. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming more sophisticated and accepted, with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that enable them to understand and respond to complex customer queries.
• 2. Omnichannel support. Customers expect to be able to communicate with businesses through multiple channels, from email, chat, and phone to a multitude of messaging and social media channels.
• Inbound solutions are evolving to provide support across these channels, allowing customers to switch seamlessly between them. This can lead to a more consistent and personalized CX. But they require investment in technology and processes to ensure that customer interactions are tracked and managed effectively across all of these different channels.
• 3. Automation and self-service. Contact centers are increasingly leveraging automation and self-service technologies to handle routine queries and issues, leading to faster response times and reduced costs. These technologies are becoming more and more capable, with the latest abilities for AI and analytics to continuously improve self-service capabilities.

While there are clear benefits to these evolving technologies, there are also challenges to overcome, such as ensuring that the CX is personalized and seamless. Brands are facing the results of an ever-growing tech stack that has been built over the years, leading to data siloes and disconnected teams.

“…customers are continually demanding digitized and smart customer service. Meanwhile, agents are constantly searching for increased job satisfaction and a better employee experience.”
—Laura Bassett

To ensure seamless experiences, brands need to invest in a complete cloud platform with a suite of solutions underpinned by AI. This makes data accessible across teams and applications and ensures seamless CXs.

Jono Luk:

Inbound customer contact center technology has changed dramatically over the last decade. We’ve seen a desire from customers to increase the number of ways they can reach a business, most of which are digital channels: mobile apps, SMS text, chatbots, etc.

For example, a customer may use social media to express dissatisfaction with delays to their flight. Since the airline can engage with the customer on that social media platform, the customer preference for communication is being met.

Digital interactions can also be asynchronous, meaning a single human agent can handle two-three inquiries at a time whereas phone interactions can only occur one at a time. This is mutually beneficial because the customer interacts with the business in the way they want: and the business can meet the customer where they want to be.

Alain Mowad:

The technology is changing to adapt to the rapidly changing needs of both businesses and their customers. Customers want faster and more effortless service. Businesses are looking to drive customer loyalty while at the same time reducing their costs.

“The advent of AI…means businesses no longer need to trade contact center efficiencies and cost reduction for customer satisfaction and loyalty.” —Alain Mowad

AI is the answer to both needs and is being increasingly leveraged to allow businesses to scale to meet customer demand. It is providing everything from automation to increase the self-service rate as well as agent assistance, automated QM, workforce scheduling, and deep analytics and insights into customer journeys and customer service operations.

An AI-powered customer service experience means customers get what they need immediately, with the least possible effort, and all at the lowest possible cost per contact. Human-in-the-loop technology allows businesses to continuously train AI models to enable additional self-service options that can be served via conversational voice and digital bots.

Additionally, AI-powered contact center tools such as QM, workforce management (WFM), and analytics streamline the tasks associated with operating a highly efficient and effective contact center without the need for increased staffing.

The advent of AI in the customer service realm means businesses no longer need to trade contact center efficiencies and cost reduction for customer satisfaction and loyalty. They can now achieve both simultaneously.

Barriers to the adoption of AI-powered technologies continue to be the perceived cost and complexity of implementing them, as well as questions around the tangible benefits and ROI that result. Technology providers can overcome them by making AI implementations easy for a clear set of use cases that provide proven and measurable positive business outcomes.

Here are just a few examples:

• Automating common tasks such as order status or bank balance inquiries.
• Providing specific information from a knowledge management system.
• Next-best-actions for customer service agents to resolve customer inquiries quicker.
• Automating 100% of quality monitoring and scoring so supervisors can focus on specific and impactful coaching strategies.

Jessica Smith:

The CX landscape has been shifting rapidly in the midst of digital-first technological advancement. There have been major strides in innovation, especially in AI, and the companies that focus on CX will come out on top.

Improvements in Conversational AI, intelligent routing, and in sentiment and predictive analytics, among others, mean that contact centers have an entirely new suite of tools at their disposal to improve CXs as well as the communication between agents and supervisors leading to better business outcomes.

Mike Szilagyi:

Technology is changing for two major reasons. First, customers are expecting more from brands than ever before – and second, the rapid evolution of software, accelerated in many ways by the global COVID-19 pandemic, has drastically changed CX technology – for the better.

It’s important to keep in mind that consumers are increasingly holding brands to higher standards. We recently revealed research in the Genesys State of Customer Experience Report, which showed people are likely to ditch brands after bad CXs. Younger generations in particular were more likely to abandon a company after just one negative service interaction.

The stakes are even higher as consumer expectations increase, forcing companies to adopt technology that enables them to effectively and efficiently deliver better CXs.

Additionally, the impact of novel technologies like ChatGPT and other AI breakthroughs are being felt in contact center tech. New technology and AI models are constantly being developed to help agents be more effective on calls, give managers more visibility into their performance, and most importantly, improve CXs.

The global pandemic also spurred on a shift in technology as more agents began to work from home. This led to improved software that allowed agents to be more effective individually and gave managers more visibility into their work.

However, as is sometimes the case with the rapid development of technology, it can sometimes be a challenge to integrate technology seamlessly and ensure that various software solutions work well together. It’s essential that CX technology is unified and not siloed, as this can make a significant difference for customers and ensure a positive experience, no matter the channel.

Q. Have you seen any changes in the split between live agent versus self-service? In the channels that customers use?

Laura Bassett:

Customers are seeking more self-service and asynchronous options than ever before due to day-to-day stress, busy lives, and an increased reliance on technology.

While phone continues to be the top choice to solve the most sophisticated inquiries, the channel preferences of customers overall has widened significantly. Many are preferring asynchronous communications through chat, messaging, and various social media channels to avoid having to sit on the phone for periods of time.

This shift in consumers wanting to complete tasks on their own time has also increased the desire for a variety of self-service options to help customers handle simpler tasks quickly on their own without the help of an agent.

“Customers are seeking more self-service and asynchronous options than ever before due to day-to-day stress, busy lives, and an increased reliance on technology.” —Laura Bassett

Brands have been investing in AI and machine learning capabilities to help them identify common issues customers reach out with and deploy solutions like smart chatbots and a catered knowledge base to assist with requests without customers needing to speak with an agent.

Jono Luk:

Since a virtual agent is less expensive than human agents, virtualization is a way to minimize costs within the contact center. However, it is imperative businesses implement virtual agents correctly because a wrong answer or negative experience will hurt customer retention.

Alain Mowad:

For inbound contacts, the vast majority will be addressed through self-service automation using conversational voice and digital bots, with the more complex interactions and those requiring human empathy being handled by live agents.

As is the case with outbound (Ed. note: see box), most inbound contacts will be digital, leveraging live chat, SMS, social messaging, and email. Voice will increasingly become a channel of choice only if all other self-service and digital channel avenues have been exhausted.

“For inbound contacts, the vast majority will be addressed through self-service automation…with the more complex interactions and those requiring human empathy being handled by live agents.” —Alain Mowad

Jessica Smith:

When it comes to automation and self-service, they’re undeniably on the rise. Customers prefer these experiences, but it’s critical that the handoff between self-service and human representative be seamless.

Historically, a chatbot that doesn’t resolve a customer issue can cause more frustration than it’s worth. But as technology improves, more and more customers are having successful automated interaction experiences.

It is easier for Conversational AI tools to pass the customer to a representative with a complete background once it becomes necessary. That technology continues to advance, and customers will increasingly look to such channels to quickly resolve their issues.

Mike Szilagyi:

Automation can handle straightforward inquiries with great results. Knowledge and context are integrated across self-service and agent-assisted interactions to support personalization and rapid resolution of the complex interactions with agents.

Digital channels support richer capabilities than voice and support a growing preference for asynchronous communications that parallel the growth in complexity of customers’ lives and the availability of personal devices and always-on technologies.

Q. What are your recommendations when choosing, deploying, and using inbound applications?

Laura Bassett:

In the age of ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools, it’s more important than ever for brands to stay on top of the latest technological advances so as to not get outpaced by competitors.

Often, we can learn the most from what the more advanced businesses are doing to leverage these new technologies to improve CX, even those outside of a business’s normal competitive purview.

AI-powered, intelligent inbound applications can help brands deploy the right mix of tools and features to create seamless, unforgettable customer interactions and drive loyalty.

There’s no doubt that the future of customer service lies in the hands of AI. However, it’s imperative for businesses to identify their needs and goals to choose the applications that fit their business needs best: and the answer lies in their data and conversations.

Furthermore, it’s important for brands to understand the necessity of human oversight when it comes to the implementation, deployment, and use of AI to remain ethical and compliant and ensure optimal customer service to drive customer retention and loyalty.

Jono Luk:

Businesses should make sure their contact center can evolve and provide the technologies they’ll need not just today, but five and 10 years down the line.

Businesses will also likely need to make incremental updates and upgrades as their customers evolve. A contact center provider should act as a partner in the evolving technological landscape and meet businesses where they are.

“Businesses should make sure their contact center can evolve and provide the technologies they’ll need not just today, but five and 10 years down the line.” —Jono Luk

Alain Mowad:

Businesses require modern inbound applications that keep pace with the demands of today’s customers and how they want to engage with your business. This means choosing applications that:

• Offer robust self-service options that employ advanced Conversational AI for both voice and digital bots.
• Provide support for a broad range of digital channels including live chat, social messaging, SMS, and email.
• Enable deflection of voice to digital channel alternatives.
• Provide AI-powered agent assistance that incorporates large language models (LLMs) such as GPT to improve agent efficiency with specific targeted responses and suggested next-best-actions for customer inquiries. Also, automatic interaction summaries with suggested outcomes and personalized contextual agent coaching.
• Offer omnichannel journey orchestration to ensure that you can completely manage the customer journey and connect every customer touchpoint with rich context preserved throughout.
• Extend customer contact beyond the contact center to other stakeholders within the organization such as back-office and frontline workers.
• Allow for AI-powered QM to automatically record and score 100% of all interactions and flag specific interactions to supervisors and quality analysts based on specific criteria.
• Offer rich AI-powered analytics and actionable insights into the entire customer journey as well as day to day operations and longer term trends.

It also means modern applications that are compatible with a modern way of working, with your agents, back-office, and frontline workers being located literally anywhere, and on any device, desktop or mobile, all delivered on a reliable, scalable, global cloud platform.

Jessica Smith:

• Choose your tools and partners wisely. Inbound applications need to be cloud-based, highly reliable, secure, scalable, and offer platform extensibility for easy integration capabilities.
• Look for solutions that incorporate powerful Conversational AI for both customer and agent experiences.
• Additionally, look for solutions that make it seamless to pass an automated interaction to a live agent with complete customer context in order to avoid any unnecessary friction during the escalation.
• Give your agents the visibility they need to be successful. Live agents should be able to handle all interactions in one interface so they can easily navigate the flow of work throughout their day without having to toggle through multiple screens and tools. This omnichannel handling is crucial for live agents.
• Businesses should have the ability to see how their bot is performing at the touch of a finger.

It is all about personalizing the customer journey and breaking down silos. Inbound applications need open platforms with APIs for advanced integration options to customize a customer’s journey.

“Choose your tools and partners wisely. Inbound applications need to be cloud-based, highly reliable, secure, scalable, and offer platform extensibility for easy integration capabilities.”
—Jessica Smith

Lastly, inbound applications should integrate with a business’s other collaboration or unified communications (UC) tools to help break down silos that exist across the entire organization. After all, CX doesn’t just sit in the contact center.

Mike Szilagyi:

First, consider the experience you want to provide your customers and employees, and whether you have the technology that enables that. Weighing your options carefully to find the right solutions that meet the needs of all your stakeholders will not only deliver on your experience goals but can also save you from costly missteps.

Next, opting for a composable CX platform will give you the flexibility to build for your unique needs. Finding a contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider that prioritizes composability and embeds AI into their products is a must for organizations that want to be proactive and provide personalized experiences.

Which channels you deploy should also be top of mind. Our research found that customers consider a personalized experience to be one that allows them to engage on their channels of choice.

And, while voice remains the top preferred channel, digital channels are quickly growing in popularity, particularly with younger generations. Having a digital strategy is crucial for organizations to meet the expectations of today’s customers.

Finally, and most importantly, all of these solutions have to be integrated and able to orchestrate the experience. Through the coordination of technology and increased data visibility, experience orchestration connects journeys for both customers and agents so they feel seen, heard, and understood, deepening relationships, and driving loyalty.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Denis Francoeur regarding his recent Podcast, Enhancing Customer Service in a Personalized Contact Center. Denis talks about the evolution of contact centers, how expectations have changed for agents and customers alike, and how personalization is a game changer for customer experience and satisfaction.

Here is my conversation with Denis summarizing his podcast.

Linda: We have a long history of personalization in the contact center. In the early days, it was caller ID. Through technological advances, we can do so much more. Please share with us your thoughts about how personalization enhances both the customer and agent experience.

Denis: One of the best ways to conceptualize this is with an example. Something almost everyone has encountered at least once is calling into a customer service call center, and having the conversation start something like this:

“Hello, thank you for calling CompanyA. My name is Denis and I will be assisting you today. Can I start by asking your last name please?”

“Francoeur”

“Okay, great. Let me just look that up here…. one moment… … … … umm, could I ask you to spell that please?”

“F R A N C O E U R”

“Sorry, I didn’t catch all that. One more time please?”

“F R A N C O E U R”

“Thank you so much. One moment…. … … …. Would this be listed under another name by any chance? I’m not finding this one in the system.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

• Perhaps the customer has already been online and did a live chat with someone.
• Perhaps there was a previous call, but the line got disconnected.
• Maybe the caller will need to be transferred to another department, often having to start from the very beginning with a new agent.

Customers want to have easy engagements with companies and report higher satisfaction when they receive a personalized and efficient customer experience. That could look like:

• Giving a customer a choice on where and how they interact with a business – such as voice or chat.
• Ensuring a customer’s information, situation and history is readily available, avoiding them having to repeat themselves.
• Having their issues addressed promptly and accurately.
• Being given consistent information from multiple people at the same company.

Agents’ jobs are hard enough without repetitive mundane tasks and technical hurdles getting in their way.

• Give agents a “single pane of glass” view of the account, so they don’t have to swivel between screens.
• Use technology to surface things like phone numbers, names, account history, special notes or handling instructions, etc.
• Allow agents to focus on quickly assisting the customer, and the customer relationship.

“Customers want to have easy engagements with companies and report higher satisfaction when they receive a personalized and efficient customer experience.” —Denis Francoeur

Linda: What are the components needed to make personalization functional in today’s call center?

Denis:

• First, you need a solid system of record that includes all of the information relevant to the customer — often referred to as a CRM.
• Second, you need to ensure all of the customer interaction channels (both voice and digital) feed into that system. Outliers complicate both the customer and agent experience.
• Third, you need to ensure call center agents have quick and easy access to all of this information.
• Fourth, utilize technology to surface the right information at the right time.
• Computer-Telephony integrations (CTI) like Upland InGenius connect enterprise phone systems to leading CRMs.
• Knowledge solutions like Upland’s Panviva and RightAnswers help ensure compliance and speedy, accurate resolutions.
• Bots and Conversational Intelligence solutions assist agents in wading through the loads of data to find just the right thing.

Linda: We have various channels of communication through which our customers can contact us. How does personalization help us to know more about our customers preferences in how they would like to communicate with us?

Denis:

• Customers are omni-channel, they research, browse, shop and request support via multiple channels.
• They want the ability to contact customer service/sales via the channel of their choosing as well. Think telephone, chat, email, SMS, socials (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• Customers want agents to know their details, such as name, previous interaction history, and the reason they’re calling, and they certainly don’t want to have to repeat themselves as their issue gets transferred and escalated.
• They want their issues to be taken care of as soon as possible, with minimal time on hold.

Linda: What are the benefits we can expect by utilizing personalization in our centers? (reduced call times, workload balance, training, satisfaction, etc.)

Denis: The benefits for customers, agents, and businesses are huge. Customers have easy, efficient experiences through the channel(s) of their choosing. This leads to increased satisfaction, and happier, more loyal relationships. Agents benefit by being able to focus.

• Focus on helping the customer rather than jumping through technical hoops.
• Focus on an accurate, efficient solution knowing that peripheral details have already been collected.
• Focus on one screen rather than swivel chairing through several applications/tools.
• Focus on the task at hand, rather than trying to balance interactions from separate, disconnected systems.

Businesses benefit in several ways:

• Increased satisfaction for both the customer and agent leads to greater retention — enabling businesses to focus on acquiring new customers and talent rather than being reactive, trying to keep what they have today.
• Shorter handle times means contact centers can process more interactions without adding extra bodies.
• Easier access to the appropriate knowledge increases first contact resolutions, avoiding customer frustrations and repeat interactions.
• The data provided through integrated contact center solutions enable supervisors to focus training and coaching on the agents who need it.

“Customers have easy, efficient experiences through the channel(s) of their choosing.” —Denis Francoeur

Linda: What is the role that Upland InGenius can play in making this work?

Denis: Since 2008, InGenius has been increasing the efficiency of contact centers by seamlessly integrating leading telephony systems and CRMs. It is the glue between the two.

InGenius enables remote control of your telephony inside the CRM interface. The phone acts the same, agents can pick up calls, place callers on hold, transfer calls, and so on.

InGenius captures information such as caller ID and IVR (interactive voice response) data and attaches it to the phone call that it passes to the CRM. Agents can resolve calls faster with intelligent process automation.

Features, such as screen-pop, help an agent personalize the experience. Before an agent picks up the call, the caller information is displayed on their screen.

Screen transfer allows agents to pass the entire case to another agent, therefore the history and information already given by the caller does not need repeating. Again, the agent’s time is freed up and can focus on the caller. The caller is greeted by name and does not need to repeat their information.

InGenius saves agents time and effort by removing manual processes such as pulling up records and typing names and phone numbers, which can be fraught with errors.

The customer feels valued and does not get frustrated by having to repeat themselves.

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Thanks for sharing your information on the podcast that covers such an impactful technology.

About Denis Francoeur

Denis Francoeur is Director of Product Management at Upland Software, focusing on InGenius in the Contact Center Productivity business unit. He has over 25 years of experience delivering exceptional customer service across multiple industries. Denis began his InGenius journey in 2017 in Customer Support and then moved to Product Management.

Bad customer experiences (CXs) still happen every day in contact centers because most brands are not actively investing in creating better ones.

So, when something unforeseen happens, like a global pandemic, brands struggle to keep up with the turmoil, causing even further erosion of the CX. Ultimately, this lack of focus also threatens the bottom line: a risk brands really don’t want to take right now given the uncertain economy.

But some organizations are taking a different path: one that I believe many more brands will begin to follow.

This new path involves elevating and empowering the contact center as the organization’s Brand Guardian. It requires a new mindset and a commitment to change. But it may be the key to winning the hearts and minds of consumers (and employees) over the long haul.

What’s a Brand Guardian?

The traditional first line of defense for any brand is a great sales experience and/or a great product. Without these, any brand will begin to falter.

But the last line of defense must be the contact center: its agents and other customer service and support employees who interact with customers every day to ensure an exceptional experience.

The most successful CX centers pivot operations and position themselves as revenue engines: not just something that happens after the sales transaction.

These teams step in when the sales experience falls short of expectations, or the product fails. They are tasked with taking a poor experience and turning it into one that results in a positive resolution and a satisfied customer. Even more, the end goal of the contact center is to maintain customer loyalty to the brand, build customer affinity, and protect future revenue.

When you think about it, this is an incredibly challenging responsibility. Just consider any time in your life that you have had to fix a less-than-ideal situation or calm an angry or frustrated individual. Were you ready for the conversation? Did you have all the tools you needed to offer the best resolution? Did the other person walk away satisfied? This is the reality of the contact center every single day.

Recently, I came across an example of how contact center support not only led to a better CX, but also turned into a sales opportunity.

A customer called an appliance manufacturer support since their refrigerator was not working properly. In response, the service representative offered to send a repair person to their house to fix the issue. Knowing the cost of this, the representative also offers to completely replace the broken refrigerator with a newer, modern version, at a discount: which the customer enthusiastically accepted.

Consumers Demand Better

Consumers have always been vocal about what they need from customer service and support. They want fast, efficient resolutions delivered by empathetic agents. They want to interact on their own terms using the engagement channel(s) they prefer. And when they don’t experience this, they leave. It is as simple as that.

Every year, we measure consumer attitudes, and the data is clear, according to the 2022 Calabrio State of the Contact Center Report: three in five consumers have switched brands due to negative contact center experiences. And those two consumers who didn’t switch? They were willing to give these brands one more chance before spending their money with alternative brands.

Ultimately, the brands that focus on enriching human interactions by listening to the data, both for the customer and the agent, will succeed.

These experiences and behaviors are true of industries where there’s constantly a few competitors outperforming the rest, with every newcomer motivated to beat out legacy players and take the top spot. Think food service delivery organizations, consumer tech companies, and clothing brands. This is healthy competition that drives quality experiences.

However, there are other industries with high cost of entry, where it’s a hassle to switch suppliers, so the players drive for the lowest common denominator in features, quality, service, and CX in order to maximize profits.

They’ve been able to get away with these lackluster CX strategies because every other player is doing the same thing, leaving customers with nowhere to turn.

That’s all starting to change, however. Customers are speaking out, and they’re getting loud. Take the Taylor Swift tour chaos on Ticketmaster, for example. Some fans spent eight-plus hours on the site waiting for tickets, while others were charged hundreds of dollars (thousands, in some cases) multiple times only to not actually secure tickets.

Many fans anticipated having some challenges due to high demand, yet the day-of experience was much, much worse. Platform glitches led to extremely negative fan experiences, and now some fans are suing Ticketmaster: and lawmakers are investigating the organization’s “unfair” practices.

Frontier Airlines also made a bold CX move recently, removing its customer service phone number. So, rather than connecting with an agent for help over the phone, customers are forced to use chatbots, social media, or other digital ways of reaching the airline.

Calabrio research shows, however, that 80% of consumers still rank phone interactions as having the biggest impact on their brand perception, and that they expect a real live human agent to be available when they want one. Time will tell how underinvesting in the CX like this will impact the airline company: but they’ve likely taken their cost-cutting endeavors a step too far.

These are only a couple examples of many poor CXs, unfortunately: but we’re starting to see customers and lawmakers work together to enforce change in industries that have otherwise been able to deprioritize the CX.

What’s clear today is that the age-old strategies of these high cost of entry industries are starting to crumble and they’re going to be forced to enhance the CX: and therefore better prioritize the contact center.

Three Ways Contact Centers Will Evolve to Insights-Driven Excellence

Brands that are serious about positioning their contact centers as strong brand guardians will evolve by capturing better, richer voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data, transforming that data into usable insights, and applying that data to their daily interactions.

So, what will this look like as we approach the second half of 2023? Here are my three predictions.

1. Fewer silos and better data integration

Good Brand Guardians have the resources they need to immediately solve complex customer challenges and nurture strong relationships. And effective managers use real-time information to evaluate and improve agent performance.

But both of these scenarios require better data. In the next few years, brands will accelerate deployment of the right tools to gather data from both inside and outside of their organizations. They will further break down data silos in order to leverage the data in ways that will move the brands forward.

Immense amounts of data exist: social media, customer interaction preferences, sales, behavioral, historical, and more. But unless we can harness it and aggregate it, it won’t provide value. We’ll see brands move faster to remove data silos, streamline entry points, and implement efficient, repeatable ways of sharing information across departments.

We will see more automation of data capture in order to create a single source of truth and make it easy for all departments to work with real-time data.

2. Adopting integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to extract knowledge

Most companies I have talked to say that they have plenty of data. But what they are missing is a way to extract usable information that they can apply to daily business.

We are already seeing organizations start to deploy AI and machine learning tools that continuously mine aggregated data systems to pull out relevant insights.

I believe we are at the beginning of this journey. Only 13% of CX leaders in a McKinsey survey expressed full confidence that their CX measurement system provides a representative view of the customer base today, so we have a long way to go. But I see this expanding as contact center leaders start to realize the benefits of insights on both the customer and the employee experience.

3. Transformational change based on insights

Finally, I anticipate a wave of change coming for contact centers as they move to adopt better strategies and tools. These changes will be focused on leveraging data insights faster and across greater swaths of the organization.

We’ll also see more accountability for teams – all the way from how they capture and analyze data to how they put the data into action. This will extend across agents, to HR, to marketing, and to leadership.

Measurements of accountability will become equally important in terms of strengthening the customer relationship, but also empowering the contact center and agents as better brand defenders.

Committing to Enriching the Human Experience

Importantly, enacting real change that drives relationships, retains great talent, and builds future revenue requires a commitment from organizational leaders.

We achieved great advances over the past three years, many of these forced upon the industry by the COVID-19 pandemic and a need to quickly pivot operations to stay relevant. These changes have been mostly ironed out now, with some strategies that will stick, and some that will fall by the wayside. But we can’t lose momentum.

Ultimately, the brands that focus on enriching human interactions by listening to the data, both for the customer and the agent, will succeed. When we prioritize what is most important – people – we will always be on the right path forward.