Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events

Posts Tagged :

Adexchange

GUEST BLOG: Live Chat… All talk?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

By Adexchange

Some love it, some hate it, and it has our agents juggling multiple customers at once.  Live chat divides conversation in more ways than one.

But is a communication platform which also encourages customers to multi-task a good thing? Or is it just another channel we must incorporate, manage and coach our teams to handle?

Research would suggest that live chat is ABSOLUTELY worth the fuss, for both our customers and contact centres.

Seeing as 90% of customers consider live chat helpful according to an ATG Global Consumer Trend Study (nectardesk.fr).

And once you’ve got your customers using the service, they are three times more likely to buy from you than regular web surfers would be (optilead.co.uk)

But in order to get these results, it’s all about keeping the focus.

So what is live chat and why was it introduced in the first place?

Remember good old MSN Messenger and you have live chat; an instant messaging service which enables an agent to speak to a customer online in real time.

The perks…

*It allows our agents to speak to more than one customer at once

*Customers feel they have more time to respond than in a phone call

*It’s appealing to a new demographic of customers, such as digitally-minded millennials

*It gives scope for fast, scripted responses to be given to common questions

How these perks can quickly become pitfalls…

*In reality, a live chat is no quicker than a phone call

*Having more than two conversations at once can negatively impact customer transactions (Customer Relationship Metrics)

*Chats are unpredictable because the customer feels no pressure to respond quickly

*Scripted responses can be alienating and robotic

Admittedly, these are some sticky corners to navigate…

But if live chat has the potential to help a business fly, it’s our job as contact centre managers to become pilots of this technology.

With the highest potential for customer satisfaction levels, at a whopping 73%, live chat is a lesson worth investing in. Phone support only keeps 44% of people happy, with email still lagging behind at 61%. (Econsultancy.com).

In short, customers are keen for and confident in live chat, and are more likely to become our regulars if we respond to that preference.

Tips to keep us kings of the live chat castle…

  • BE HUMAN:We should engage with our customers just as personally as we would over the phone. We want them to feel listened to, not typed at. Otherwise…we might as well be robots, and that doesn’t feel good for anyone!
  • MIRROR OUR CUSTOMERS:It’s tougher to gauge tone over text than when we ACTUALLY chat, so let’s take our customers’ lead. If they are friendly and chatty, we can reciprocate that warmth. If they’re formal and curt, we know not to overstep the line.
  • ANTICIPATE:Live chat can help us anticipate any problems our customer may have online. Online marketing company Logical Position improved their sales by 30%, by triggering automatic greetings which sensed when people were struggling with payment (livechatinc.com).
  • DON’T BITE OFF MORE THAN WE CAN CHEW: Live chat hasn’t proven to be time-saving. Instead, we’re using it for quality conversation, and to give some TLC to customers who prefer not to call up. Ideally, we should keep conversations to a maximum of two at once.
  • KEEP IT SIMPLE:Always start by asking the customer for their name, even if it Is a complicated reference number we need!
  • BRAND CONSISTENCY: We want to be personal and empathetic, but also consistent. A live chat conversation could evolve to a phone call with a different agent, so it’s important to maintain a transferable brand persona. It’s also possible that the live chat interchanges with a chatbot. Gartner estimates that 85% of customer interactions will involve chatbots by 2020. Consistent language helps keep the jump from robot to agent smooth.
  • KNOW OUR STUFF: Armed with the right information, we can keep our phrasing short and sweet, and our service helpfully concise.
  • USE THE TYPING INDICATOR FEATURE: This way our agents can see when our customer is about to reply, and be chomping at the bit to respond.
  • BE AVAILABLE: Why not extend live chat availability beyond phoneline hours? Even half an hour would allow agents to focus on live chats, resist rushing last minute phone calls, and give customers a sense of special ‘out of hours’ treatment.
  • REMEMBER, WE COULD GO VIRAL: Nothing’s private, with a click of a mouse our customer can share our conversation across the globe. So, we must be careful how we tread…
  • COACH OUR AGENTS: It’s unfair to expect our agents to manage live chat without any guidance. Are we happy for them to use emojis, GIFs and abbreviations? It’s a whole new world and our agents need guidance, coaching and support.

For more ideas, or help coaching your team on live chat, drop Adexchange a line… we’re already helping some of Europe’s most successful brands…

GUEST BLOG: Creating an effective Knowledge Base

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

By Helen Thain, Content Manager, Adexchange

The mind of a Contact Centre Manager is constantly whirring with ways to reduce agent workload whilst improving customer experience. An impossible task?

I don’t think so. Behind every good agent is a solid and reliable Knowledge Base.

An effective Knowledge Base, to help resolve customers simple and frequently occurring issues more quickly, lies behind the success of multiple channels. Emails, phone calls and chatbot dialogues all rely on a good, comprehensive and well written library of Knowledge Articles and Videos – giving agents exactly what they need at the click of a button.

Not only is the Knowledge Base there to help agents but as consumers we’re becoming increasingly tech-savvy and expect companies to evolve technology to meet the needs of our busy lives. Technology in the customer service industry is developing quickly and, when used effectively, can significantly reduce workload. Customers are more than happy to help themselves – it’s satisfying and painless for them and means fewer calls and emails for agents to handle!

75% of customers see self-service as ‘a convenient way to address customer service issues’ – Nuance Enterprise.

This multi-channel approach gives us plenty of scope to create separate Knowledge Bases for internal and external use.

Knowledge Articles vs. Video Articles

We already know that a great Knowledge Base is going to reduce agent workload and improve Contact Centre performance but what should we be including in this Knowledge Base?

Knowledge Articles are great for giving agents clear and effective answers to any of our customers’ more frequently asked questions. Just copy and paste the sections you need, add a bit of a personal touch and hey presto you’re done! But is that enough?

Did you know ‘the human brain can process video 60,000 times faster than text’? – Psychology Today

This can make a plain, text-based Knowledge Article seem a little behind the times.

A Video Article can take your plain, text-based article and turn it into an efficient and effective tool for both agents and customers.

Professional Video Articles, that last anything from 30 to 90 seconds, give viewers visual journeys with audio prompts (and a soundtrack!) – it’s the Contact Centre equivalent of an Oscar winning movie! Watch them online or on the go on your smart phone. Simple, effective and all absorbed 60,000 times faster than a Knowledge Article equivalent.

What makes a good Knowledge Base?

The dream Knowledge Base will have the perfect mix of classic text-based articles and professional videos. A Video Article is perfect for explaining processes like changing your login details or amending an order but probably won’t work so well when trying to explain why a customer’s order hasn’t arrived yet – that’s where the trusty, text-based Knowledge Article comes to the rescue.

Our Top Tips

  • Keep the Knowledge Articles short – people will lose interest and forget key information if they have to read a long piece of text
  • Use clear and simple layouts – short paragraphs and bullet points will help to highlight key information
  • Keep Video Articles under 2 minutes – any longer and the viewers’ attention will begin to fade
  • Finally, give the content of your Knowledge Base a K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Silly)

Great Knowledge Article content, clear layouts and streamlined Video Articles work together to create an effective Knowledge Base for agents – giving customers a faster, better and more effective response.

The result? An efficient and low-cost Contact Centre delivering exceptional customer service.

Want to know more? Get in touchwith us here at Adexchange to see how we can help improve the performance of your Knowledge Base.

GUEST BLOG: Chatbots – should we believe the hype?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

By James Rein, Senior Account Manager, Adexchange

Probably, yes. If you’re responsible for a contact centre and find your advisors listlessly answering the same, simple, non-specific questions every day then read on – a chat bot is likely to have a big impact on the efficiency of your operation.

‘In 2015, Swedbank achieved a 78% first contact resolution rate using a text based assistant which resulted in a 60% deflection from live assistance’ (issuu.com)

Impressive!

Let’s flip the perspective for a moment and think about things from the customer’s point of view. How many times have you sifted through pages and pages of FAQs, got bored, and thought ‘Nope, I’ll just call them’? How would it be if you could just type your question and get the answer straight away? Pretty nice, huh?

Chatbots aren’t infallible but it’s not the technology that could trip up your bot – that side of things is straightforward – it’s the effectiveness of the content.

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

What is a chatbot?

Think of a chatbot as the guardian of your FAQs and knowledgebase. It has access to all non-specific information any customer could possibly want and can deliver it to that customer instantly.

No need for any agent interaction, no need for customers to wait on hold for twenty minutes to get an answer and no lost business. That’s right – aside from improved efficiency generally, 53% of people are actually more likely to shop with a business they can message online. (Sproutsocial.com).

Just like advisors, chatbots evolve too. They might start life on your website and be set up to deal with your 30 most frequently asked questions. Within the first month of use a couple of trickier questions get asked and, at the same time, you get 5000 new ‘likes’ on Facebook.

You decide to add new questions and answers to your bot’s database and launch it in Facebook Messenger too. Then WhatsApp. Then you launch a new product and add FAQs about that as well. It’s easy to get all kinds of data relating to your bot’s performance and every reincarnation reduces the number of calls to your contact centre. This frees up your agents to deal with specific, more complex questions from customers.

So should I get one?

If your advisors are mostly occupied with intricate, customer specific questions then a chatbot probably isn’t going to be for you. However, if you’re inundated with calls from people asking questions they could easily have found the answer to online then yes, it’s definitely worth exploring the option of a chatbot.

The technology is only one part of the set up and, isn’t difficult or necessarily time consuming to get in place. The crucial element is making sure you get the content right.

In such a distracted world it’s time to ditch the corporate waffle and formal tone and really engage your customers by writing in a clear, informal and friendly way that they’ll find effective and refreshing.

Forget paragraphs of text – use white space, bullets, short sentences – and make your communication to the point and succinct.

A chatbot is only as good as the content powering it.

If you want to get more out of your Chatbot get in touch to see how we can help.

GUEST BLOG: It’s not the technology – It’s the content!

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

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.