By Suzy Hyatt, Adexchange

Investing in new Contact Centre technology is essential – but if our customers struggle to use this technology, getting a return on investment can be difficult…

So how do we make sure we get the most out of our technology? The simple answer is Content.

Assuming the technology we’ve put in place isn’t falling over (and assuming our network can take the capacity), if our customers aren’t doing what we want, then the content and customer journey could be affecting our ROI.

The result? Customers being driven back to more familiar (and expensive channels) like the IVR.

Worse still, if the channel we’re trying to drive our users down is really unappealing, they may give up on our brand completely – and go elsewhere.

So why does this failure happen?

1) No appeal

Think of the old English proverb ‘You canlead a horse to waterbut you can’t make him drink’.

A channel of communication must seem genuinely easy to use in order for our customers to even consider interacting with it. This is particularly true when it comes to the relatively ‘new’ channels that customers are less familiar with (think chatbots,portals, speech recognition).

2) Customers try – and fail – to use the new technology.

If we can successfully drive our customers towards our new technology channels, then that’s a great start.  But what happens if they struggle to use the channel once they’ve arrived?

If our chatbot is too robotic, our portal difficult to navigate or our payment platform’s speech recognition poorly tuned – people will give up and revert to a more comfortable channel of choice?

3) No investment in the customer journey

A lot of money is often invested into new technology. Specialist IT staff help to implement it – and highly skilled agents are hired to work on it (where applicable). But investment in the content and customer journey is often unintentionally overlooked. It’s vital the customer facing output (the content) is designed by customer communication specialists – who understand how to increase customer usage and increase ROI.

The Solution

How can we ensure we get the most out of our technology?  As mentioned, the secret lies in thecontentwe chose to wrap around the technology.

Let’s take a couple of examples;

1) A sophisticated speech recognition ID&V platform helps to reduce valuable AHT from busy agents – if used effectively.

We need to think about the following;

• Are the questions we’re asking too complex? If the user doesn’t understand what we want them to do they’ll be more likely to fail.
• If repeating the menu, it’s often effective to use different phrasing. This helps to catch people who didn’t understand what we asked the first time around.
• Do we need the user to have certain details to hand before they begin their automated journey? If so we need to tell them early on – and give them the opportunity to put the system on hold while they go and find what they need (rather than handing them off to a live agent).

We helped a national money lender increase their ID&V success from 35% to 55% – simply by making some changes to the existing audio messages. No further technology investment needed.

2) If we’re keen to increase our web self-service we need to make our portal easy to use.

Remember to ask these questions;

• What benefit does the channel of our choice give the customer? What’s in it for them?
• How easy is it for the customer to actually use our portal? What language are we using?
• Are our other channels too appealing? If so, we need to make our channel of choice more enticing.

We helped a global healthcare provider more than double its portal adoption (from 30% – 61%) by improving the content facing each user.

In short – we can spend millions on new technology, but it’s the customer facing output – the content – that touches our customers. So we must focus on making this customer facing interface as effective as possible.

If you want to get more ROI out of your technology get it touch to see how we can help.