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Business Decision Makers: Their CX concerns, and how to resolve them

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By Dan Burkland, President at Five9

As the cost-of-living crisis forces customers to tighten their belts, effective and receptive customer service remains the key to maintaining success. Focusing on customer experience (CX), even through periods of economic instability, can increase a company’s profitability by up to 2% and shareholder return by up to 10%.

Business leaders are now faced with difficult decisions, and CX teams must ensure they are looking at three key goals: reducing expenditure, increasing empathy with customers, and prioritising adaptability in an ever-changing environment.

Businesses are facing waves of resignations as talent teams struggle to source and retain employees. It’s not just the well-being of customers that CX teams need to consider – it is their employees too. When employees are motivated and knowledgeable, they are able to give better customer service, resulting in improved customer experience – but that only comes from improving the employee experience (EX).

Investing in new areas might initially seem counterintuitive during economic turbulence. But compromising on CX directly impacts brand loyalty – nearly a third (32%) of customers stated they would stop doing business with a brand after just one poor experience.

A recent study of business decision-makers identified key strategies in helping businesses to transform the experience of their call centre agents, and consequently, customer experiences.

Unlocking the informed and empathetic agent

The CX study found that while 86% of contact centre decision makers report an increase in the volume of interactions, 72% also note an increase in agent turnover. Contact centres are clearly a casualty of the Great Attrition, with employees reevaluating their approach and demanding greater flexibility, more remote working options, and a stronger focus on well-being. In fact, more than half (54%) of contact centre employees are not willing to go back to the office full time.

Therefore, organisations must look to cloud-based technologies to offer a seamless agent experience from home to office. With all customer data and comms in the cloud, agents can securely access the information they need, wherever they choose to work.

However, it is not just a question of making your organisation more attractive to retain and hire agents, but also ensuring that you have the technology in place to cope with this deluge of interactions at speed. Currently, less than half (47%) of contact centres are starting to adopt AI to provide agent assistance, which is essential for giving employees the information they need to drive quality interactions at scale.

Bringing together human empathy and judgment, with the speed and scale of AI offers the best of both worlds for customer service. More than half (53%) of decision-makers reported that agents need emotional intelligence and empathy, with customer issues becoming increasingly complex, so collaborative intelligence technologies should be a key area for both CX and EX investment.

Making every interaction meaningful

Empathy has replaced expediency as customers seek a more human customer experience. Customers want and expect agents to truly listen to their needs, understand and identify with their situation and feelings, solve their issues, and answer their questions effectively. Above all, they want to connect on whatever channel is most convenient for them at that moment. Therefore, businesses must ensure that however customers choose to get in contact, they can resolve these queries simply, quickly and on a variety of channels.

Encouragingly, the majority (95%) of contact centre decision-makers say their organisation provides an omnichannel experience. In fact, 40% of customer interactions now take place via non-voice digital channels, with 69% expecting more than 40% of customer support interactions to be fully self-handled by 2024. Organisations are clearly stepping up with expanded digital and self-service options, to provide options that ‘meet their customers where they are’ and reduce costs.

Yet nearly a third (30%) stated that these channels are not integrated. Organisations must therefore work to bring customer and contextual data together to ensure a seamless experience across every channel. Fortunately, by integrating all data within the cloud, organisations will create a 360-degree view of each customer to enable seamless experiences across any channel or touchpoint. Whether customers opt for ever-growing self-service options or want to chat to an agent over the phone, ensuring that the right data is in the right place to inform interactions is essential.

Looking towards the future, it’s paramount that businesses act decisively to address CX challenges. Self-service, multi-channel and AI offerings are quickly becoming commonplace for customers – organisations must provide their agents with the right software to work as efficiently and reactively as possible. By bringing the focus to both employee experience and customer experience, customer loyalty and satisfaction can be maintained, increasing profit in periods when it is needed the most.

Harnessing digital tech to enable personalised CX in 2022

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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By Brian Atkinson, Vice President and General Manager EMEA, Five9

These five trends outline why we can expect more companies to harness digital technologies in 2022 to enable smarter, more personalised customer experiences…

1 – Replacing legacy infrastructure with digital tech

2022 must see the complete uprooting of the ‘press 1’ tree of frustration that is IVR. With accelerated investment across channels such as webchat, SMS and WhatsApp, investment in voice and call experiences is sorely lacking. Reliance on mazes of IVR routing continues to waste customers’ precious time and often fails to provide the solutions they need.

This needs to change, and we are already seeing forward-thinking organisations enhancing the voice experience through next-level IVA (intelligent virtual agents) technologies that shift away from poor, legacy IVR technology and into a natural language, conversational experience underpinned by AI (Artificial Intelligence). It’s time to embrace seamless customer experiences powered by modern technologies and consign frustrating IVR experiences, bogged down in obsolete technology, to the bin.

2 – Empowering human agents with intelligent automation

AI has been slow to realise its potential while organisations have been asking what it can actually deliver in the CX arena, and how. The confusion is now lifting as we are seeing how AI capabilities can holistically impact the entire customer journey. We’re now at a point where we can entrust a ’digital workforce’ of intelligent virtual agents, underpinned by AI to deliver experiences for us.

With practical AI beginning to crystallise, we’ll see customer service increasingly powered not only by humans who have rich data and insight at hand, but by digital agents that can also respond to many requests intelligently. With more AI deployments coming to life in the next 12 months, this interest will turn from curiosity to action. We will see more organisations seeking to harness AI to enable a digital workforce of intelligent automation while empowering ‘real-life’ customer experience agents to deliver that ever-vital human touch.

3 – Shifting from siloed customer data to boundaryless data access 

We’ve been talking about silos for many years but are now truly starting to see those break down, especially in the large enterprise. In the next 12 months, organisations that want to exercise innovation must focus on ending data silos and embracing boundaryless and secure access to data across their systems. Opportunities for automation, AI, machine learning – and even some of the most basic insights are being lost due to continued siloing of data.

This can even go beyond stamping out internal silos, to embracing a decentralised data link approach, leveraging technologies like blockchain, and using cloud-based AI services by vendors such as Google or IBM Watson. Here, third-party services can anonymously analyse millions of customer interactions to help train natural language processing systems, for example. This feeds back into application innovation for all. For example, the development of automated dashboards for agents, who can gain amazing insight into the customer, immediately, at the right time and the right place. Without boundaryless data, this type of innovation cannot be realised.

4 – Enabling empathy-driven customer experiences 

With supply chain issues looking to roll forward into the next year, there must be a continued focus on empathy as part of the customer experience. While organisations may not be able to exert control over many of the variables affecting the supply chain – chip shortages and port blockages, for example – they can return to the six pillars of customer experience, in particular empathy, personalisation, and effort.

This means clear and regular communication, flexibility and understanding. At its most basic, sticking to rigid returns policies at a time like this won’t serve anyone. Levelling up, this can mean offering customers personalised options when disruption does hit. For example, if a customer has ordered a new car and we know that chip delays will delay delivery, can they be contacted in advance to choose whether the cruise control option they selected is essential, or just a nice to have? If not, perhaps they would be happy to accept a different model sooner?

Resolving frustrations and ensuring that customers feel heard and valued will have higher stakes than ever. For example, our research shows that nearly half (47%) of consumers said they are likely to share negative experiences from online shopping on social media platforms. This proves that retailers are just one bad interaction away from a social storm, threatening brand loyalty across the board.

It’s not about delivering the impossible, but about having the data and tools we need to be able to communicate empathically and provide options and flexibility. Technology can help identify these opportunities and then deliver feedback on how that flexibility was received by the customer, helping to power the next experience, for the next customer. As such, technology will open more doors for companies to deliver empathy-driven, personalised experiences that engender loyalty even in the face of disruption.

5 – Cloud ubiquity to underpin personalised CX 

Without widespread cloud adoption, none of the previous innovations will be realised. Innovative organisations know that, and 2022 will see the continuing march towards cloud ubiquity enabling smarter, more powerfully personalised customer experiences. The benefits of cloud adoption are myriad: flexibility, reliability, agility. Testament to that, around 75% of organisations are now taking a cloud-based approach to customer experience.

Both smaller organisations and large enterprises are moving to cloud models to take advantage of the latest technologies powering application development, such as Kubernetes and Docket Containers. When it comes to novel adoption of AI, of NLP and IVAs, cloud is the enabler. It allows organisations to take advantage of third-party innovation, layering of APIs, and access to capabilities way beyond the capabilities of on-premises. In the next 12 months there is no question that the cloud will dominate customer experience conversations, and those that are still wavering are set to get left behind.

UK ‘the most unforgiving country’ when it comes to customer service

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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More than a third of people (38%) in the UK felt that their experience with customer service has got worse over the last 12 months, making it the highest figure out of the US and Europe.

That’s according to the Customer Service Index 2021, produced by Five9, which found nearly half of UK respondents (44%) are very unlikely to be willing to do business after poor customer experience – making it the least forgiving country.

And almost two-fifths (39%) of UK consumers have left a brand they were previously loyal to over the last 12 months, with the biggest losers being retail and consumer products (28%) followed by banking and financial services (15%).

Five9’s Customer Service Index looks at what consumers believe makes good or bad customer service. Other interesting points from the research include:

  • Phone is still king: More than half (51%) of total consumers (US and Europe) still prefer the phone as the best means of communicating with customer services. Yet compared with other countries, the UK is most likely to use webchat (20%)
  • When asked the preferred channel for urgent/sensitive issues, the number for by phone increased to 65%. Note that for the UK respondents, that number increased to 68%
  • Over a quarter (26%) of UK consumers are more willing to use social media platforms for customer service than they were a year ago
  • Virtual agents: Two-fifths (40%) of UK consumers are already using virtual agents where available. Nearly a fifth (18%) haven’t yet used them but would if they were available, showing a huge opportunity for contact centres to capitalise on virtual agents
  • The UK is still not ready for video: Over two-fifths (42%) of consumers would prefer not to use a video call with a customer service agent. Whereas in Spain, less than a third (29%) aren’t comfortable

Brian Atkinson, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA from Five9, said: “Our Customer Service Index suggests some correlation between customer service and brand loyalty. Most businesses have faced unprecedented uncertainty over the last 12 months and simply cannot afford to lose customers. It’s therefore essential to get customer service right – especially for UK consumers. To do this it is ultimately about human connection, which is the underlying theme across the survey results. The phone is still popular because consumers want to feel like they are talking to a real person, and are being understood and listened to. Yet, they still expect the same across chatbots and social media. Human connection needs to therefore be at the heart of every communication – even if an actual person isn’t present.”

You can read the full report here.