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?
Touchpoints are vital to the overall customer experience. It is during these moments, when a customer reaches out to you to conduct business, that your company has the opportunity to really put its best foot forward and leave a lasting impression. When too much emphasis is placed on these moments, though, it can actually have a negative impact. It will leave the customer feeling like the only time you truly care about them is when there is something to be gained by you.
Chat automation and other forms of artificial intelligence are effective in boosting customer engagement. The micro-experiences these tools create, however, do not account for even a fraction of a customer’s entire experience with your brand. If your company defines the customer experience by only a series of touchpoints, you’re missing out on a valuable source of information.
Successful enterprises understand the importance of customer loyalty. 52% of people stop using a company’s products or services based on bad customer service interactions. And their opinion matters. Users take reviews into account 88% of the time when deciding if they should start doing business with a company.
We live in a world where pizza delivery gets to your home faster than the police. No offense intended members of law enforcement. Rather, kudos to all those technologists out there that have enabled the consumer to consume their company’s product via a myriad of channels. Just the other day, I had to scramble to get a gift for a high school senior for his birthday. In a matter of moments I found a restaurant near the campus of the university he’ll attend in the fall, and was chatting on-line with someone at that restaurant about getting a gift card out to me ASAP because his party was in 3 days. This wasn’t some mega-chain restaurant, but rather a single location, local business. So, if you work for a company that doesn’t have an omni-channel contact center presence – get moving…quickly, because if Fatback’s Smokin’ Racks in Quincy, IL has web chat, and you don’t…well, you can draw your own conclusions.
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.
“Few technologies are more despised than interactive voice response (IVR).
It doesn’t help that big companies have largely replaced the dreaded ‘press one for sales’ with voice recognition technologies. Instead of repeatedly pressing zero, we can all now repeat the word ‘representative’ until we finally get a human on the line. Is this progress?
It’s no wonder, then, that IBM decided to exit the IVR market a few years ago, selling off its WebSphere Voice products to a holding company that rebranded its new offering Blueworx in early 2016.
Out of the gate, Blueworx faced multiple challenges: not only does IVR top consumers’ most-hated list of technologies, but established incumbents like Avaya , Cisco Systems, Genesys, and Aspect dominate the space.
To make matters worse, Blueworx had no choice but to leverage older software that IBM had optimized for its own hardware, as well as AIX, its aging flavor of UNIX.
Playing ball by the incumbents’ rules was a losing proposition. The only way to compete was to reinvent the IVR game.” Continue reading on Forbes.com.
So, who are we exactly and what is it that we really do? I mean of course besides being an awesome team of people who might play ping pong between conference calls and rattle an employee in the hot seat once a month by asking them absurd questions (“you’re an ordained minister?!” True story.). We are more than that, we do actually work. Well most of us anyway. And not only do we work hard, but we love what we do. So, while some of us may wear socks with sandals or choose Batman over Robin, we’d like to share with you what Blueworx is all about.
Over the course of the next 12 days we will be showing you who Blueworx is. By day #12, we are confident you will not only choose Blueworx for your business, but shout out to all of your friends (real or Facebook) all of the reasons why you think we rock (and not because most of us really do believe in aliens).
The holidays are in full swing and even if you couldn’t tell already by the Christmas lights that adorn the many homes, you definitely can tell by the wait times, especially when calling into customer service. Two days before Thanksgiving I received text messages notifying me that packages I had ordered from an online giant had been delivered. Awesome, I thought. I love how technology has advanced so much that I knew the exact moment to leave my warm office chair to open the front door. Only this time as the chill blew into my face, my porch was empty. No package, and definitely not two that were clearly marked as delivered just minutes before.
In my last article on virtual assistants and bots improving CSAT by cutting down on boredom (https://www.blueworx.com/do-you-hate-waiting-in-line/ ), one thing I didn’t address was how to add automation to the contact center without it being perceived as just an extension of the IVR. Because, let’s face it, most people don’t like IVR, and few of them understand that without IVR, product costs would increase. So, how do you use chatbots and virtual assistants without adding to the frustration of the customer?
