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Pole To Win

GUEST BLOG: Immersive Support – Revolutionising customer interactions through Virtual and Augmented Reality

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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By Pole To Win

Immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are revolutionising many industries and the way we conduct our day-to-day lives.

With consumer uptake continuously rising, businesses are on the cusp of being able to assume that a significant proportion of their customers will have access to immersive tech capabilities. Companies should now be preparing for the many advantages this will bring. Much like the technology itself, there are a variety of options for businesses to consider especially when it comes to discussing immersive versus non-immersive customer experience.

Immersive support for non-immersive products

You’re a customer trying to get support for your brand new smart watch. You contact customer support and the first question they want to know is “Do you know the model and serial number?”. You’re stumped, everything is ruined and you’ll need to go back to using your old phone. But wait, the customer support representative asks you to turn on their smart watch company AR app and point your phone towards the watch. Now you can see an annotated outline of your watch to identify where the model and serial number are. Or perhaps the image is being streamed directly to customer support who can identify the model for you.

These kinds of immersive tools will allow customer support agents to see through the customers eyes, rather than just relying on descriptions provided by the customer that might be inaccurate or misinterpreted. This accuracy can dramatically reduce customer frustration and shorten average handle times, resulting in a huge win for both sides of the interaction.

Immersive support for immersive products

Immersive support will allow some of the most personal customer support interactions ever, transcending existing audio-visual capabilities. Instead of telling your customer instructions over the phone, it will now be possible to “meet” them in simulated 3D spaces and see their issue as they do.

Not only will this put a “face” to customer support – albeit an avatar in some platforms – to help humanise agents to customers, they can interact with them in far more meaningful ways than were previously possible.

Video game equivalents to this method have existed for some time. For a long time in many popular online games, it has been possible to contact a “GM” or Game Master; these customer support representatives conduct their service through the game itself. This kind of interaction can be extremely valuable as it is “in-product”, and removes the requirement for your customer to leave the environment or experience to contact support. Immersion is a critical factor so ensuring that your customers can stay immersed, while contacting your agents, will increase their enjoyment and reduce frustration.

Non-Immersive support for immersive products

Immersive products don’t always need an immersed agent. In a classic customer support situation, if a customer is using a VR/AR headset and they are seeing issues with the way text is being displayed, the agent would ask the customer to describe the issue as best they can and would then try to identify the problem. Now, however, the customer support agent instead simply streams the customer’s in-vision view and sees the problem for themselves, removing any guess work.

A Customer Support Revolution?

If your favourite movie won’t play in your VR cinema app but instead of exiting the immersive experience you can summon a customer support representative to fix the issue for you, in-app and right there in the experience, it is reasonable to assume this will decrease the likelihood of you choosing to disengage with the experience. Engaging users in their own space, where they feel comfortable and relaxed, is poised to revolutionise customer support in immersive environments and will significantly change how the average customer views support.

Within each of these support options are a host of new and rapidly evolving methods and techniques that are only possible with immersive technologies. While still early days, the flexibility that VR and AR can and will continue to provide to customer support solutions indicates the emergence of not just a new channel, but of a wider cultural change and shifting of customer expectations that all businesses must keep up with today, and stay ahead of tomorrow.

GUEST BLOG: Speaking your customers’ language

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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By Pole To Win

Multilingual support is essential in a global market. At a basic level, exceptional customer experience relies on exceptional communication.

The underlying fundamental is exceptional, coordinated and consistent communication in all of your customers’ native languages. Making an assumption that all of your customers are able, willing or comfortable with communicating in English is done at significant potential peril to your brand, and does not reflect the ambitions of a customer-centric organisation. Multilingual customer experience is quite simply indispensable for your customers and your business.

Your customers are more satisfied after interacting in their native language

It seems obvious that customers respond better to brand interaction when they can do so in their own language. It’s something that’s easy to overlook but the benefits should not be. According to ICMI’s 2014 report, 72% of respondents said their customer support satisfaction was increased when it was offered in their native language.

Native language support increases loyalty

Customer loyalty is hard sought and easily lost. It can be the linchpin of your company and continues to provide returns on investment over time. The same ICMI report showed that 58% of customers said their loyalty to the brand was increased by being offered support in their native language. And since 94.5% of customer service managers said that customer loyalty is important, why wouldn’t your company want to take advantage of it?

You don’t want to be left behind

According to the 2017 CCW Executive report more than 70% of businesses intend to invest in multilingual customer support. In today’s increasingly competitive market, companies not offering multilingual support will stand out for all the wrong reasons, which is not a differentiator to be proud of!

Easy to grow new customers

Ecommerce has not only changed the way people shop but has also opened up the geographical locations of customers. A boutique in Reykjavik, Iceland can easily have customers in Tianjin, China. Shipping to worldwide locations can easily be arranged through a whole manner of air, sea and road options. Customer service in your customer’s native language will not only increase satisfaction for your current customers but will also make other speakers of that language more likely to make that purchase. A 2014 Common Sense Advisory report showed that the more language-local content available throughout the customer experience leads to a greater likelihood of purchase.

Removes anxiety

Angry customer communications often arise from frustration and, understandably, communicating in a non-native language can add to this. By providing the option of native language communications, customers may experience a reduction in some of the anxiety around the experience, resulting in a more relaxed environment. According to Esteban Kolsky, if customers are not happy, 13% of them will tell 15 or more people. So, a tense, difficult conversation in non-native English will almost certainly be taken into consideration when spreading the word about your company.

Domestic companies can benefit too

The 2011 census showed that 4.2m people in England and Wales spoke a language other than English at home. By offering multilingual support in these target languages then you can increase positive customer experience by considering the needs of the wider customer base in the United Kingdom alone.

About Pole To Win

Pole To Win is an experienced global partner offering multilingual customer experience in over 30 languages from locations around the world.

How agents with deep domain knowledge enhance your customer relationships

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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By Pole To Win International

Domain Knowledge is a concept long lauded as a fundamental of effective software development. From analysts to developers, the importance of product understanding is stressed as critical to every stage of developing and supporting software.

However, the appreciation of domain knowledge benefits all industries and services. Domain knowledge isn’t unique to software development or development teams, it’s a fundamental understanding of brand, product and method that improves and affects all customer relationships and interactions.

Domain knowledge is about more than knowing the product being supported. It demands a comprehensive understanding of your business:

Product

The first thing your customers will notice when contacting customer support is how well agents know the product. Training, knowledge sharing and generating product experience through encouraging discussion and interaction across your company reinforces understanding of the product line, in turn increasing customers’ satisfaction and confidence.

Business Activity

An in-depth knowledge of what your business does is as important as understanding the product. Without a thorough understanding of what you offer customers cross selling and providing recommendations become impossible. Whether insourced or outsourced, your agents must always know more about your business than your customers. If a customer mentions they are also looking for another service or product you offer, your agent must be able to discuss these clearly and effectively. Effective ongoing training, including in-depth company overviews and service offerings, ensures your agents are extremely well versed in your company, culture and values.

Industry

Your customers shop around. They’re often very aware of the best prices and services in your sector. An understanding of the wider industry, and your company’s standing and market position within it, is key to your agents knowing your unique offerings: what you do better than your competitors, how you sell your products and services and what is your perceived brand value.

Leveraging domain knowledge improves the way your customers view and interact with your business. This will allow your agents to more effectively support your target demographics, and drive new customers and new business. With greater satisfaction and faster average handle time for tickets, your new and existing customers may come to view your support channels as more effective and knowledgeable than your competitors. By allowing agents to build first-hand knowledge through joining relevant meetings, conversing with subject matter experts and taking part in cross-team dialogues, domain knowledge acquisition is greatly enhanced beyond using just fact sheets and feature lists.

At all times the goal is to create a foundation of knowledge and understanding that can be expanded upon and repurposed. For outsourced models, meetings and discussions can easily be handled remotely with strong communication throughout the delivery of the service.

Deep domain knowledge also provides benefits to many aspects of your customer support service. It isn’t just agent knowledge that improves. Their insights can also provide a deeper view into how your customers use your service.

Within the scope of customer journey mapping, domain knowledge helps to create accurate maps providing a visual representation of how a typical customer interacts with your agents and service. The buyer personas created from deep domain knowledge are invaluable in identifying gaps and pressure points within your service flow. Customer journey maps are also markedly improved when your agents understand the product and business: identifying and analysing strengths and weaknesses in your service becomes more fruitful, and change management become easier to implement as agents better understand why and where these changes are occurring.

Ultimately, deep domain knowledge is fundamental to enhancing customer experience. By refining the interpolating of information from your customer journey into knowledge-based actions, opportunities are created for more enjoyable and effortless interactions for your customers and agents, resulting in invaluable customer relationships.

Pole To Win

GUEST BLOG: Integrated CX and QA – Drive engagement through uniting teams

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Increasing productivity, efficiency and customer retention by aligning QA and CX teams in a multilingual, multidisciplinary environment, by By Pole To Win…

Beginning as two separate entities, Quality Assurance (QA) and Customer Experience (CX) historically existed independently in software development and support services, but as customer engagement and retention have become increasingly important, companies have strived to maintain the engagement of their user bases.

When both services are required, operating a CX and QA team under the same roof, or integrating an outsourced CX team with your internal QA, can provide benefits that would be unattainable without cross-team integration. QA teams are the knowledge powerhouse for post- and pre-release problems, workarounds and usability advice for software products. Harnessing such benefits produces a more informed, reactive and efficient CX team, complementing the ongoing hard work that goes into understanding and adopting the client’s culture, regardless of product.

The feedback loops that integrated CX and QA teams create are symbiotic, providing various benefits to both teams. There is no-one better to inform your CX Agents about processes, limitations and known issues than your own QA team. With more hours of experience than it would be possible for others to have, QA teams can be the guiding light to help keep your response times fast and your customer interactions helpful and effective. Well-informed CX Agents reduce costs and add value with superior customer interactions and faster ticket processing.

This knowledge sharing is not just a cross-team benefit but also cross-language. Technical issues unique to, or reported in, one language within the user base can be translated by CX, conveyed to QA, and subsequently applied across all versions. Similarly, linguistic content or formatting issues in the user interface of one language may provide an early warning for other languages. This multilingual, multidirectional information flow, when managed well, is a formidable reservoir of knowledge that provides unparalleled efficiency across your services.

With a more informed and erudite CX team, customer reported issues become far more valuable. CX Agents can use that shared QA knowledge, backed up by dedicated training, to help support customers and report to QA in a manner far more efficient, exact and useful to the QA team. Information fed back to QA from customers can also improve testing, allowing QA to focus on popular areas of the application or on aspects and sections where most issues are encountered. This feedback loop adds value to both teams, reducing time spent investigating issues by QA and reducing length and number of tickets to CX: Agents and Testers can be constantly learning from each other, while creating a project-wide knowledge bank that benefits stakeholders at every level.

This in-depth understanding doesn’t stop with the integrated teams. Informed Agents can create informed customers. More accurate and knowledgeable responses from CX can help create a user base that shares this knowledge amongst users through online forums and social media, decreasing ticket counts and increasing customer engagement. Greater satisfaction in CX responses is a direct user benefit, increasing trust from customers who are provided a fast, informed, and efficient service.

Increases in efficiency and productivity across teams can of course be measured. Integration provides an opportunity to align common KPIs between QA and CX. Both services value productivity, quality, and client satisfaction, and by integrating these measurements, invaluable insight is gathered into how your services perform as a whole, rather than as isolated units.

Pole To Win is an experienced global partner offering standalone or integrated QA and CX services to provide all-round support to development teams, applications, and their communities. With a heritage in the highly competitive interactive entertainment industry, PTW now brings this experience in fast-paced, changeable markets to clients and their products in many innovative industries worldwide.