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MplSystems

GUEST BLOG: Ensuring the ROI of adding Artificial Intelligence

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By IFS | mplsystems

Adding artificial intelligence to the contact centre is an important decision that involves a significant investment of time, money, and resources. Because of this, when an organisation is ready to implement AI, it’s absolutely critical to identify how and when the new technology will deliver a return on investment.

There are a number of ways that the contact centre can benefit from adding artificial intelligence. It ultimately depends on how progressive the business is in their use of the technology and how willing they are to fine tune its capabilities to their unique needs. With the right strategy and implementation process, the contact centre can experience an exponential ROI from artificial intelligence. While some of the uses are straightforward and already widely adopted, there is even more potential for leveraging the core benefits of AI in the service experience.

The core benefits of artificial intelligence include:

  • Collect robust amounts of data across virtually limitless sources
  • Process data quickly and effectively, with an ability to learn over time
  • Complete easily predictable tasks
  • Augment human experiences with recommendations and predictions

Some executives will fall into the trap of seeing these benefits and believing that they should reduce (or eliminate) their frontline contact centre workforce as a result. They’ll buy into the detrimental lie that the ROI of artificial intelligence will come from eliminating staff. In reality, however, an organisation deploying AI shouldn’t do so to replace humans and/or minimise costs. While there can be cost savings as a result of using chatbots to automate entry-level interactions that can be handled by humans, AI is not necessarily always the right solution. If the bot lacks access to a comprehensive knowledgebase and cannot effectively understand a customer’s request, it is certain to result in amplified frustration and dissatisfaction.  Sure, bots are capable of handling those types of interactions but, for some organisations, what AI can do and what it should do are two very different things!

The companies who will excel at using AI will leverage it to gain deep insights into customers’ preferences. The inherent capabilities of artificial intelligence should be used to deliver bespoke content and communications to customers. The vast amounts of data that are available within an AI tool is best utilised when it delivers accurate, predictive answers to customers. In other words, artificial intelligence can help organisations simplify the complexity of their data to deliver smarter service experiences.

When AI is thought about through this lens, the potential use cases stem far beyond automating customer interactions.  Contact centre leaders could use the analytics from AI sources to better identify the training and development needs of their staff; the aggregate data from previous customer experiences could be utilised to route contacts to the best agent or source for a solution; product development could be accelerated through faster access to customer insights and preference data. The efficiency would not just be through the customer interactions, but rather across the entire enterprise as people, processes, and technology grow more agile in meeting and serving customer’s needs.

It couldn’t be a more interesting and energising time to work in contact centres. The convergence of people and technology continues to present exciting challenges and tremendous opportunities for organisations to adapt and evolve. While there is plenty of fear around artificial intelligence and whether or not its capabilities will be abused, the real story is that it’s going to enable a beautiful future for humans to do our best work, while machines handle the rest.

GUEST BLOG: The foundational pillars of omnichannel success

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By IFS | mplsystems

Many organisations want to provide an omnichannel experience, but few are actually doing it well consistently.

If you’re a contact centre leader who’s been challenged with leading the omnichannel charge, you’re probably wondering what it takes to make, or break, a successful program.  More importantly, what are the components necessary for getting it right?

Achieving true omnichannel success will require a combined focus to people, processes, and technology that’s driving toward a unified management of the customer experience.  Fundamentally, omnichannel service is about creating a unified experience that ensures context and clarity on a customer’s past, present, and future.

From the perspective of process improvement, organisations must tear down any silos amongst business units which prevent making connections between things like customer feedback and agent performance.

Additionally, the development of a holistic view of each customer should be accessible and consistent across the organisation, along with being integrated through systems that ensure true omnichannel routing and handling of all contacts. The most important part of being capable of improving the customer experience is having access to a robust set of data for decision-making on all customer-focused initiatives.

It’s not acceptable for a contact centre or other business unit leader to make these important decisions on assumption or half-truths. If contact centres want to deliver omnichannel success, and great customer experiences, they need to connect the dots between the many touchpoints of the customer journey.

To connect these touchpoints in the omnichannel customer experience, there are four sets of systems that are necessary for organisations to utilise:

  • Systems of Engagement

These systems manage the contact channels for both self and assisted interactions and include omnichannel interaction routing that’s based on a single set of rules.

  • Systems of Operation

These systems ensure the operational side of interactions run smoothly and include workforce optimisation, agent desktop, and robot process automation.

  • Systems of Record

These systems manage the transactional data related to customer engagement which includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), knowledge management, and customer feedback.

  • Analytics

These systems process large volumes of structured (CRM, ERP) and unstructured (call recordings, text, scripts, social posts) data. Analytics systems can provide root-cause analysis so that organisations can understand why customers engage. Additionally, they are able to identify interactions that are handled well and those that are not. These systems should also include predictive capabilities that use historical data to forecast likely customer actions.

While it sounds (and is) incredibly complicated to orchestrate an omnichannel customer experience, by implementing an advanced agent desktop system, organisations can place these complex systems beneath the surface and deliver only the most relevant data to an agent’s fingertips. The result is an experience that is delivered to the customer with ease and fluency yet powered by complexity and sophistication.

It’s important to realise, however, that improvements to the agent’s desktop could be difficult to track and justify based exclusively on numbers.

That doesn’t make the impact any less real. The intangible benefits, such as, “improved agent experience”, can be found in reduced operational costs that are the result of agents using more efficient processes, or decreased employee engagement because of improved system function.

Beyond this, the customer experience is also improved and can lead to improved customer retention, up-sales and increases to customer lifetime value.

mplsystems

Industry Spotlight: mplsystems contact centre seminar & whitepaper – Register today!

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Despite technology advances, customer service departments are still struggling to scale to the incessant increase in customer questions on multiple channels.

mplsystems discusses options to meet this challenge and relieve agents of simple tasks, whilst empowering them to deal with complex tasks in their whitepaper: How are Artificial Intelligence & Virtual Assistance Changing the Contact Centre?

Join them to learn more about technology options and best practice in our seminar session at the Summit: Empowering Agents & Workforce Optimisation.

Join the seminar at 9.45am on Monday 14th April 2017 – Contact Tina Parekh on 01926 623 500 or email info@mplsystems.co.uk.

Looking for a new call centre event to attend? You need the Call Centre & Customer Services Summit…

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With the next Call Centre & Customer Services Summit taking place on April 24 & 25 at the Radisson Blu Hotel, London Stansted, we thought we’d give you a few reasons to book your place at the event nice and early.

Put simply, if you’re looking for a new and informative call centre and customer service focused industry event, you’ve found it.

First and foremost, the Call Centre & Customer Services Summit provides a platform for highly-targeted one-to-one meetings between industry professionals and trusted suppliers. But it also comes with a full programme of educational seminars, allowing all attendees to increase their industry knowledge and develop their skill sets while on site…

Plus, there’s full hospitality throughout, including lunches, drinks reception and an evening gala dinner, offering copious networking opportunities to build new business relationships.

But we think the enduring success of the event is best summed up by visitors who have attended previously:

“We found the Summit to be an excellent investment of our time; a pleasant and productive way to meet new customers.”

Netcall Telecom Ltd

“Fantastic event! Well organised; definitely will attend future ones.”

Tesco

“Excellent Summit with genuine buyers and senior people seeing what is new for forthcoming projects; no time wasters.”

MplSystems

“Fully packed event with lots of food for thought. Well organised and facilitated; great event to make new connections.”

Boots UK Ltd

“Another great bunch of interested, potential customers, ready for follow-up meetings.”

Premier CX

So there you have it. More bespoke than a conference and more focused than an expo, the Call Centre & Customer Services Summit is the only event you need to attend in 2017.

The next Call Centre & Customer Services Summit takes place on April 24 & 25, 2017 at the Radisson Blu Hotel, London Stansted.

For more information or to book your place, call Gayle Buckland on 01992 374063 or email g.buckland@forumevents.co.uk.

Alternatively, visit www.contactcentresummit.co.uk.