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Customer

Contact Centres Need to ‘Communicate With Customers’

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A survey has revealed that an overwhelming majority of Brits have a negative perception of call centres.

90% surveyed by Aquarium Software admitted they expect to be sold something when answering a call from a centre even though that makes up just one quarter of calls made in the industry.

“These results are worrying,” according to managing director of Aquarium Software, Ed Shropshire, who believes a large factor in positively changing public opinion is adapting to modern technology.

“Only the right software can allow contact centres to interact with customers in a way they find acceptable,” added Mr Shropshire, explaining that “if a customer is asking you a question via Twitter, a reply via phone call is unlikely to be appreciated.”

Making use of these ‘omnichannel systems’ lets consumers contact on their terms, giving companies a stronger reputation.

“There are always going to be a small minority who do engage in unsolicited selling,” but says that the future of the industry will be led by those who are willing to offer more ways to communicate, which will help “show the public that contact centres are a valuable and worthwhile resource.”

5 trends transforming Call Centres in 2017

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The Call Centre industry is “evolving at a very rapid rate”, according to leading industry analyst Peter Ryan. “Whether it is new technologies, alternative points of delivery or taking on the growing multitude of channels needed to communicate with today’s mobile consumer, enterprises need reliability and quality,” he claims, whilst offering his predictions for 2017

 

1 Location and languages spoken will become less important

The rise of automation will see a change in how people interact with call centres. As computers and voice recognition continues to impress, new business models focussing this way will change current opinions and concepts on off-shore and nearshoring.

 

2 Central and Eastern Europe will provide huge UK opportunities

In the post-Brexit world, studies are already showing countries such as Romania and Poland are increasing as top outsourcing destinations, as the countries are building reputations for customer service and financial attractiveness.

 

3 Data Security is more important than ever

As technology becomes the backbone of the industry and payment options become quicker and easier, security has to keep up with the evolving world in order to prevent dangers such as data and identity theft.

 

4 The boom of Apps, Chatbots and Mobile

It is predicted that around 85% of customer interaction will be entirely automated by 2020, and the companies that can more quickly make that switch will be leading the pack.

 

5 The departure from traditional voice

In the world of instant messenger, digital interaction is becoming the communication of choice for younger generations. Call centres will need to open up more channels in order to appeal to as many customers as they can, including emails, live chat and a broader range of social media if they want to stay relevant with an increasingly tech-savvy customer base.

Improve your customers’ experience…

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Optimising the customer experience delivers significant revenue and performance benefits, yet only 14% of organisations feel they manage the end-to-end journey. Netcall’s integrated customer experience (CX) platform seamlessly manages interactions from start to finish. Deliver information to the right place at the right time, giving your agents a full view of each customer. Creating a positive customer experience every time helps retain customers, encourages repeat purchases and promotes peer recommendations.

w: netcall.com/liberty

e: getintouch@netcall.com

t: 0330 333 6100

Guest Blog, Stuart Dorman: Placing self-service at the heart of your customer journey

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Historically the customer contact sector has treated self-service as a lower cost alternative to the traditional contact centre model. Now, however, with customers looking for a much more seamless engagement experience – across sessions that might start with an app or a virtual assistant, transition into a webchat and then conclude with an email or voice dialogue – it’s no longer possible for organisations to adopt this simplistic attitude to self-service.

Instead the focus needs to be on creating effective, organisation-wide ‘Digital Front Door’ strategies that deliver exactly the right, contextualised balance between self-service, assisted service and the agent-focused contact centre model.

Fortunately, improving the customer experience and reducing the overall cost of customer engagement doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive concepts. Effective voice self-service can lower costs and reduce ROI – while still providing consumers with automation options that can dramatically simplify or improve the customer journey. Similarly, the latest proven voice biometrics technology – using natural voice patterns, not passwords, questions or PINs – can authenticate your customers naturally and effortlessly, and help provide an important service differentiator for your business.

At the same time, service providers can present customers with speech-enabled self-service solutions that are easy to use, reduce overall interaction times, and also allow you to intelligently route interactions to the right person within your organisation. Core speech recognition capability has improved dramatically with the invention of deep neural networks and continued increases in computing power. This has enabled a level of speech recognition accuracy that’s both of high quality and low latency in terms of responsiveness for everyday users.

We’re also now seeing the rise of high quality conversational interfaces; known variously as virtual assistants, voice assistants or chatbots. Facebook, for example, has its ‘M human-assisted’ chatbot service that sits within Messenger and can help in a variety of ways.

The continued rise of AI-enabled chatbots will of course have its issues. However, there’s no doubt that speech-enabled bots will continue to play an increasing role in future customer service journeys. While many organisations are still working out the best ways to deploy speech-enabled solutions or conversational UIs, their customers are already busy experiencing these technologies in other areas of their lives. Google, for example, estimates that its number of voice queries doubled in 2015 over the previous year. Apple reports that it receives over a billion information requests a week via its Siri assistant, while enterprise speech specialist Nuance says it now processes some 14 billion customer speech interactions each year.

As these innovations become more prevalent, there’s going to be continued consumer pressure for the kind of engagement experience offered by the market’s most innovative self-service technologies. This could present a challenge for the contact centre sector particularly, as many organisations simply don’t have the speech, conversation, customer journey and UX skills that are really needed to keep pace with accelerating industry best practice. It’s also probably going to be more difficult to keep up with best practice as customer service innovators extend self-service solutions with more robust natural language understanding, deeper contextual understanding and appropriate AI-enabled reasoning.

With Silicon Valley starting to really push forward with innovations such as Virtual Assistants, Augmented Reality and Conversational Commerce, the one thing that’s certain is that your carefully crafted customer journeys will require constant optimisation.

To find out more about how you can place self-service at the heart of your customer journey, contact me at sdorman@sabio.co.uk or visit www.sabio.co.uk

 

Stuart has over fifteen years’ experience in the customer service industry and is currently focused on helping contact centres to improve sales, productivity, quality and customer service through better use of technology, process optimisation and a focus on people. Stuart is a recognised as an industry thought leader; regularly producing thought provoking White Papers and speaking at industry events.

Industry Spotlight: ‘Customer of the Future’ report details expected consumer self-awareness within the next decade…

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According to new research conducted by The Institute of Customer Service, the current indecisiveness of the country’s economic and political landscape will present a further opportunity to empowering to a ‘new breed’ of customer.

Determining 12 key ‘factors of change’ expected to outline the business landscape in 2025, the ‘Customer of the Future’ report also highlights a series of potential scenarios facing UK organisations and suggests how they can start ‘future-proofing’ themselves in a bid to keep up with changing consumer trends.

Predictions made include the ‘mass consumerism’ trend ultimately becoming a thing of the past with a personalised service reigning supreme; as well as a greater influence on the ‘network economy’ resulting in competing organisations collaborating to build market share, and ensuring customers receive innovative products at a better value. With this said, an ‘unpredictable’ mindset will also be shared by customers of the future, as a reluctance to give out personal data and the attraction to personalisation may cause some problems for organisations to sustain customer loyalty.
Chief executive of The Institute of Customer Service, Jo Causon, said: “Customer behaviour is changing, and the future promises vast, exciting opportunities for new products and ways of delivering service. Yet in a climate of expanding choice, customers will also want integrated services and simple, straightforward experiences from companies they can trust. The challenge will be for organisations to understand both sets of needs and be able to move seamlessly between them.”
Researchers constructed seven pivotal recommendations to provide valuable advice to UK businesses; one of which is centred on the need for organisations to tighten their processes around the security of data – aspiring to a future scenario in which customers can give their personal information with confidence, and are assured of its long term security.
View the report infographic here 

Jabra unveils customer service challenges report…

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Surveying an approximate 3,200 ‘customer centric profiles’ in seven countries, a White Paper conducted by headset manufacturer, Jabra, has revealed that 73 per cent of decision-makers in call centric environments are experiencing an increase in the intricacy of customer queries.

The research, which monitored areas including; the value of call-centric workers; complexities surrounding digital transformation and customer service trends; and the factors in the productivity levels of staff members, also found that 55 per cent of consumers are likely to change their minds on purchasing a product due to poor customer service; despite 80 per cent of company bosses claiming that their levels of customer service are ‘superior’.

Read the full White Paper here