A customer’s experience is shaped by the quality of service offered by support channels. It is often said that a satisfied customer tells a friend, while a let-down customer tells the world.
When it comes to buying a product/service, many factors are involved in the decision. On the other hand, a person’s willingness to recommend it to their network revolves around a single factor – customer experience.
Customers may or may not run into problems while using products and services. If there is a problem with the product/service, they turn out to various support channels offered by the company to solve it.
“It’s amazing what technology can do all in trying to help us understand the needs of our customer today as well as in the future.”– Thomas Siebert, Director of National Sales at FinishMaster.
Listen to Thomas Siebert’s views on how to boost CX here!!
The findings of a report from Hiver state that 72% of customers plan to switch to a different brand if they have a negative customer experience. This data suggests that customer satisfaction needs to remain a key priority for any brand.
In today’s digital world, tools like AI can be utilized to enhance and improve customer satisfaction.
Before looking at the future of customer experience, let us look at how it has evolved over time.
Evolution of Customer Experience
The major part of how customer experience has evolved is closely tied to the history of call centers. No company began by having call centers with hundreds of agents, instead started with a dedicated person handling all calls that came in regarding purchases, queries, and anything the customers wanted to know.
From one customer support executive, it slowly grew into a team and then into a call center purely for any kind of customer support. As the name suggests, it was purely telephonic in the beginning.
As technology grew, so did the different channels that customers reach out for support. The single-channel approach from calls started to change.
From a purely call-centric approach, call centers slowly started to accept different channels. Beginning with email and chat support, the arrival of social media messages for support has made customer support truly omnichannel in today’s world.
This multichannel/omnichannel approach has also sparked a shift in call centers turning to contact centers. As humans slowly started embracing the intelligent nature of technology, the face of contact centers has also started to change.
The next step for contact centers is embracing and allowing AI to spur customer experience into greater heights.
Let us look at AI and how it can increase customer satisfaction.
Artificial Intelligence to Elevate Customer Experience
Artificial intelligence has always had a negative connotation because of the various sci-fi stories been told. Stories with aspects like Skynet in the Terminator franchise, violation of the Three Laws of Robotics in I, Robot and Black Mirror to name a few haven’t helped in creating an accepting mindset of AI.
Stories aside, a different picture is painted if one looks at the current scope of artificially intelligent tools. These tools can be used to make various workspaces more efficient, including contact centers.
Keeping worries of being outsmarted and replaced by AI, here is how artificial intelligence can help elevate customer experience in today’s world of contact centers.
Filter out Simple Queries
Remember when IVR was introduced? You’d call a service center and be greeted by a robot telling you something like “Press 1 for queries on your recent order. Press 2 to register a complaint…” and so on.
While this original version of IVR can only filter out queries and give agents a basic idea of what the customer is calling for, using artificial intelligence there can work wonders. When an IVR is smart and trained for basic queries, customers can get some of their support queries resolved there.
In cases where the query is complex, it can transfer the call to an agent. This makes it easier for agents and customers alike.
Customers can have all simple queries resolved by IVR calls. Similarly, agents can focus on much more difficult queries which require their attention.
100% Omnichannel Auditing
Manually auditing every call in a contact center is an impossible nightmare. Of the thousands of calls happening daily, only 1-3% can be audited by a manual team.
Using automated contact center tools can allow all conversations to be audited within minutes after being resolved. Along with auditing all calls, these tools can also conduct omnichannel auditing allowing for all customer interactions to be audited.
Auditors can analyse these audits and understand the performance of both individual agents as well as the entire cal center.
Increase Agent Training Programs
Since automated contact center software audits every customer interaction, it can pave the way for agent training. These tools score each interaction based on parameters set by the auditors.
Based on these scores, agents can understand the areas in which they need to improve. Apart from just scoring these interactions, these automated contact center tools can also assign calls for the agents to learn from.
In an industry where the attrition rates of the employees are quite high, this can also help in reducing ramp-up time for new agents.
Understand your Customers Better
Automated contact center tools can also analyze and understand customer behavior based on interactions. This allows agents to understand things that went unnoticed during the call.
Conversation intelligence allows agents to understand customer behavior better. Understanding these nuances allow customers to be more proactive on call.
Balancing Between AI and Agents
It is normal for contact centers to feel confused about their future because of the sudden appearance of AI and conversations about jobs being overthrown.
One needs to understand that the current state of artificial intelligence isn’t a threat to contact centers. Contact centers need to be prepared to adopt AI into their daily life and enhance their performance with it.
A customer’s experience can be enhanced when both agents and AI work together to elevate overall contact center performance.
