Changes in the customer experience journey are happening fast. There is no slowing down or stopping the convergence of technology and the increasing demands for quick, relevant and personalized customer interactions. The stakes are high when it comes to the customer experience and it is not just the Contact Center that needs to take notice – the customer experience is a whole company issue.
What if we could tell you the contact center can be better, faster, smarter and more successful in creating loyalty with your customers that is long lasting? Creating a better customer and agent experience has been a goal that businesses have been chasing for decades. It is finding the delicate balance between agent efficiency, self-service performance and customer expectations that continues to be the challenge for most businesses. How do you create a smarter experience for customers and agents without sacrificing something?
All this talk about modernizing the customer experience can quickly get overwhelming. You have many options to enhance the customer experience today with natural language speech, incorporating other channels like SMS, chat and even visual IVR or go all the way to leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.
Release 7.7 of Blueworx Voice Response for Linux
Contact centers today are actively looking for opportunities to leverage enhanced self-service as well as proactive outbound interactions that drive customer loyalty and reduce the cost to serve. In today’s competitive market, where maximizing customer loyalty while reducing costs are key business metrics, offering a proactive approach to common reasons customers call in is imperative. The dissemination of time-sensitive or personal information delivered quickly and consistently is a requirement to meet today’s customer demands. The essence of outbound calling or text messaging is being proactive, preemptively contacting a customer before they have to contact you for information. That is why Blueworx continues to make features like outbound calling more efficient and effective for businesses.
Compared to even 5 years ago, technology has never before been so integrated into our daily lives. Look around you, how many internet-connected devices are within arm’s reach? These things are only going to become more important with each passing day. So yes, start stocking up on power strips now. As we rely on our devices for our everyday needs, the lines between online and real life are blurred. Because of that, people are going to need more than one type of experience to stay engaged, an Omni-Channel Experience.
Let’s face it, contact centers are not that exciting – but times, they are a changing. This next year the focus across the board will be on the customer journey. Customers are not just buying products anymore, they are buying experiences. We’ve put together a list of facts to show you just how crucial the customer experience is and will continue to be, both now and in the future.
Do you hate waiting in line? On hold? Most of us would certainly answer, “yes.” However, the psychology behind waiting in line says that most of us don’t hate waiting in line – we hate being bored. That’s why there are floor to ceiling mirrors in most large buildings near the elevator. It gives us all something to do (check other people out). In addition, one of the first people who studied the science behind waiting in line was AK Erlang. Some of you may recognize the last name – that’s right, he worked the probability and statistics behind the calculators that allow us to determine the lines/agents/bandwidth needed in a contact center based on busy hour traffic and average handle time.
“So what?” you ask.
The potential for chatbots to make a large mark in the contact center world is growing – automation being the largest driver. While they are in a very basic stage now, as with all things related to AI, chatbots get better the more you use them. Machine learning is different than human learning – it’s only as good as the data we feed it. Chatbots lack natural cognition to challenge inputs such as 1+1 = 3. But over time, patterns are established that will make chatbots “intelligent” enough to take on tasks that today don’t seem possible.
We are all exposed to some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on a daily basis. Whether we employ it for personal projects with Siri, on our device’s software to efficiently tag photos, or at the office with the likes of Watson or Alexa, it is obvious that the Age of AI is here.
Heath Terry, Head of Internet Research at Goldman Sachs, states, “We’re going from a world where people give machines rules to a world where people give machines problems and the machines learn how to solve them on their own.”
No longer is the phrase “customer service” being used, or even challenged. Instead, consumers everywhere have upped their game and demanded something even better – a “customer experience”. What does that even mean? Well, it’s like customer service but on a mai-tai-sipping-tropical vacation. Substantiated by research and behaviors, companies are giving these vacation-loving consumers exactly what they’re asking for. Out with the old, in with the new. But what exactly is the difference between customer service and customer experience? Let’s take a look.
