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GUEST BLOG: Chatbots – should we believe the hype?

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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: Connecting customers with conversational Artificial Intelligence

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Jonathan Sharp, Director, Britannic Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new technology and has been around for a long time but Gartner is estimating that by 2022, 30% of customer service experiences will be handled by conversational agents. Companies need to develop strategies to harness the power of AI to digitally transform and automate core services in the contact centre to deliver a seamless and superior customer service.

Companies should be aware, as with any new technology that you shouldn’t rush ahead to incorporate it into your contact centre. Follow our top tips to deploying AI in the contact centre to make sure you get it right.

  • Strategy is Everything

Without a strategy a project is doomed to fail before you even start. As when introducing any new technology into your business, it is essential that you plan a strategy from the offset to understand what you want to achieve with AI, and how to go about it.

  • Bring on the Solution Provider

A Solution Provider who is experienced in real time applications and systems integration will be able to work closely with you to discover your needs and requirements. Helping you put together a technology road map and strategy to solve business problems transforming processes and improving customer service.

They will ascertain what objectives you want your digital assistant to achieve, whether it’s to generate a sales lead or answer and process a customer service enquiry. Then to look at the next level on how the digital assistant will interact with the contact centre agents and the wider organisation if required. Once you have covered the objectives that you want to achieve and the processes required to set up. You can decide on the look and feel, conversational tone and content that you want to show.

  • Walk Before you can Run

When deploying AI – virtual digital assistants into the contact centre, it is advisable to have a comprehensive CRM and multi-media contact centre strategy as part of your overall digital transformation process. Again, a Solutions Provider can assist you with this.

  • Your Number One Agent

A virtual digital assistant has endless ability to self-learn whether that’s to learn the content from your website and or from customer conversations that take place in webchat. They also have the ability to recognise and pre-empt the needs of customers during similar interactions in the future.

They can be programmed to produce answers to questions and resolve issues by completing web forms during conversations. When the customer wants to speak to a human they can be transferred to a customer service agent when necessary.

It is advisable to make the digital virtual assistant, the first point of contact for website users because often the initial stage is customers information gathering or requesting answers to basic questions. This enables contact centre agents to focus on complex enquiries handing over information sourcing to the digital assistant. 

  • Eliminate Form Abandonment

Help eliminate high form abandonment on busy websites and for those who are looking to deploy an extremely efficient web chat in response to rising demand for self-service and one-touch communication channels.

  • Bringing in the Numbers with AI

Industries such as retail and travel have started to embrace the technology and reap the benefits. Britannic Technologies provides a conversational artificial intelligence solution called Ami that has already helped companies like Cruise 1stto boost profit by 47%. A self-learning digital assistant, Ami reads the Cruise 1stwebsite in real time and independently decides how to use the knowledge to respond to enquiries and achieve predefined business goals. These can include generating sales leads or providing customer support by interacting with website visitors.

The company found that their sales agents were taking general, information seeking enquiries although they needed to be focused on sales calls. Now, Ami handles the customer research that previously would have blocked the telephone lines. She is delivering revenue to the business and the conversion rate in the call centre has increased from 20% to 22%. 

  • Integration is Key

Systems integration is vital when deploying AI for it to be truly effective.

You will require a Solutions Provider who is experienced in integration and they will assess what technology you currently have in place. What technology you require and do you want it on-premise or via the cloud? You can then identify where and how a digital assistant can be integrated into your existing systems in the back office and the front.

  • A Single View

A Forrester survey revealed that 64% of the survey respondents said their greatest obstacle is creating a single view of customer data and information when improving CRM capabilities. And more than half acknowledged they struggle with creating customer insight to drive decision-making.

When a customer service agent deals with a customer’s enquiry they are often faced with several screens, this is cumbersome and difficult to manage. A Solution Provider will integrate a digital assistant into the contact centre so customers and agents are presented with a single user interface where all interactions can be completed on a single screen. This helps to make the customers journey seamless, and makes the agent’s job easier at the same time, enabling them to deliver a better experience.

Agents can also view the screen of the digital assistant so they have visibility of all chats and can access both real-time and historical interactions.  For example, contact centre managers can use this information to analyse how many customers have logged complaints, call about specific issues etc. 

  • Augmenting the Agent’s Role

AI helps contact centre agents to get rid of the mundane everyday tasks. This could include anything from call routing to answering basic questions that an auto attendant or Web Real Time application could deal with. The more advancement in technology in the call centre, the more contact centre agents’ roles will be refocused on soft skills to deliver empathetic, personal service and advice. Together, these developments will help to improve customer experiences overall.

A digital assistant can also reduce the workload for the customer service team enabling them to deal with more complex enquiries resulting in a richer customer experience and adding the personal touch. Their ability to prioritise enquiries in terms of importance and urgency can even help to ensure that human agents are involved exactly where they need to be at any given time.

  • Opportunity NOT a Threat

Artificial intelligence is the opportunity that busy customer services teams have been waiting for. If you get it right from the start and work with a Solution Provider experienced in real-time applications, contact centre technology, and system integration then the benefits of increased revenue, improved communications and better customer service will be worth it.

For more information, visit:

https://www.btlnet.co.uk/solutions/contact-centre/contextual-apps-and-ai

GUEST BLOG: Why operators should be open to using flexible staff

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Could a flexible workforce be right for your business? There are five key benefits for you to consider, says Coople…

Matching and optimising your staffing levels to the business you are experiencing can be a challenge, especially when you need to maintain high standards throughout the customer experience. A flexible, adaptable workforce provides a solution. Yet, many firms aren’t open to flexible working opportunities.

So, could flexible working be right for your business? There are five key benefits to consider when you’re weighing up the pros and cons with your operations in mind.

  • It’s estimated that the average business can improve their margins by 10-20% simply by using the right mix of contracted and on-demand staff for your business.
  • With a database of flexible employees to tap into, you’re in a better position to cover unexpected staff absences or planned holidays without your customer experience suffering as a result.
  • It maintains your standards and procedures. With a flexible workforce, you know you already have trained, experienced staff that you can turn to when you need them most.
  • It can be a bonus for some potential employees who prefer a more flexible approach, helping you to secure the top talent.
  • When you have strategic goals in mind, a flexible workforce can provide you with the short-term expertise that you need.

For a flex pool to work effectively, it is essential for management to balance tasks and responsibilities between permanent and flexible workers. A unified pool can automate processes and add to the value chain, covering areas such as, recruitment, on-boarding, and payroll through to performance management and quality assurance, allowing you to focus your time and resources on other business aspects. Flexible pools combined with an innovative platform allow you to remove the need to filter through CVs, co-ordinate multiple payments, and much more.

Speak to us to find out more.

GUEST BLOG: Superagents – 6 reasons to celebrate

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Rather than fear robots taking over the contact center, Nick Smith at Teleopti says it’s time to harness the power of both worlds to improve the customer experience. Here he outlines six reasons to celebrate today’s superagents…

You often hear about the struggle between man versus machine and robots taking over agents in the contact center, but it’s not quite that black and white.  According to Dr Nicola Millard at BT, the more likely scenario is “man plus machine”, a winning combination where “smart people partnered with smart machines have the power to superpower us.”[i]

Our own experience at Teleopti suggests that both human agents and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have a powerful role to play.  On the one hand, AI and chatbots are simultaneously revolutionizing customer service and elevating the status of agents. For example, WeChat in China is one of the most successful pioneers of chatbots supplying 10 million businesses and enabling people to hail a taxi, order food, pay a bill and book a doctor’s appointment without human intervention.[ii]

On the other hand, AI is only as good as the data that fuels it and the things AI finds hard are the qualities that make humans unique: conversation, empathy, creativity, intuition and negotiation.

The silver bullet solution for today’s customer journey
The combination of AI and well scheduled human agents, with the right skills, might be the silver bullet for effective customer service but are agents ready to support today’s customer journey? By the time a customer gets to speak to a live agent, the chances are they have already used your mobile app, searched for answers on your website and trawled numerous YouTube clips to no avail.  They are frustrated and want to speak to someone who knows all the steps they’ve taken, why they are frustrated and how to solve their query from one single encounter of the human kind.  In short, they are looking for a superagent!

To create a team of superagents, organizations need to re-think their learning environment, capture an organization-wide talent pool in a centralized Workforce Management (WFM) solution and then add Real-Time Adherence (RTA) to re-allocate idle time to training.  Through advanced forecasting, scheduling and competence management, human agents will remain more productive and valuable than robots can ever be.  Let’s take a closer look.

Six reasons to celebrate superagents

  1. Dealing with complex conversations – counter-intuitively, digitalization has elevated the role of the contact center agent and businesses are paying a premium for this new breed of superagent.  Nowadays, the calls agents handle take longer, are more complex and require moral judgment and empathy.  What is more, whereas the computer “says no” humans have the power to negotiate mutually acceptable outcomes for customers leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and profitability.
  2. Emotional Intelligence – being on the front line, agents have the benefit of direct contact to truly understand the emotional triggers behind what customers want.  The best agents will also be able to read through a conversation, for example with a chatbot, before picking up seamlessly with the customer.  Wise organizations then blend agent intuition with the scientific evidence of speech analytics technology to improve future customer conversations.
  3. Collaboration – successful agents work closely with other departments to get the answers and support they need to think outside the box and come up with their own ideas for delighting customers.  Help agents engage proactively across the organization by giving them an effective set of collaborative tools such as internal chat and enterprise social media.
  4. Flexibility – the beauty of the human brain is adaptability.  If one solution doesn’t work for a customer, agents can use all their powers of conversation, empathy, creativity, intuition and negotiation to find the right one.  Then add WFM technology into the mix to produce flexible schedules and manage your precious talent and resources effectively.
  5. Tact and diplomacy – this is where the human touch comes into its own because AI driven robots learn responses based on the data fed into them but humans can interpret and act on that data to deliver highly personalized customer interactions. The emergency services and organisations with a large proportion of emotional or complex enquiries will always rely on humans to accommodate their customers’ specific needs and conduct sensitive, tactful and diplomatic conversations.
  6. Just being Human!  – good customer service starts with people rather than machines.  It is your human agents who know if customers are happy and which channels they prefer and it’s their human managers who will act on customer feedback, improve calls scripts and agent training and then enhance business processes that proactively manage ‘predictable’ situations and resolve problems quickly.

Of course, AI is radically transforming customer interactions but there is no substitute for the human touch when it comes to closing sales calls or delivering an exceptional, personal customer experience.

Nick Smith is Business Manager for UK and Ireland at Teleopti.

[i] Botman vs. Superagent: man vs machine in the future of customer experience” – white paper by Dr Nicola Millard, Head of Customer Insight & Futures, Global Services Innovation Team at BTGloballces Innovation Team, BT

[ii] Botman vs. Superagent: man vs machine in the future of customer experience” – white paper by Dr Nicola Millard, Head of Customer Insight & Futures, Global Services Innovation Team at BT (page 10)

Data is not enough for better customer experiences: Use workflows to channel it where it’s needed

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By Geoff Land, MD, Infinity CCS

A few weeks ago, we looked at how important it is to develop a ‘Single Customer View’ of your data if you are to deliver a great customer experience. We saw how the arrival of GDPR gives companies an opportunity to catalogue their data to create such a view. But once you’ve done that, exactly how do you use that data to improve customer experience? The answer is to get it into agents’ hands exactly at the moment during each interaction that they need it…

Failure to let data flow is behind most bad customer experiences

There are many ways to design great customer experiences, but most of them have one thing in common: efficiency. It is the efficient flow of information from customer to company, and company to customer, that ultimately makes for a happy customer.

Whether a customer is querying a bill, placing an order, cancelling an order, setting up a payment method, reporting a problem, or chasing a delivery, what they want is their issue dealt with quickly, ideally in a single, short interaction.

Customers find it frustrating when they get transferred between departments, need a call back, or have to wait on hold. The reasons these things happen are nearly always due to complex internal processes that even well-trained agents find difficult to follow; data siloes between different departments; and agents having to log in to and use multiple IT systems to access information or data input forms.

Having a “Single Customer View” of your data streamlines the process by eliminating all your data siloes. It essentially allows an agent or system to access in one place all the information about a given customer (at least, all that is relevant to their own role and appropriate for their security level).

But even if all that data is now sitting in a single system or knowledge base, it still doesn’t streamline interactions very much if agents still have to access multiple other interfaces to actually get things done.

What’s needed is an interface that pulls everything together – data, processes, and systems – into a single view for the agent.

Agents need the right tools as well as the right data

In recent studies, such as Dimension Data’s Benchmarking Report, companies say they are struggling to deliver exceptional customer experience for a number of reasons including limited technology budgets, complex internal processes, lack of multichannel, insufficient or incomplete customer data, and overly complicated IT systems.

To deliver what customers want it is important that the appropriate technology system, business process, and customer transaction data are all immediately available to an agent (or automated system) at the right time during a customer interaction.

Most processes can be broken down into simple steps, which means that with the right software agents can be guided through these steps one at a time in a flexible manner. Instead of logging in to multiple systems all the information and input screens the agent needs are presented to them in a single user interface.

This type of robust workflow results in faster, more accurate customer interactions, less hold time, fewer call backs, and no need to transfer customers between different teams (unless your internal structure demands it – and if it does you should consider changing that where possible).

In our experience companies deploying workflow solutions in their contact centres on average see a 20% boost in productivity. Which is why we’re even seeing this type of technology deployed in emergency command centres (i.e. 999 and 911 centres) where just improving call response by seconds can make the difference between life and death.

Behind the scenes is where all the magic happens

The above benefits can be applied to any channel and with little capital investment as no existing hardware or software needs to be replaced. This is because there is no need to integrate existing systems and data sources with each other. They can all continue operating just as they do now, in their own siloes.

Instead, everything gets integrated into the agent desktop via the workflow using APIs (Application Program Interfaces). This vastly simplifies the process of integrating multiple systems because they don’t have to ‘talk’ to one another, just to the workflow.

Let’s say a customer has called in (or is using webchat, or Messenger, it doesn’t matter) to change their address and query a previous payment. Rather than having to access different software applications to perform these tasks, the agent first runs a workflow which includes an interface they can use to input the new address. It also shows the old address and other information they need to confirm the customer’s identity.

Next the agent opens another workflow they can use to search through the customer’s past transactions. While these all really sit in another database on another IT system (or several) they are brought together in a single view in the workflow. The agent can search for the appropriate transaction, pull up further information about it, and launch further workflows if they need to make a change, add a note, or escalate the query.

The workflow software acts as a central point of control, allowing data to be drawn into it from multiple siloes and systems, and for the agent to input data back into those systems. If all that existing data has been catalogued to provide the “Single Customer View” then the meta-tags that pull it all together can be used by the workflow to find and associate pieces of data more effectively.

For more information on how to create a Single Customer View download Infinity CCS’s e-Guide here: http://www.infinityccs.com/gdpr-and-single-customer-view-guide/

GUEST BLOG: Elevating the role of self-service – 8 Top Tips

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Self-service has a greater role to play than simply reducing the number of voice calls into contact centres.   Mashud Ahmed of Puzzel explains more…

The role of self-service is in a state of transformation as contact centre leaders look for smarter ways to meet customer demand and corporate business requirements. Research by ContactBabel indicates that 80% of organisations offer some form of self-service with web self-service and telephony self-service or voice IVR being the most widely adopted across contact centres of all sizes.[i]  When it comes to other forms of self-service adoption, by far the most prevalent are FAQs (83%) followed by self-help customer videos at 23% and virtual agents at nearly 10%.[ii]

Self-service is growing but it has a far greater role to play than simply reducing the number of calls coming into the contact centre.   Puzzel’s latest white paper outlines the options and explains how to create an effective self-service strategy supported by the latest cloud-based contact centre technology.

8 Top Tips for Self-Service

An important rule to remember is that self-service shouldn’t be left to chance.  A successful self-service implementation comes down to a clear, carefully thought-out process that puts the customer at the heart of everything.  Puzzel’s white paper offers 8 top tips to maximise self-service in contact centres including:

Have a clear goal

Start by questioning your organisation’s true motives for deploying self-service?  Whatever the reason, make sure the customer is the key motivator.  Give customers what they really want and consider rewarding them for using self-service.

Focus on existing self-service assets

Find out what works and what does not work by focusing on your existing self-service assets while looking for opportunities to improve their value.

Make the experience more engaging

Customer intimacy is the name of the game.  Why not use tools such as speech recognition to bring a human element to voice IVR?  Customers can ‘speak’ with the added bonus of round-the-clock self-service availability for example to look up their bank balance, pay their utility bills, purchase theatre tickets or book flights.

Look beyond IVR

Today’s self-service options are varied and appeal to different senses from automated speech recognition, web self-service including search text and FAQs, bots, virtual agents to the latest Smartphone apps and Visual IVR.

Zero out the “zeroed out to an agent” statistics

It is estimated that typically 17%[iii] of all calls that go into a self-service option are “zeroed-out” when the customer decides they would actually prefer to speak with a live agent. Remember to listen to what customers want and avoid complex IVR functionality.

Consider Visual IVR

Smartphones make it possible to offer visual representations of IVR menus.  Visual IVR can be used to send video presentations such as relevant ‘how to’ YouTube clips, while waiting for an agent.

Bridging the gap with bots

Bots offer a powerful way to build a bridge between the digital and human world.  They are a powerful addition to an organisation’s self-service portfolio.  The secret is to choose the right bot for your contact centre.

Take a closer look at virtual agents

Virtual agents often appear as an embedded widget on support pages, sometimes fronted with an avatar, inviting customers to engage via text in the hunt for answers.  Whether you decide to use bots or virtual agents, be sure to make them an intrinsic part of your self-service offering to deliver far greater levels of personalisation.

Good self-service should be customer-focused and become a part of the customer journey.  Take on board these 8 simple strategies to get it right and you’ll be rewarded with customer loyalty, healthy profits and a distinct competitive advantage.

To download Puzzel’s latest white paper entitled “8 Top Tips to Make Self-Service a Success”, visit www.puzzel.com

[i] The UK Contact Centre Decision-Marker’s Guide 2017-2018
[ii] Call Centre Helper – What Contact Centres are Doing Right Now (2017 edition)
[iii] The UK Contact Centre Decision-Maker’s Guide 2017-2018

GUEST BLOG: Is your data the key to delivering a better customer experience?

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By Geoff Land, MD, Infinity CCS

When looking at the challenges of delivering the type of multi-channel, digital customer experiences that are being demanded of businesses today, most CX professionals cite the current limitations of their technology, people, or processes.

While it’s true that those are the challenges most companies encounter, these are generally expensive and time-consuming problems to solve – if they can ever be truly solved at all. The business and technology landscapes change so quickly that as soon as a company has caught up on what customers want now, they are already on to the next thing.

What often gets overlooked is that delivering great customer experiences is really about allowing information to flow as freely and as quickly as possible between the customer and company and back again. As important as they are, technology, people, and processes are just conduits for that information, and the much-hyped digital and automated channels just new ways for customers to access it.

Efficiently storing, indexing, and processing the huge amounts of customer data that companies now hold can vastly improve customer experience.

The joined-up business

To deliver the customer experiences being demanded of you today, your contact centre’s processes, technologies, staff, and data must be all aligned to the same ends. Specifically, the right piece of technology or software, the most appropriate business process, and the relevant customer and transaction data all need to be made immediately available to the agent, or automated system such as a chatbot, that is interacting with a customer.

Where there are limited budgets to invest in technology, lengthy internal processes, complex agent desktop tools, a lack of multichannel options, and a lack of understanding about customer behaviour this can be difficult to do. But a lot of the battle can be won with better quality data even without replacing legacy systems and processes.

Single Customer View

Having a single view of all your customer and transaction data essentially means that every piece of information about a given customer is accessible by everyone who needs it, when they need it. To accomplish this, either all data must be pulled together into a central location, or all the data that sits in different siloes should be tagged and linked together.

The end result is the same: customer-facing people can see everything your whole company knows about a given customer or prospect.

GDPR changes the game

The problem with creating a single customer view has always been that it is difficult to identify every piece of data the company owns and then tag it correctly.

The difference today is that this is exactly what companies that hold large amounts of data are being asked to do in order to maintain compliance with the EU’s new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations).

Responding quickly to requests from data subjects – for example to share all the data you hold on them, or remove all their data – is time consuming and difficult without a central repository of all your personal customer data.

This same inventory can also form the basis of the single customer view that your sales, marketing, and other customer engagement staff can use to improve service and better target offers.

Data discovery and tagging

As we have already said, you do not need to bring all your data together in one place to create the single customer view, or living data inventory.

The first step is to scan all your structured databases, semi-structured XML files, unstructured file systems on individual workstations, and cloud-based file systems to find all the personal and sensitive data the company holds.

Data discovery software – basically deep-dive data mining tools – can find all this information and search against it simultaneously, instantly finding and collating everything from siloed data sources. An automatic metadata tagging process can tie all the pieces of data together so that you can quickly understand, for example, which bits of data relate to customer John Smith.

Living data inventory

The goal is to end up with an indexed copy of all your data. Now, no matter where data is held across your IT infrastructure it can be accessed as if from a single location.

This gives you a portal for accessing all your data about any individual customer which can be kept up to date by regularly running the discovery and cataloguing processes on newly acquired data.

Even without updating your legacy systems or existing processes, customer-facing staff have the ability to pull all the relevant data on a customer and their transactions into whatever tool or workflow they are currently using.

This enables your contact centre to manage multi-channel interactions without asking the customer to repeat information; route customers to the right team or person; proactively head off service issues; personalise upsell, cross-sell, and renewals offers; and identify the best customers to find more like them.

The addition of desktop workflow tools that can front legacy systems and integrate them with the new digital channels can add an additional layer of efficiency, again without ripping and replacing any expensive technology.

For more information on how to create a Single Customer View download Infinity CCS’s new e-Guide here.

Or visit www.infinityccs.com.

GUEST BLOG: Ringing the changes – The art of reducing call volumes

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Colin Hay at Puzzel believes focus on customer interactions is what really matters and outlines ten strategies for reducing customer call volumes…

Traditionally, contact centre leaders measured success on how quickly customer calls were dealt with. Happily, many organisations are now questioning this metric and instead are looking at what it really means to deliver exceptional customer service. They have woken up and realised that the inside-out approach, where internal processes come before the customer perspective, no longer meets expectations. What is more, digitalisation has changed the rules bringing with it a multi-channel contact centre environment and a new definition of ‘call volumes’.

Studies* show that inbound voice calls, as the overall number of customer contacts, have decreased. There is now a clear shift by customers from voice to digital channels such as email, webchat, social media and SMS. This trend throws the spotlight on how organisations manage multiple “channels”, the new word for “calls” and if they really need all of those channels.

The real challenge for contact centre leaders is to remove contacts that are ‘preventable’ or ‘predictable’ and that offer no customer value, rather than to simply reduce the total number of calls but how can this be achieved?

Ten Strategies for Removing Unnecessary Customer Contacts

The following 10 strategies provide a practical guide to increasing the number of contacts that provide true customer value, regardless of channel:

  1. Create actionable Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) – don’t just create a CJM, put it into practice!
  2. Know why customers are contacting you – involve your agents, the shop window of your organisation and first port of call for customers and then back up their claims with clever technology such as speech analytics.
  3. Proactively manage the Customer Lifecycle – introduce Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) to proactively manage ‘predictable’ situations such as new customer welcome calls, promotional offers, courtesy calls and health check calls.
  4. Shift customers to self-service – when organisations can accurately predict why customers are calling, dramatic reductions in inbound call volumes can be achieved by shifting customers to self-service channels. These may include IVR, Web page search and online virtual assistants or digital assistants and bots.
  5. Get it right first time – the most effective way of reducing future call volumes is to resolve queries first time, on time and every time that customers make contact.
  6. Act on customer insight – the information contained within customer contacts, if mined and used appropriately, can assist in better understanding customer needs, improving call scripts and agent training, resolving problems and enhancing business processes.
  7. Make customer communications clearer – avoid complicated pricing, unclear legislative information, badly laid-out or worded forms, letter and bills that confuse customers and encourage them to call for an explanation.
  8. Maintain a unified view of the customer – agents need to know that the person they are speaking to over the phone is the same person who emailed yesterday and made contact via Twitter the day before – and they need to know and understand the nature of those conversations to avoid going over the same issues and wasting time.
  9. Create self-help videos and customer forums – online customer forums have for many years helped to reduce the volume of inbound customer contacts. Bring them bang up-to-date by featuring videos on channels such has YouTube for product or “how to” queries.
  10. Effectively use customer feedback – but don’t just restrict feedback to what customers thought of their last experience. Build feedback tools into systems to give customers as many opportunities as possible to provide feedback.

By following these ten simple strategies, organisations can actively reduce demand for live agent service, add real value to the customer experience and boost satisfaction and loyalty.

Puzzel has sponsored a white paper entitled “10 Strategies for Reducing Customer Call Volumes.”

Download a copy at www.puzzel.com.

Colin Hay is Vice President Sales UK at Puzzel.

GUEST BLOG: How to deliver great customer experiences without the hype, politics or drama

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By Synthetix

2018 is not quite half way and already this year has many of us concerned about what the future might hold, with the UK’s Brexit date less than a year away. The volatile political events during 2016 has set the scene, ‘dominoing’ into 2018. And many UK businesses are operating in ‘limbo’ – not wanting to make any drastic changes to processes, staff or technologies –  waiting to see the what impact and lead up to Brexit might have on the future of their business.

Another dominating topic in 2018 is AI. Like political ructions, new technology can create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, until we understand it better. But unlike politics, were we can choose who we support, or whether to cast or vote or not, we are parading inescapably into a new generation of digitally enabled customer experiences and there is no turning back.

Waiting to invest in new customer engagement technology, could put you well behind the curve to compete within the digital future.

Fake News

Some leading organisations are already masters in this new world, already using AI to great effect or are actively planning for it. But most organisations still find it difficult to imagine how AI with its hype and science fiction drama can bridge the gaps between a customer’s diverse interaction points to help improve their journey and experience with services and answers they need.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you understand that consistently satisfying customer service is increasingly important as customer expectations are adapting and growing just as rapidly as the channels and technology consumers are now empowered to engage with.

Being open to new paths of communication, such as Virtual Agent technology, can up the personalisation and customer engagement stakes. Unlike the uncertain outcome of the UK general election and its repercussions, Virtual Agents, when deployed correctly, with a set of specific goals, can generate leads, increase sales, and grow a business in a big way, and this is only the beginning. However, just because Virtual Agents are part of the hottest topic of 2018, this does not necessarily mean it will be the right fit for everyone.

Polls

Self-service has become the long-term solution to meeting customer expectations. In a global report, ‘The Self-service Economy’, 70% of consumers expect a self-service option for handling commercial questions and complaints. And millennials especially expect companies to keep improving their levels of service, expecting everything to be just a click away – their social relationships, their retail relationships, even their banking and insurance relationships.

This isn’t a manifesto to try to convince you to invest in Virtual Agent technology, but rather to highlight how it can align with wider business objectives.

These free guides offer practical advice about investing in AI powered bots amongst other contact centre technology and how best to utilise these channels to deliver optimum return on investment.

Email in contact centres: 5 reasons to give it a second chance

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Colin Hay at Puzzel assesses the latest research and believes it’s time to raise the bar for humble emails…

Despite being the first of the non-voice multimedia channels, email was initially doomed to failure when it was introduced well over 10 years ago.

With response times stretching into many days, if not weeks, appalling levels of service sent customers rushing back to the phone. It took many years, much investment and the coaxing of customers, along with the demise of the letter and fax, for email to re-emerge as being credible for customer service.

The UK Contact Centre Decision-Maker’s Guide 2017-18 (DMG) reveals some interesting developments in the often rocky road of email. The Digital Channels chapter reveals how humble email is gaining renewed customer confidence and showing signs of a definite revival. Let’s take a closer look:

• On average, 20.5% of all inbound interactions are now done by email
• In terms of service levels – there have been vast improvements with 66% of email enquiries being answered on the same working day whilst the number of those taking more than one day to be answered has decreased significantly to 28%
• 45% of respondents to the DMG survey already have an email management system to support customer service interactions.

Multi-channel is the way to go

The research also shows that contact centres which have adopted a blended environment, supported by a universal queue system to handle enquiries regardless of channel, can proudly claim that twice as many emails are successfully handled within one hour. This is probably because as contact centres move towards customer engagement centres, the ability to handle all channels through one integrated solution allows for the central management of customer email enquiries. In turn this speeds up response times.

In fact, it seems that the success of email transactions relies on interacting with other channels. Thirty-eight percent of respondents said that fewer than 10% of emails can be answered without recourse to alternative channels, while 10% claimed that more than half of all emails needed supplementary channel assistance. The fact that emails typically require supplementary channel assistance should come as no surprise. However, the advent of cloud-based technology makes it possible to deliver a seamless multi-channel customer experience as integration with other databases, CRM and media archive solutions provides the ability to respond to enquiries regardless of channel, including email.

Five reasons to give email a second chance

Technical innovations have come a long way in ten years providing endless possibilities and a wealth of benefits that have contributed to the rising status of email as a sophisticated communications medium in the contact centre. Here are just a few:

1) No queue time – email is an immediate action, you just press and send.
2) Cost – email is still less expensive than voice.
3) Intelligent routing – means email queries are directed to the agent with the appropriate skills to respond and urgent cases are passed to the next available agent.
4) Time savings and increased customer satisfaction all in one – important announcements can be made by email and distributed simultaneously to multiple parties yet it is simple to create and change, signatures to personalise emails and boost customer loyalty.
5) Superior reporting capabilities – give managers the hard evidence they need to make meaningful service improvements.

A time and place for voice

This is all very good news for email but there will always be a place for traditional voice. Take sectors with complex cases such as healthcare, social work, insurance and law. Enquiries from this type of organisation often require sensitive handling that only a voice conversation can achieve. However, email is perfect for complaint handling where a reliable audit trail is required. This is corroborated by DMG’s research which shows complaints account for 14% of email traffic whereas less than 10% of voice calls involve handling complaints. The latest solutions treat cases not individuals using unique identifier technology. This means sophisticated search, respond and reporting capabilities support efficient case management by triggering consistent, consolidated responses to customers.

Renewed confidence in email is reflected in many of today’s organisations who use it as part of their daily customer service activities. Take Puzzel’s customer, dedicated facilities management help desk provider Fm24. Since deploying cloud-based contact centre technology, Fm24 has noticed a rapid increase in email traffic, currently 30% more than the company’s annual call statistics – proof that it’s time to give email a second chance and take advantage of its elevated status in the contact centre.

Copies of the full UK Contact Centre Decision-Maker’s Guide 2017-18 can be downloaded from the Puzzel website at Puzzel