As customers have more brands to choose from than ever, the businesses that win the battle of the customer service wins the game. In today’s world, more and more brands are chosen based on whether customer experience matches their rising customer centric expectations, and customer service plays the most critical role in creating that experience. It’s no surprise then that the top trends in customer service heading into 2018 all have one thing in common, the customer themselves. Let’s take a look:
Last year the Microsoft State of Global Customer Service Report reported that 72% of customers expected call center reps to already know their contact information, product details, and service history as soon as they make contact. Unfortunately, only 17% of these brands have so far actually integrated their customer data across their digital assets, and it would suffice to say that these expectations have only risen since then. Today, however, big data analytics has now made it easier than ever to track customer preferences, trends, and insights with fantastic accuracy. With such data more accessible than ever, look more and more brands to finally make the push to leverage customer data from their CRM to create more tailored experiences in 2018 and beyond.
Did you know that of the 60% of customers today who opt for self-service, only 20% actually succeed, while the remaining 80% end up in the call center? Not succeeding on the self-service journey takes a toll on customer satisfaction, along with the costs savings IVR was meant to provide. It’s no surprise then that with already over 1 BN smartphone users worldwide and growing, IVT is being replaced in favor of Visual IVR. Visual IVR transfers the existing IVR voice technology onto phone screens where customers can see and touch their way through visible menus, speak to a specific call center agent or even see how long they will need to wait in line, and then choose a callback option, all from the comforts of their smartphones. Visual IVR is thus finally fulfilling many of the unfulfilled promises Voice IVR, including self-service empowerment, agent efficiency and cost savings for the call center.
As customers voice their complaints across all channels, via phone, online chat, e-mail, social media, etc., many companies are still failing to respond fast enough to satisfy their customers across the board. Slow response times are the primary culprit why lousy customer experience creates an estimated $62 billion lost by U.S. businesses each year. Thankfully, the antidote has arrived to keep up with the explosion of omnichannel customer service, chatbots. These intelligent virtual assistants can provide fast, cost-effective, human-like customer service and can be easily deployed on almost any interface, for instant customer service at all times. In short, by cutting response times down to the minimum, while providing a round the clock presence, chatbots not only increase the efficiency of the call center operations in various ways, they also drastically improve the overall customer experience.
Why do customers find social media and messaging support so attractive? It’s because they already spend much time on their phone, now they can get customer support from the comfort of the apps they are already on, and resolve their issues quicker than ever. In fact, according to Social Media Today, the average person will spend 116 minutes on social media every day! And 60% of that social media time spent is on a mobile device, and these numbers are only going to continue growing as platforms develop even further at the expense of traditional media avenues. This transformation in customer behavior is forcing companies to respond and to follow the customers where they are. The bottom line is if your brand wants to offer a customer experience that will keep customers coming back, don’t be anti-social.
As RPA software robots can automate repetitive rules-based tasks by imitating the way live agents engage with applications, RPA is already dramatically changing the way companies approach many of their vital business processes. While the customer is not even aware of its presence, since the customers don't actually interact with RPA bots, however, the increased speed of the internal processing they most certainly are aware of. Throw in easy integration with a relatively low cost, and it’s no surprise that RPA currently has such a high rate of adoption compared to other automation tools. In fact, according to Gartner, demand for RPA tools is growing at about 20% to 30 % each quarter. Expect to continue to see this trend continue to skyrocket in the coming years.
Today, providing easy and fast customer service, no matter what channel your customer chooses is the name of the game and is essential to keeping customers loyal and driving real business value. Are you ready to play?
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/top-5-trends-in-customer-service
Publish Date: October 25, 2017 |
It’s no secret that the holiday season is often the busiest time of the year for many businesses. In fact, 20-40% of annual sales for retailers are generated over the last two months of the year, so the pressure on holiday retailers is high. For many customers, the way in which a company delivers its customer service determines whether they choose to give that company their business. The bottom line is poor customer service costs money, and customers are willing to abandon your brand even after a single negative experience. Let’s take a look at some of the factors that create such a challenge for call centers this time of the year and the solution that is primed to deal with them once and for all.
While the holiday shopping season equals more sales opportunities, it also means that call centers experience a giant spike in call volume as customers flood the lines with all sorts of inquiries, questions, and complaints regarding their purchases. If these spikes are not efficiently managed, this can result in a corresponding spike in dropped calls and long holding times that leave customers unsatisfied. More than any other time of year, customers just want to get answers to their questions as quickly as possible so they can check off their holiday shopping list. You need to take into account that people will hang up when they can’t reach a live agent, and 45% will drop an online purchase if their questions are not speedily answered. You begin to understand that, while the holiday season may be a fun time for shoppers, it’s make or break time for businesses depending on how well they are set up to manage these spikes.
Call time isn’t the only thing consumers are concerned with. They also pay attention to whether customer service reps answer questions effectively to resolve problems. In fact, expectations customers have for contact centers tend to be even higher over the holidays than they are the rest of the year. However, when the hold times begin to grow, and the customers’ patience starts to run out before they even start the conversation, it only makes the agent’s job increasingly harder, and more unlikely to meet those expectations. Put it all together, and it’s no wonder a comprehensive solution is crucial to take advantage of high volume surges like the holiday shopping season so that retailers can celebrate as well.
Today, with over 1 billion smartphone users worldwide and growing, web self-service is now the most commonly used communication touch point—the first and only channel ever to exceed the phone. However, Voice IVR’s has severe limitations that drive customers crazy, including the endless menus, confusing options, poor voice recognition, limited ability to collect information and more. Therefore, despite the widespread investment many brands have made in Voice IVR, many customers are calling anyways, especially during the holiday season. In fact, studies show only around 20% resolve their issue on their own without calling a contact center. Therefore, for many companies, the trend towards Visual IVR is more critical than ever for efficient call center management, and today the provider used by more organizations globally than any other is Jacada.
Today, 84% of customers report frustration when agents lack access to the necessary personal information which is required to address their question. On the other hand, Jacada Visual IVR delivers a personalized customer-specific digital experience to voice callers, allowing customers to transition from the digital channel to the agent with full context, significantly reducing call handle times and improving self-service success rates by more than 10% based on their deployment at Fortune 500 companies around the world.
Jacada Visual IVR enables agents to pivot an inbound call to a digital interaction and thus surface all of a brand’s digital assets, in a single location, to voice callers. This significantly increases the chances that customers will also pivot and utilize a company’s various digital assets to efficiently solve all their self-service their needs.
Jacada Visual IVR enables a cross-channel customer service presence, offering customers a seamless transition from self-service to assisted service, whether on the web, mobile or voice engagement, while consistently maintaining the context of the customer’s original intent.
Jacada Visual IVR deploys the Jacada Intelligent Assistant, an interactive virtual agent to guide the digital customer journey. Available 24/7 across all channels, the Intelligent Assistant utilizes natural language processing which allows it to understand the intent of the customer and intuitively help customers with all their sales and customer service support related needs.
Despite the challenges of the holiday season, call centers that adopt the most beneficial solutions, such as Jacada Visual IVR, to best assist their customers, employees, and companies as a whole, can fully take advantage of the holiday season, and turn into one to be truly celebrated.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/jacada-visual-ivr-the-holiday-gift-to-all-call-centers
Publish Date: October 6, 2017 |
Today, leading brands and service providers are turning to the amazing cognitive technology offered by “chatbots” to better manage and automate the customer service experience. At the same time, another technology gaining traction in the industry, Robotic Process Automation, is also being referred to as a “bot,” and it has started to create some confusion. The truth is, while the RPA and chatbots both utilize artificial intelligence to impact the customer service experience positively, they are entirely different in their roles. Let’s take a look:
As we move further into the digital age, with the growing need for an Omni-channel customer service presence, brands are beginning to utilize chatbots as their agents of choice on the front end of their customer service response system. The cognitive technology of chatbots enables them to interpret customers’ voice and text responses and follow up with accurate, automated answers designed to resolve routine customer service issues quickly. If the chatbot is unable to take control of the interaction and settle the matter, only then is the customer directed to a live agent. Another benefit is that human agents can now focus their efforts on more complex cases and value based tasks. In short, by cutting response times down to the minimum, while providing a round the clock presence, these virtual assistants not only increase the efficiency of the call center operations in various ways, they also drastically improve the overall customer experience. Furthermore, the data gathered by the chatbots can offer valuable insights into a specific consumer’s needs, which can also be a powerful tool to deliver increasingly personalized customer experiences. Indeed, chatbots have the potential to be a real game changer for businesses, enabling a maximally efficient call center operation with higher customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.
At the same time, companies have also begun to discover a different type of bot, known as Software Robots - Robotic Process Automation (RPA). While confusion may potentially stem from the fact that both RPA and chatbots both automate repeatable, high-volume tasks that have long been handled manually, where RPA is different is that its target customers are not the end consumers. Its target audience is the internal employee that utilizes RPA to automate back office business processes. Today, this technology has already made inroads in a variety of fields. For example, banks have started using RPA for employment and credit checks to automate mortgage processing. Security companies are deploying RPA to automate processes associated with ID and access management, while the insurance industry is using RPA to process claims. However, unlike with chatbots, the customer is not even aware of the presence of RPA, as the customers don't interact with an RPA bot. However, the increased speed of the internal processing has a direct positive effect on the customer experience, which they most certainly are aware of.
The truth is the time is almost here when chatbots themselves will incorporate Robotic Process Automation technology, combining the powers of both and forming what is known as a “Super Chatbot.” The Super Chatbot will use its cognitive intelligence to recognize the customer’s emotional state and respond accordingly, while at the same time, the integrated RPA technology can automatically initiate the backend processes required to help resolve the issue the customer presented.
There is no doubt that the artificial intelligence of both chatbots and RPA has raised the standards of customer service and with all the various types of work that it can accomplish, its adoption should only continue to spread for years to come!
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/chatbots-and-rpa-changing-the-future-of-customer-service
Publish Date: October 5, 2017 |
There is no doubt that the Internet of Things is going to significantly change how customer service is delivered. While adapting to the IoT has its challenges, benefits far outweigh.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to fundamentally alter the way in which the world works, and contact centers will be no exception. IoT concept, whereby virtually any ‘thing’ – from refrigerators and microwave ovens to motor vehicles - can be connected to the Internet, is fast becoming a reality. In fact, Gartner predicts that some 20.4 billion ‘things’ will be connected by 2020, ¹ while Cisco IBSG goes even further, suggesting that it will be more like 50 billion. ²
In an era where exceptional customer service is probably the single biggest differentiator an organization can have, those businesses that successfully integrate IoT into their customer service offering will have the opportunity to take their brand to a whole new level.
Of course, anything that offers great benefits inevitably comes with its own unique challenges. Let’s have a look at some of the ways in which the IoT is going to impact on the contact center, along with the challenges and benefits that come along with each.
With so many things connected, the sheer volume of data generated is going to provide contact centers with information beyond their wildest dreams. Not only will organizations be able to more quickly learn what technical issues regularly arise in particular products, speeding up their improvement, but more vitally, products which reveal consumer behavior – and among these would be health devices and motor vehicles – will enable companies to learn more about their customers. Using this information, they will be able to provide services which are tailored to individual consumers.
The IoT is going to require contact centers to understand how to integrate smart object contact into the overall customer service experience. This will mean an additional channel added to the omni-channel center, one where the clients’ IoT-enabled products are capable of making contact with the centers on their behalf. We will soon reach a point where the customer is able to simply push the ‘contact’ button on their connected devices, in order to seek assistance. The omni-channel center already presents its fair share of challenges, which will no doubt become even more complex when the customer is contacting you from their car or their refrigerator.
When agents are required to handle a call, it will likely be of a complicated nature. Therefore, it will be crucial to ensure agents have specialized product knowledge and additional capabilities to digitally connect with the customer. Highly skilled agents will need to be completely familiar with not only the product and brand, but the entire ecosystem of connected devices.
Since the IoT will allow smart objects to communicate potential problems even before these occur, customer service can become far more proactive. Instead of reacting to problems after they happen, companies will be able to prevent these from occurring at all. This will significantly reduce the customers’ need to reach out to the contact center, and will help the organization to differentiate itself by delivering a genuinely proactive service to its clients.
IoT-enabled devices that require assistance from the contact center will mean that agents will need to use screen-sharing or gain remote access to successfully identify and solve these complex problems. They will also probably require greater access to customer information. This means an increased need for privacy and security training, and an assurance to customers that proper security procedures are in place.
Looking at the above, there is no doubt that the IoT is going to have huge implications for the contact center. Although not without its share of challenges, the IoT offers enterprises the opportunity to deliver proactive service, as well as to be better prepared at the moment of engagement.
The IoT is clearly going to transform contact centers, as it will enable them to gain more control of customer service by providing new streams of information that are integrated into the existing infrastructure, and most vitally, will provide an opportunity to add additional value to current service offerings.
Ultimately, the IoT should lead to an enhanced level of customer service, more knowledgeable and productive agents and – if applied correctly – offer the business a differentiator that allows it to reduce customer churn while considerably improving cost savings.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/internet-of-things-will-fundamentally-alter-the-contact-center
Publish Date: September 22, 2017 |
While the insurance industry has been slow to transition to a digital world, chatbots offer a quick and easy way to begin delivering the services 21st century customers demand.
It is a recognized fact that in general, the insurance industry has been slow to adopt digital tools and business models, at least in comparison to most other industries. Insurance has long been a pretty inflexible game, which is why this sector has been shaken by the manner in which customer expectations have shifted dramatically in recent times. Today’s consumers expect their service providers to maintain a presence that is not just multi-channel but omni-channel, and they expect a customer experience that is not just satisfactory but actually enjoyable.
It is thus important for insurers to recognize the importance of delivering a flexible, convenient and digitally mature experience, particularly given the diverse needs of policyholders. This means that it is imperative they implement more advanced services to support human agents.
One potential answer to this lies in artificial intelligence (AI) and the chatbots that run on this. It certainly appears as though chatbots are the future, with research firm Gartner predicting that AI will power 85% of all customer service interactions by the year 2020.¹
The unique ability of chatbots lies in how they are able to personalize and automate processes, which offers the insurance industry a wonderful opportunity to significantly enhance the relationship that exists between companies and their policyholders.
One of the key benefits offered by such virtual assistants is the ability to simplify mundane, everyday tasks. Since the comprehension and informational algorithms that power chatbots are improving all the time, these virtual assistants have the potential to enhance efficiencies in numerous ways.
Not only do they offer the ability to handle frequently asked questions, increasingly they are able to handle more complex queries in the natural language format of chat, while at the same time being able to reference more information than a human could ever possibly hope to.
If you think about it, insurance companies have an abundance of the one thing AI requires to be successful - data. Effective machine learning, in turn, delivers the ability to make all this information actionable. Whether it is ranking information and listing it; classifying other forms of information, such as images; associating information with a numerical value; or even parsing data in order to detect anomalies, AI can change the way insurers operate.
Since chatbots are capable of identifying speech patterns and interpreting non-verbal hints, they are able to interact with customers in a way that gives them the feeling that they are interacting with a real human, one who is smart enough to handle whatever insurance-related query they throw at them.
In addition, customers today have shifted from predominantly verbal communications to written forms of interaction, thanks to the proliferation of text-based mobile apps. Therefore, customers will not only be happy conversing with chatbots that offer a user-friendly and conversational interaction, but will be happier still knowing they can do so at their own leisure, 24x7.
Ultimately, chatbots should enhance the customer experience, as they are able to provide users with an easy way to obtain the information they need. Sophisticated virtual assistants can even provide a personalized approach that can include images, content, links, call-to-action buttons or direct payment options, based on user input at a specific point.
Another reason customers will enjoy interacting with a chatbot is because virtual assistants enable the user to interact with services without the need for downloading or installing an app and having to struggle to learn a new user interface.
The key benefit, of course, is the already mentioned ability to automate claims processes. From assisting customers to register the first notice of loss or scheduling an appointment for the evaluator, chatbots can eliminate the need to have a human involved in these mundane processes.
The right virtual assistant can genuinely help an insurance organization to achieve effective customer engagement, allowing fast and contextual access to information, explaining complex products and ultimately improving sales and distribution. By automating a wide range of simpler functions, they play a crucial role in boosting employee productivity, by freeing up humans to focus on the more complex, time-consuming and critical activities that are vital to helping an organization differentiate itself in the marketplace.
Tata Consultancy Services anticipates that insurance companies will spend on average $90 million on artificial-intelligence technologies by 2020. ²
What it boils down to is that the automation provided by chatbots can go a long way towards eliminating the day-to-day administrative tasks faced by brokers. Virtual assistants offer the chance for insurance companies to leverage the efficiencies these bring to attract new customers. By adopting digital technologies, these players will have begun future-proofing their businesses.
After all, chatbots are a lot more than merely a utility play. Advanced virtual assistants can be designed to have distinct personalities, ones that align with the brand powering them. When this is achieved, the chatbot moves from being simply transactional to being a solution that can transform the customer experience.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3763265 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-19/insurance-customers-will-have-to-get-used-to-talking-to-machines
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/chatbots-saviours-of-the-insurance-industry
Publish Date: September 18, 2017 |
The theory behind mobile customer service apps may be sound, but in practice, the challenges to adoption are significant.
Modern contact centers are expected to support a wide range of multimedia communication, due to the growing demand for digital channels. Given the present ubiquity of smartphones, it is no surprise then that many enterprises are seeking to develop a mobile customer service application as part of this drive towards multiple channels.
However, there are a multitude of complexities associated with the provision and uptake of a mobile app within the confines of the contact center experience. For one thing, voice clearly remains the most popular channel for customers, and weaning people off of the familiar is never an easy task, despite the obvious benefits this may offer to both the organization and the customer.
For the enterprise, voice remains the most costly channel, while users who fail to utilize an option like a mobile app are making their own lives more difficult, as a channel like this should have been designed to improve the simplicity of making contact with the business.
After all, digital channels like mobile apps are supposed to increase the customer’s satisfaction – not only does it offer them a self-service capability, but it means they will no longer have to sit on hold on the phone, waiting for help – and increased satisfaction means they remain happy with your business.
However, despite the clear benefits a channel such as this offers, many companies find that even though they have invested heavily in developing a mobile app, with a view to enabling customers to perform routine transactions in a simplified manner, precious few of their clientele have bothered to download it. Worse still, only a few of those who download it actually bother to use it.
The reasons for this are myriad and complex, and are often as much due to internal issues as they are to customers’ unwillingness to try something new. For example, a lack of internal collaboration may occur between the various players involved in the app’s implementation, meaning that the integration of features within these mobile apps is often quite rudimentary.
In addition, some businesses make the mistake of looking at their mobile app development as a once-off project. The assumption is that once the app is complete, all is good with the world, when the truth is that it is only once the app goes live that the real development begins. Bugs need to fixed, new features need to be built at the users’ request and the developers need to keep the app current with any and all platform changes.
Errors or bugs in the finished product are one of the biggest challenges companies face when driving and maintaining uptake of the service. Customers are quick to leave negative reviews should there be any issues with the app and many will immediately abandon it. In fact, according to a 2016 survey from Sitecore and Vanson Bourne¹, around one third of those polled claimed that they would give up on a brand completely after just one poor mobile experience.
Therefore, solving any errors or bugs should receive the highest priority, but this is seldom what happens in the real world. Another problem with such apps is that the developers fail to ask the critical question: ‘what needs does this app meet?’ If it fails to meet the demands of the customer, it doesn’t matter how well it works or how effectively it was designed, uptake is likely to be minimal. Furthermore, the in-app experience needs to connect with and match up to the web experience that a customer may already be used to. Failure to do so will almost certainly turn the customer off.
Some enterprises have sought to deliver an improved customer experience by building in easy-to-use live help access, including the ability for an agent to co-browse with the relevant customer. While this enables an agent to actually assist the customer with learning how to use the app properly, it also defeats the main purpose of providing a self-help channel – which is to save costs by eliminating the need for an agent to be involved in the transaction.
Another issue that can affect the mobile customer service app is a failure to build it in such a way that it operates correctly across the multitude of mobile devices, which have different manufacturers, screen sizes and operating systems. Unless this is properly taken into account, it may have a negative impact on how the app functions. Failure to provide a consistent user experience across phones, tablets and other devices is likely to end up with an increasing number of customers avoiding using the app.
In addition, security is a growing concern amongst users of electronic devices, with many consumers refusing to download a mobile app they don’t trust. An altogether larger number will also have concerns about leaving themselves vulnerable to outside threats, leading to another reason for lack of uptake.
Then there is the simple matter that a large number of customers will fall into one of the age groups that are less than comfortable using the latest technology solutions. These are people that have spent many years accepting the fact that the phone is the go-to device for contacting a company, and because they are less tech-savvy, will have a built-in suspicion towards new technology offerings.
Moreover, those that are more comfortable with new solutions will expect their mobile phone experience to match their expectations, which are likely to be quite high. If these expectations are not met, they will consider it to be a poor substitute, and will go straight to the phone instead. And they will probably not bother to use the app a second time.
Ease of use is another critical factor – people naturally shy away from apps that are unintuitive and hard to comprehend initially. So unless the app is simply designed – though not too simply, otherwise it will not be able to provide the service required –offers convenience and ease of access, they may also be put off the technology.
Educating customers around the use of the mobile app is one way to drive increased uptake, but once again, this costs money and needs to be targeted properly, and at the right customer segments, so it is often a low priority from the enterprise’s perspective.
Finally, there is the irritation caused by the need to download the app in the first place. This is an extra barrier for an irritated customer. After all, if they are experiencing a customer service problem, they are unlikely to go to the trouble of downloading it in order to make contact. Neither are they likely to download it at any other time, since it simply not something they are going to think about until it is needed – by which time it is too late and they are probably going to find making a phone call to be the simpler route.
So, while the theory behind a mobile app for customer service is a good one, the practice often leaves a lot to be desired, and based on the above, it is not difficult to understand why the majority of customers still avoid this contact channel. Mobile apps may yet become a meaningful channel for the contact center, but until the many challenges outlined above can be solved by the enterprise, the signs suggest that it will remain a niche and peripheral channel at best.
1 - http://www.sitecore.net/resources/index/white-papers/mobile-research-whitepaper.aspx
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/the-trouble-with-mobile-customer-service-apps
Publish Date: September 11, 2017 |
While a robot would never be able to take the place of agent 007, there is a school of thought that suggests that a personalized self-service solution offers many advantages over a human contact center agent.
There is no doubt that in the modern contact center, self-service customer support plays a critical part in the company-customer relationship. Today’s customers do like to do things for themselves, but at the same time, they tend to expect personalized experiences when they reach out to an organization. While there are more than a few challenges companies face when attempting to deliver personalized self-service to their customers, there are also many reasons why a personalized self-service can actually do a better job than a human agent.
An advanced and well-engineered automated self-service solution should, ultimately, be able to provide all but a few of the attributes that a live agent can, and often the attributes it does offer are done better.
For one thing, customers are more concerned with getting the answer they seek – they don’t care whether it comes from an IVR or a human being - and a well-planned, multi-channel self-service solution will immediately enable the consumer to interact via the medium of their choice. This should deliver a far speedier response than if they had to call into the contact center and hold for an agent.
Another area where these systems can be better is in answering in the customers’ language of choice. It is worth noting that a fair percentage of US citizens today speak more than one language, and quite often English is only their second language. Since it is unlikely that you have too many agents who are multilingual, such a scenario could easily lead to a situation where a customer whose first language is not English ends up incurring a longer hold time. On the other hand, an intelligent automated system should be able to interact fluently in several languages. With the right intelligence built in, it may even be able to ‘learn’ the preferred language of frequent callers, enabling it to initiate the interaction in the customer’s chosen language. Not only does this eliminate the need for the caller to select a language preference, but it offers them a level of personalization they are unlikely to get from a human agent.
While a human agent obviously offers customers an attentive and courteous listener who is prepared to work with the customer to solve their problem, such a scenario is only really of value if the customer’s challenge is a complex and difficult one. For more common queries, the self-service solution can be programmed in such a manner that it can easily and quickly address and resolve these challenges, and do so consistently. In addition, automated speech is designed to be clear and precise, eliminating accents, colloquialisms, grammatical errors, abusive language or the simple problem of an agent speaking to softly or too rapidly.
Another challenge that can occur with human agents is that calls can occasionally become highly charged with emotions or end up going off on a tangent. In situations like these, it can be difficult for the agent to exhibit the correct levels of empathy and courtesy. An automated solution, on the other hand, will quite easily be able to keep interactions with the client linear, and a machine will never experience the type of emotions that might interfere with delivering the kind of customer service your company should pride itself on.
While humans are able to spot – and hopefully follow through – with opportunities to cross- or up-sell to clients, most contact centers still limit the decision-making authority of their agents, which in turn reduces their opportunities to creatively solve problems. A good automated solution, however, can be programmed with logic designed to parallel specific business rules, meaning that it can take the necessary decisions, while staying within the ground rules established by the programmer.
One of the most important issues related to personalizing customer service is to have access to as much information as possible about the individual customer, from the outset. While contact center agents generally have access to the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, which is usually integrated with the telephony system, there are many other databases within the organization that may also contain pertinent information about the consumer. Electronic self-service solutions can be programmed to cut through the traditional siloes within a business and access information from multiple databases, meaning they will be better positioned than a human agent to deliver a personalized service.
In addition, such a solution should have access to the complete contact history of the customer. The last thing you want is for a client who is presumably already-frustrated to have to repeat the details of their problem multiple times. Furthermore, it is often the case that customers with long contact histories are making contact with a view to querying a recent transaction or performing the same task, such as checking an account balance. Good self-service technology will be able to incorporate all of the customer’s history, across all channels of contact, meaning that its IVR menu can dynamically adapt to these recent interactions.
Self-service solutions also offer customers a higher level of security in certain situations. There are very few people who are comfortable giving out vital information like credit card details to a stranger on the other end of the phone. However, if they are passing such information over to an automated system, they are less likely to fear doing so. In addition, a self-service solution can be programmed to utilize security options like voice biometrics, to further enhance the clients’ sense of security.
We live in an era where compliance is critical and it is vital to adhere to applicable laws and regulations. Automated self-service solutions not only ensure that every transaction is handled with honesty and integrity – in a financial services center, for example, it would ensure that the mandatory disclosures were accurately recited – but being electronic, it also keeps a clear record and audit trail, should any compliance issues be raised.
Finally, an intelligent self-service solution should be able to leverage advanced Web and speech technologies to complete not only basic, but even some complex transactions, along the lines of providing airline reservations for a client. And because it is intelligent, it is also able to remember other recent transactions undertaken by the customer and can thus anticipate the reason for their call and present them with a decision tree built around this particular knowledge. And which customer doesn’t want to have their needs anticipated? This is personalization at its very best.
It is a good time to be involved in the contact center space, as technology limitations have mostly been overcome and businesses today have a strong base of best practices on which to build their self-service solutions. While challenges certainly remain, there is no doubt that it is possible to deliver a personalized self-service that is, in many ways, equal to or better than human assistance. We know that customers are demanding quick and accurate answers, via their channel of choice. A personalized self-service offering can not only deliver these in a way that makes the customer feel special, but at the same time can save the organization a small fortune by reducing the high costs associated with human agents.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/can-personalized-self-service-do-a-better-job-than-an-agent
Publish Date: September 8, 2017 |
Delivering exceptional customer experience is the holy grail of modern business, but like King Arthur’s knights, you are unlikely to find what you seek without an effective map.
The modern contact center is undoubtedly a company’s most critical link to its customers, and the way technology has developed over the past two decades has significantly altered the way in which this link occurs. The need to connect with customers via multiple media channels – whether it be through chat functions, social media, websites, email or the traditional telephone - has seriously complicated this business unit.
Of course, such complexity also opens up a whole new range of opportunities for the delivery of a truly exceptional customer experience. To achieve this, however, requires a plan – a well-crafted and thought out customer experience roadmap.
The road to desired business results ultimately runs directly through customer experiences and behaviors, and it is vital to recognize this fact. While all companies deliver a customer experience, it isn’t always what the company intends. Thus, if you want to ensure that your company delivers an uplifting customer experience, it is critical that you develop a roadmap outlining what you expect the customer experience to be, and, most importantly, how you expect to achieve this.
In the end, the aim should be to ensure that customers receive the experience your organization would like them to have, one that builds loyalty, supports repurchase, increases loyalty and reduces customer churn and attrition.
When it comes to the contact center, the key elements of a successful customer experience include the ease of access, or the manner in which a customer is able to obtain information, purchase products, make inquiries, complain or seek assistance in fixing a problem. Alongside the ease of access is the speed of access. Customers today expect high service levels, without requiring them to first jump through multiple hoops, such as repeatedly having to enter their account number or contact the center more than once to achieve resolution. The third aspect here lies in the quality of the interaction, which encompasses things like how easy, efficient and logical the process is.
Once you understand this, you can get to work laying out and designing your desired customer experience roadmap. The first step, of course, is to know the ultimate goal you want to achieve with this roadmap.
Whether this goal is to improve the customer experience at specific channels, to engage your employees or to refine and consolidate your brand, you need to ensure that you have measurable and achievable aims, and that these are set out at the start.
Following this, it is important to know what channels, methods and touch-points the customers use when interacting with the business. Knowing what these are and how they are used by the customer will enable you to more easily ensure that your customer relationship management (CRM) system is able to track each time that consumers touch the company. This is critical information you can use to help populate your roadmap, in order to ensure that the customers’ journey is always a pleasant one.
It is also vital to consider the customer experience holistically. While the contact center is at the coalface of customer interaction, it is not the only department that touches the customer. In other words, you need to understand how other business units interact with and impact on the customer too.
Marketing, Sales and your brick and mortar stores all interact with customers, and the standard silos that exist between business units creates a distance between the various business areas that means that more often than not, these entities have little understanding of what takes place in the contact center. By focusing on viewing the customer experience holistically, you can ensure that messaging remains consistent, regardless of the department delivering it.
Furthermore, you should not only focus on the different business units within the enterprise, you should also include stakeholders from across the company and from all levels within the organization. It is important to understand how different stakeholders impact on the customer experience and to obtain input from them on how to create the ideal roadmap. A good example is how a back office area like accounting or dispatch will have information about processes that directly impact on the customer, so obtaining input from them can only help to improve the overall customer experience.
Your roadmap must also take into account the fact that clients inevitably view your brand as a single entity. It is of no interest to them the fact that, for example, the company website is administered by different people to those who handle the contact center, or that some of your services may be outsourced.
Therefore, the roadmap must take into account the combination of touch-points that each customer goes through, so you that you can understand how you deliver your brand experience at each of them, in order to improve the overall experience.
Another step is to make sure that your people reinforce the brand with every interaction they have with customers. This becomes easier once you have a holistic view of the organization and its various business units, but it must be drummed into staff that they must seek to understand what each consumer is trying to achieve at each touch-point, why they are there, how they feel and what external factors might be influencing them.
Remember that a single bad experience often has more influence on a customer than a lifetime of good service and traditional brand messaging. This is why it is crucial to reinforce the brand at every single customer touch-point.
Although it seems counterintuitive to say it, the roadmap must also take into account those things that are beyond your control, but may still impact how customers feel about you. For example, a road closure outside one of your stores or a failure in Internet connectivity may still leave the client feeling less than happy with your company. While these issues may be beyond your control, you can make a note of the things that have or can affect your key touch-points and – where possible – develop strategies to mitigate against them.
Also be sure to get every member of staff fully engaged in the customer service effort, by treating customer experience as a competence, as opposed to simply another function. This means getting everyone in the business on message, all the time and making sure that they are empowered to make the decisions that need to be made in order to satisfy the customer.
Finally, understand that your roadmap is not set in stone. In other words, even though you may have finalized it, ensure that you review and renew it periodically. Revisit it on a regular basis, even though the likelihood is that it will not need amending most of the time. However, every time a new branch opens up, a new sales or contact channel is added, or even if a new outsourced provider is brought on board, you will need to build this into your roadmap.
Ultimately, you need to understand that it is called a roadmap because it is very similar in most respects to its namesake – and if you are using an out-of-date atlas to find your way around, you will run into trouble sooner, rather than later.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/crafting-a-customer-experience-roadmap
Publish Date: September 7, 2017 |
Natural Language Understanding and artificial intelligence are often terms that are used interchangeably when describing virtual assistants, but they are actually two different things.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) forms the basis of contact center self-service solutions, and when used successfully, it delivers flexibility, efficiency and clear customer satisfaction. In its own way, it is comparable to the way in which artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting on the contact center. In fact, NLU and AI are often used interchangeably when describing virtual assistants in this space, but the fact is that these two solutions are not the same.
NLU is, at its core, all about the ability of a machine to understand and interpret human language the way it is written or spoken. The ultimate goal here is to make the machine as intelligent as a human when it comes to understanding language. NLU is therefore focused on enabling the machine to understand normal human communication – referred to as natural language – as opposed to being able to communicate via computer-speak, or machine language.
NLU is the core technology that sits behind modern interactive voice response (IVR) and virtual assistant solutions, and is designed to enable the rapid and correct routing of callers and generally to enhance the customer experience throughout their self-service engagement. Because NLU enables the virtual assistant to understand people as they talk in their own words, it means it is no longer constrained by a fixed set of responses. In this way, it is able to effectively mimic a live agent interaction.
NLU is effectively a subset of AI technology, designed to enable software to be able to understand natural language as it is spoken. Artificial intelligence is crucial here because the virtual assistant needs to be able to comprehend the intent of a question, as opposed to merely the words being said. Furthermore, it has to be able to understand the context of the conversation too, if it is to conduct an interaction that flows, rather than one that consists of individual, standalone questions and answers.
Because AI enables a natural language search, it is easy for the virtual assistant to find answers and learn on the fly, meaning it can better understand a human’s words and recognize a wider variety of responses, even if it has never heard them before. This means that users can speak with the assistant in the same way they would a human agent and they will receive the same type of answers that a human would have provided. NLU therefore enables enterprises to deploy virtual assistants to take care of the initial customer touch points, while freeing up agents to take on more complex and challenging issues.
As the first line of assistance, virtual assistants are able to capture and captivate customers, by providing them with the answers they need or guiding them to the right places where they can find such answers. And they are also intelligent enough to understand when they don’t have the answer, meaning they can then escalate the call to an agent assisted channel, such as email or click-to-call.
NLU therefore holds the potential to have a massive impact on first call resolution (FCR), as it is able to direct customers to the right place, first time around. With NLU, your callers can say anything they like and the virtual assistant should be clever enough to understand it. This means FCR is increased, along with your customers’ levels of satisfaction in the contact process – something that should lead to greater long term customer loyalty.
While NLU is a subset of AI, it is certainly not something that should be used interchangeably with the latter term, as AI in a broader sense is able to do much more than merely understand and contextualize natural language.
AI is actually a powerful tool that can aid and augment the entire customer service process within the contact center. AI technology is not only useful in assisting call center managers to route calls more effectively, it is also able to provide agents with the data and tools they need to create positive interactions with customers. It can even be used to monitor customer satisfaction levels across a variety of channels – including voice, SMS, social media and chat - based on voice analytics and the type of language used by the caller. In the end, this should result in a more productive and efficient contact center and a greater level of overall customer satisfaction.
AI is ideally suited to interpreting big data, which means it can be useful in identifying customer browsing patterns, purchase history, recent access to customer devices, and most visited webpages. Once it has collated all of this detailed information, the company can even use AI to offer its customers personalized recommendations and proactive service, based on the data patterns it has pulled together.
Without AI, businesses wanting to provide such a service to clients would require one or more dedicated analysts. Even so, you would expect the analysts to take days or even weeks to identify relevant patterns in consumer behavior. AI, on the other hand, can identify such patterns rapidly enough to enable you to deliver the service in near-real time. Moreover, AI is able to utilize a range of analytics that the company may have, such as self-learning algorithms, as an example, to consistently improve its own performance.
Whereas NLU is clearly only focused on language, AI in fact powers a range of contact center technologies that help to drive seamless customer experiences. From IVR solutions that connect customers quickly and seamlessly with the most qualified agent, to prioritizing callbacks and ensuring the customer is called back when their position arrives at the front of a queue and on to predictive dialers that help to fuel sales through smart and effective lead management, AI offers a much broader scope of advantages to the contact center.
Finally, when one considers the impact that big data and the Internet of Things are likely to have on the future of the contact center, AI is clearly only going to play an even more crucial role in shaping the way brands and customers engage with one another in the future. Both NLU and AI are going to be vital to this future, but if they are to have the impact on the modern contact center that organizations hope for, it is important that people understand the differences, as well as the similarities, between the two.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/natural-language-understanding-nlu-and-artificial-intelligence-ai
Publish Date: September 6, 2017 |
There are many benefits to implementing a chatbot within your contact center, most of which directly and positively impact on the end-customer.
The increasing prevalence of chatbots in the customer service space can be put down to the simple fact that they provide fast, easy and human-like customer service at first contact. There is no doubt that chatbots have the potential to significantly change both how customers interact with companies, and how organizations, in turn, interact with consumers.
While the standard view of a chatbot is one that operates as an interactive virtual agent, and is capable of assisting customers with simple inquiries, thanks to its chat-based interface, some solutions are able to handle more complex tasks too. A good example is Jacada’s Intelligent Assistant, which is able to go far beyond a simple question-and-answer format. Thanks to a conversational type dialog with the customer, this chatbot is able to understand the intent and sentiment and translate this to actionable transactions.
Due to its ability to deliver on more complex interactions with consumers, the Intelligent Assistant is perfectly suited to deliver a number of vital benefits to the contact center. In this blog, we will look at four of the most important of these benefits.
A report by Forrester suggests that as many as 77% of US consumers believe that the most important part of customer service is for the organization to value the consumers’ time. This is the first key benefit offered by the Intelligent Assistant – it can greatly reduce the time required to resolve customer issues, which obviously leads to happier customers.
Anyone who has some experience with calling a contact center will know that there is an inevitable hold time, before you are connected with an agent. This could easily take upwards of 10 minutes and leads to increased customer frustration. After all, if a company expects you to support them, you expect them equally to not waste your time. Thanks to chatbots, the frustrating days of waiting in a queue to speak to an agent are eliminated.
After all, chatbots never get tired, they never get angry, they never require breaks and they can simultaneously have conversations with thousands of people. No matter what time of the day it is or how many people are contacting you, every single one of them will be answered immediately.
In a similar vein, we live in a society where traditional operating hours are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The permanently available nature of the Internet and the growing number of all day, every day operations run by many large retailers means that modern customers also don’t wish to be hemmed in by standard opening and closing hours. When they want a problem resolved, or an answer to a question, they expect to be able to get it immediately – whatever the time of day or night.
Being robotic in nature, Virtual Assistant is available 24/7/365 and can quickly answer questions across multiple channels. This means that you can deliver the kind of service expected by modern consumers, without having to hire agents to work night shifts, because Jacada’s Intelligent Assistant provides natural, human-like assistance, without the need for the presence of a trained customer service agent.
A third benefit of this chatbot is that it is able to personalize the customer experience, thanks to its ability to collect and analyze data from a wide range of sources, including previous support interactions. This allows them to deliver a more personalized experience, because it means customers don’t have to repeat themselves multiple times to different agents every time they contact an organization.
Moreover, there is clearly a growing demand from the customer side for a more personal experience across all channels and at all times. To keep up with the growth of these channels, one can leverage a chatbot to meet the rising volume of support requests. And because it utilizes natural language processing technology, the chatbot can actually understand what the customer is asking, enabling it to provide personalized, on-demand service around the clock. Perhaps best of all, the chatbot is even able to authenticate the customer, without human intervention, making life that much easier for the client.
Finally, the Virtual Assistant is a great tool for promoting brand loyalty. For one thing, by automating many basic customer service functions, it is helping to transform the role of human agents, allowing them to focus their attention on the more complex cases, thereby providing better and warmer service to their customers.
More pertinently, Jacada’s Virtual Assistant is also capable of automating outbound, proactive communication with consumers, meaning that it can automatically contact the customer to follow up on a previous call they may have made, to check in and assess their satisfaction with the result, or to find out how happy they are with a product or service they have purchased. It can even be used to wish individual clients on their birthday. These small touches inevitably boost customer satisfaction.
In today’s world, an increasing number of people are more comfortable with the chat format than they are with making a phone call, which means we can expect the demand for chatbots to grow significantly. It is probably no exaggeration to suggest that there is a chatbot revolution coming, so to be successful in the future, businesses will have to embrace this new technology. And when it comes to implementing a chatbot, there’s no better option than Jacada’s Intelligent Assistant to help you to join the revolution.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/benefits-of-chatbots
Publish Date: September 5, 2017 |
Chat bot technology is being driven at a revolutionary pace. Yesterday’s chat bot provider is already obsolete, and today’s chat bot provider faces a juggernaut of competition the likes of which the technology world has never seen. Chatbot platforms are rapidly becoming commoditized as there are so many players with little to no differentiation. The next generation of chat bots will belong to the “Big Six” – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and IBM.
The maturity of chat bot providers can be gauged according to the following scale:
In a piece entitled “Gartner predicts a virtual world of exponential change”, they make the claim that by 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen. They go on to state that companies like Apple, Google and Amazon are “turning ‘voice first’ interactions into ubiquitous experiences”.1
This in part is what limits the playing field to the “Generation 4” maturity model above – only those chat bots that are truly multi-channel with the inclusion of voice will be able to reach this classification.
The sheer technological advancement coupled with the demanding requirements dictates that implementation of a fourth generation chat bot will be an assembly of best-of-breed components. No single vendor will have the capacity or appetite to deliver and end-to-end enterprise ready chat bot.
The vendors identified as fourth gen chat bot vendors will be leading the ecosystems. The core chat bot technology will be theirs. However, other vendors will opt-in to the ecosystem and provide significant value-add in being able to deliver an end-solution. These ecosystems will be so dominant that even existing 2nd or 3rd generation chat bot providers may end up breaking into their parts to play in the ecosystem in a bid to remain viable.
Deploying a fourth generation chatbot into a complex enterprise is not without its challenges. While the sophisticated AI and NLP is sufficiently “black boxed”, there is still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done around dialog management and integrating the various assets found in the enterprise.
Figure 2 shows a conceptual abstract chat bot architecture in an enterprise. Integrating to all the external systems, customized business logic, heavy services orchestration and dialog management all add up to a significant code investment.
In fact, none of the Generation 4 chatbot providers currently provide any mechanism to seamlessly integrate these components. The result is extensive coding to combine the elements, which is time consuming expensive and difficult to maintain……and relies on an already overburdened IT Services Roadmap.
The primary areas that the ecosystem can provide to aid in the implementation of a fourth generation chatbot are:
Given this strong convergence of technology with a limited number of fourth generation chatbot vendors, organizations may rightfully be confused as to what implementation strategy they should use. Answering that question in part depends on where you are in your chat bot journey.
This may be one of the times you’re being rewarded for not being an early adopter! If you’re now in the consideration phase of chat bot implementation, it is a critical moment to step back and reassess your approach. If your chat bot vendor is not one of the identified fourth generation chat bot vendors, you may be limiting yourself right out of the gate. You would be strongly encouraged to reassess your bot engagement strategy.
This is a refrain that is unfortunately becoming all too familiar. While organizations saw some initially encouraging results, as customer inquiries become more complex, the chabots became less and less useful. Whether this is due to limitations in the NLP, a lack of machine learning, a lack of dialog management or the inability to be full transactional, the limitations of current chatbots are quickly becoming evident. Organizations falling into this category should start planning to move to a fourth generation chatbot provider in order to future-proof their virtual customer assistant platform.
Congratulations on using a fourth generation chat bot provider. You’ve made the right decision and you are on a future-proof platform. However, we understand the challenges you face in implementing this in the enterprise and tying together all the various components. At Jacada, we provide the first graphical drag-and-drop chat bot design environment that brings together the sophistication of the fourth generation AI technology, coupled with dialog management and transactional capabilities – all in a code-free environment. This allows for the rapid assembly of fourth generation chat bots by selecting the best components in the ecosystem and seamlessly bringing them together.
Fourth generation chat bots are going to be cross channel industry leading AI engines, coupled with an ecosystem of supplemental technologies.
At Jacada we help organizations in developing their chat bot roadmap, and we provide a unique “bot framework” to assist in fourth generation chat bot implementation.
This bot framework includes the ability to create sophisticated dialog management, centralize all the orchestration between the components, and use robotic process automation to surface more transactions and remove the human element. All through a visual code-free environment.
For more information, visit www.jacada.com
[About the author]
As Chief Marketing Officer, Chris’ responsibilities at Jacada include global Go-To-Market strategy, corporate positioning, and marketing strategy and campaigns. Chris has over 20 years of experience in product management, marketing and software development having held several senior leadership positions. Before joining Jacada, Chris founded a successful software consulting company providing large scale software systems to Fortune 500 companies. Outside of work, Chris enjoys app development, automated trading algorithms and provides pro-bono legal services. Chris holds a BS Computer Science and a JD, and is admitted to practice in the State Bar of California
1 - http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-predicts-a-virtual-world-of-exponential-change/
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/the-evolving-chat-bot
Publish Date: September 1, 2017 |
While an increasing number of customers are moving to digital channels, voice remains extremely popular. Combining digital with voice could thus give your center a competitive advantage.
Contact centers today have clearly incorporated digital channels into their customer engagement model, and this transformation has created a growing need for an integrated experience in the omnichannel environment.
With customers today becoming increasingly tech-savvy, these digital channels are not only proliferating, they are having an impact on every aspect of communication, with an increasing number of customers only resorting to the telephone when all other options have failed to resolve their query.
Voice, however, still remains a popular channel, albeit one that is particularly expensive for the contact center. For this reason, the benefits of bringing digital resources to a voice call, or transitioning or merging a call with a digital interaction when a customer phones a contact center are enormous.
Self-service channels have already largely stripped the simple interactions – like tracking the delivery of a package or requesting an account balance – from agents. Automating these issues within the contact center has meant that only the tougher ones are left for human agents to handle.
This, of course, means that the calls that do end up in the contact center are more complex and contentious, which in all likelihood will mean longer average call durations. Since on the customer’s side, the telephone is inevitably the means of last resort - indicating that they are probably fairly irritated by the time they call in – while it is the most expensive and complex interaction for the contact center, some way of making this interaction run as smoothly as possible is clearly required.
Which leads us to the benefits that can be gained by adding other channels into the voice mix, channels that not only make life easier for the agent, but ensure that the customer completes the call in a positive and happy frame of mind.
For one thing, Intelligent Virtual Assistants are today capable of intelligent, human-like dialogue with consumers. Chatbots like this have access to a rich set of features, including the ability to understand complex inquiries, ask clarifying questions and personalize responses. Moreover, these solutions are able to capture, analyze and aggregate each conversation to deliver real time insights.
They can also learn from past and current live agent interactions, as well as other engagements happening in the digital channels, in order to constantly optimize their behavior and improve the accuracy of their responses. While such a solution would likely entail digitally pivoting the caller over to the chatbot, rather than using the virtual assistant in conjunction with the live agent, an effective chatbot would offer a useful customer service outlet in certain instances.
Another digital tool that holds plenty of potential is that of an online chat system, which can offer customers immediate access to help, rather than having to wait for lengthy periods in the phone queue. Wait times for these chats are considerably shorter and customers are also able to multi-task while waiting.
Furthermore, agents immediately have access to each customer’s browsing history, shortcuts, co-browsing features, and many other helpful tools. This knowledge will enable the agents to deliver better, more relevant support to clients, at a cost per interaction that is lower than most alternative methods, like phone or email support.
From the contact center’s point of view, online chat offers quicker response times, which means that the agents spend less time on an interaction, thereby enabling them to handle more queries in the same period. In addition, the agents are also able to support multiple customers simultaneously, making it far less costly than the telephone.
One of the best technologies to combine with the telephone is that of co-browsing, which is particularly useful in instances where customers need help resolving an issue. This tool enables an agent to see and interact with the consumer’s computer, smartphone or tablet screen. Therefore, throughout the conversation, both parties are always on the same page and the agent can more easily talk them through what needs to be done. Alternatively the client can hand over control of their screen to the agent, who can run through the process remotely, while they watch.
Co-browsing technology really lends itself to first contact resolution, because screen sharing immediately provides the agent with context and an overview of the issue that the customer has. This means their time is optimized, as they don’t need the customer to undertake an in-depth explanation of what is wrong. Rather, they are able to see the problem for themselves and can begin resolving it straight away.
Customers also appreciate the hands-on nature of co-browsing, as well as the resolution speed it generally offers – but more than that, it improves their experience by effectively offering them a form of training that will empower them to solve a similar problem in the future by themselves. It also allows the contact center to gather a vast amount of useful information about the customer, which can be utilized further down the line to further personalize the service offered to them.
Yet another technology that is coming into its own and offers great benefits to both agents and customers is that of video. This can help in multiple ways - not only is it useful as a way of facilitating face-to-face chats between agents and customers, it can also be utilized as a means of visual instruction for self-service troubleshooting.
For the latter, videos can be used to help bring your brand to life through a series of simple ‘How To’ videos, or by showcasing the advantages of a particular solution – something where a picture is not only worth a thousand words, but can get the message across much more easily, in a quick and simple manner.
On the other hand, making use of video in respect of live support enables your agents to deliver a face-to-face interaction that is more personable than a voice-only contact can ever hope to be. And customers that find their problem resolved rapidly, by an agent whose face they are able to see – which makes them that much more human to the customer – will inevitably conclude the transaction with an enhanced sense of satisfaction.
Moreover, considering the proliferation of smart phones today, video calling may even be more cost-effective from a customer perspective. It is definitely a great way to show off products or services that the consumer can’t experience for themselves, and an equally enjoyable way for them to have any queries they may have about such products or services answered.
There can be no doubt that digital transformation is changing the way in which contact centers operate. As we move forward, the ability to either link additional newer technologies to the traditional telephone – such as through the video calling mentioned above – or by pivoting callers to a technology that can solve their problem more quickly and effectively is a very clear means of improving customer service, enhancing customer loyalty and at the same time making life a little bit easier for your agents.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/voice-to-digital-transition
Publish Date: September 1, 2017 |
The customer experience manager is key to delivering the kind of service offering that can truly differentiate an organization. Here are some of the most important things that a CEM should (and should not) do.
In our previous blog, we spoke about the importance of having a customer experience manager (CEM), what this job entails and the kind of challenges such a person would face. We follow that up today with a look at some of the key “do’s and don’ts” that accompany taking on the role of a CEM. Naturally, while the points outlined below are areas of focus for the CEM, it goes without saying that part of the CEM job description is to ensure that all employees who work under them also make sure that the do’s are done, and the don’ts are avoided.
Be proactive. This means focusing on proactive customer engagement, particularly as it relates to social media. An unhappy customer that turns to social media will have a much larger audience than one that simply shares such an experience verbally. This means monitoring the various social platforms closely and listening to conversations that are being had by both customers and competitors, in order to get ahead of bad experiences before they occur. This will create a form of predictive customer service, and should ensure that even customers who have a problem with the organization come out of the experience feeling positive.
Underestimate the customers’ inexperience. One thing you must never do is underestimate the inexperience of your company’s customers, even though it is expected that modern consumers are more sophisticated and technologically savvy. Despite consumers’ increased skills, the CEM still needs to make the process of contacting the customer service center as easy as possible. This means ensuring that the customer service center utilizes as many channels as possible, so that however the customer chooses to contact the business, they are able to do so with ease. Making sure that your customers have easy access to support is, after all, a key part of the CEM job description.
Respect your customers. Respect is critical if you hope to build long term relationships with them. You want to make your customers feel both important and valued by the business, which means making sure each and every customer receives the proper attention from someone who has a polite and friendly attitude. Demonstrating that you really care should not only leave customers feeling more fulfilled, but should also lead to both increased loyalty and brand advocacy.
Be indifferent. Indifference is the arch-enemy of good customer service, as it is a clear indication that your enterprise no longer cares. While there are many reasons why agents – or even the CEM themselves – may have an ‘off’ period where such indifference creeps in, it is critical to nip such attitudes in the bud. Ultimately, it is the job of the CEM – and by extension, the agents who serve under them - to take on the customer’s burden and make any problem they may face your problem instead.
Be honest. This entails being fair when it comes to issues like pricing, additional fees and other types of extra charges. It also encompasses establishing transparent return and refund policies and means focusing on delivering timeously and responding or following up when you say you will. In effect, this means always doing what you promised. After all, nothing destroys trust faster than broken promises.
Ignore customer feedback. As a CEM, it is vital that you always listen to your customers. If a consumer has made the effort to share an opinion about their experience with you, keep an open mind about it, as any suggestions or feedback will prove useful in improving your company’s service. More crucially, make them aware that you are taking their feedback into consideration, as this will let them know that you care about what they think and expect of you.
Put yourself in the customers’ shoes. One of the best ways to understand the customer, and thus serve them better, is by putting yourself in their place, before addressing their request. It is always important to understand the feelings of frustration experienced when something goes wrong and – more pointedly – how irritating unsatisfactory customer service can be. Understanding how the customer feels and what your service department looks like from their perspective is critical to getting your customer service approach right.
Treat customers as mere transactions. Nobody likes to feel like they are no more than a number to a large corporation, especially when that number is usually delineated in dollars. While the money side of the equation is obviously important to the business, you want to put the customers’ well-being front and center. If you do this, you will be well-positioned to build strong and long-lasting relationships. And such relationships inevitably lead to greater customer spend anyway.
Remember to express gratitude. Thanking your customer for their feedback, or their loyalty, or a myriad of other things will make them feel appreciated by your brand and will make even a less-than-stellar customer experience feel good. Saying ‘thank you’ to those who support your business takes little effort, and the rewards tend to be exemplary.
Be afraid of complaints. However good your service is, there are going to be occasions where there is a service failure - after all, it is impossible to satisfy all of the customers all of the time. Although this means that complaints are inevitable, it doesn’t mean you should fear them. Look at a complaint as an opportunity to find and fix a problem. Every complaint is directing your attention to an area that needs improvement. Therefore, every complaint should serve as the foundation of an even better customer service.
Ensure employee engagement is maximized. Remember that the more engaged your employees are, and the more they are privy to the company’s customer service goals, the more likely they will be to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience. Getting employee buy-in to your customer service goals will mean they are more empowered to solve problems, and thus provide customers with the kind of service that ends positively for everyone.
In the modern world, phrases like ‘the customer is king’ have become seen as little more than a cliché, but that doesn’t stop them from being true. A good customer experience manager, one that focuses on the above do’s and don’ts, should be able to build a customer service department that turns this phrase from a mere cliché into a truism instead.
[About the author]
Kevin is an advocate for effortless customer experiences and quick customer resolutions. He is driven to help Telcos & Retailers as they deal with the need to change digital habits and increase utilization of their assets. He has a background in marketing, public relations and advertising and has a firm belief in the mission of Jacada. He is an Atlanta native and Georgia State University graduate who loves competition and is passionate about his family, his work and his dog Peaches.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/the-do-s-and-don-ts-of-customer-experience-management
Publish Date: August 30, 2017 |
A relatively new job title in the customer service space, customer experience manager is more than just a fancy title – it is the glue that holds the customer service center together.
Customer experience management is top of mind for a range of industries today, as customer experience is now viewed as a key differentiator for businesses in a world where competition is greater than ever before and price differentiation is no longer enough.
To successfully deliver this, companies need to hire a customer experience manager (CEM) to ensure that the customer journey, across all touch-points, is pleasant and efficient. Success at this should, in all likelihood, result in higher customer satisfaction, improved cross- and up-sell opportunities and an increase in both loyalty and referral rates.
So, just what is involved in such a job? What is expected of the CEM, what are the main responsibilities of such a role and what are the key challenges facing someone in this position?
First and foremost, the CEM is expected to ensure that the customer service department operates efficiently and effectively, in order to optimize the interaction between an organization and its clients. To achieve this, CEMs need to take responsibility for creating and implementing strategies designed to boost both the customer relationship and the end-user’s satisfaction.
Such strategies should focus on ensuring that clients are able to reach out to the business via the channel of their choice, as well as making sure that the company can also communicate with the client in a similar manner. A key part of the job is guiding contact center agents towards ensuring that their interactions with customers always reflect the enterprise in a positive light, and to guarantee rapid responses to any and all inquiries and questions.
It is important for CEMs to oversee proper training for agents, to ensure an effective workforce and to analyze and interpret customer interactions, in order to be able to correctly identify current and future requirements, as this is vital information when it comes to optimizing the customer experience moving forward.
Furthermore, the CEM has to liaise with other business units within the organization – such as marketing, sales and advertising – in order to obtain a complete picture of customer feedback, thereby positioning themselves and their company in such a way as to be able to develop programs that will improve the customer experience not only in the contact center, but across the entire organization.
Another aspect of the role is to monitor the activities of customer service staff, in order to ensure they comply with agreed upon standards of courtesy and professionalism, and also to provide regular feedback to agents in order to keep these employees apprised of the situation. This means chiding them when things are not up to standard and praising them when they go above and beyond the call of duty.
Finally, when things go wrong, as they inevitably sometimes do, it is the CEM’s role to follow up with the customer, as the act of having a senior person reach out will demonstrate to the client that even though there may have been a problem, the company clearly values their business and is actively seeking ways to improve the situation in the future.
So what are some of the biggest challenges facing the CEM as they go about implementing their job description and improving the customer experience?
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the CEM is the need to create a customer-first culture. Too often, much of what is done – in any business unit, not just the contact center - is biased toward doing things the way that is best for the company, rather than what is best for the customer. Furthermore, if the experience is to be a good one throughout the customer’s journey, cross-departmental support will be required from areas such as marketing, IT, sales and finance.
The CEM, therefore, needs to focus on instructing a sustained customer-centric mindset across the enterprise. This means getting everyone on board with a customer-centric strategy, starting with the C-Suite.
The second major challenge lies in getting the right team in place. Implementing a diverse program like customer experience will require an experienced team to manage it. This goes beyond merely having skilled, empathetic agents in place and entails building a team that encompasses implementation experts, research analysts and BI specialists.
In addition, there needs to be scalability built into any team created, as a large team may be required at the start of such a program, but as it evolves, fewer staff may be needed and the CEM will have to justify the ROI in the team they have put in place.
Speaking of ROI, it is not enough to simply demonstrate that customer satisfaction has increased as a justification for any money spent. Today, it is imperative for the CEM to be able to show exactly how customer experience efforts are impacting on key business KPIs, like customer retention.
Improved customer retention and increased sales are often perceived as the primary benefits related to investing in customer experience and improvements in these need to be demonstrated if the CEM hopes to continue receiving investment in their customer experience program.
Communication is also a challenge that needs to be overcome. Having a strong and experienced, customer experience team, is only valuable to the organization if these employees are provided with a purpose, rather than simply being given tasks to complete. In other words, the CEM needs to communicate to staff what they are working towards, rather than just telling them what they are working on. It is equally critical to communicate to them that they can use their own initiative in dealing with customer issues – employees who are there only to escalate requests are not serving the bigger customer experience picture.
Finally, a major challenge that CEMs need to overcome is the breaking down of, or at the very least communicating across, the various company silos. Customer-centricity tends to be hampered the most when there is a lack of cooperation created by a siloed approach. Too often, individual departments or business units have their own approach to how they treat customers, and if each one is even slightly different, it can ruin the customer journey. It is the CEM’s job to foster better collaboration across business units, in order to improve the total customer experience.
It is clear that the customer experience manager is not just someone running another support operation for the enterprise – instead, CEM is a vital role in a critical business department, and is a role that is key in shaping a company’s brand image and is vital to improving customer loyalty.
Every interaction with your organization’s customers is a chance for your people to excite them and make them more loyal to your business. Crafting a thoroughly enjoyable customer journey will not only create clients who stick with you in the long-term, but should also lead to these customers recommending your company to more people – and the CEM is the key to ensuring that this happens.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/the-customer-experience-manager
Publish Date: August 29, 2017 |
What are the new technologies being deployed in the contact centers? Several key trends are currently dominating the landscape, and have already started to infiltrate the industry even well before this year.
Through advancements in technology, interactions have become easier, friendlier and more cost effective. To help you stay on target for 2017, we’ve identified 5 of the most influential trends affecting the future of call centers:
1. Cloud Contact Centers
Cloud contact centers offer huge boosts in call center efficiency, with 24/7 support, along with increased data security, flexibility, and adaptability, particularly any platform needs to be able to to be integrated cloud CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, SAP, and even Facebook. Integrating with cloud CRM makes the cloud contact centers a real benefit for businesses who want to promote team communications and collaboration. It’s no surprise then that the cloud contact center industry is set to take a serious jump forward within the next five years. In fact, according to research just released from Markets and Markets, the cloud contact center industry is projected to increase nearly threefold – from $5.43B to $15.67B between now and 2021. Meanwhile, Gartner recently predicted that more than $1 trillion in IT spending would be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years.
2. Big Data Analytics
The trend toward big data analytics is changing how call centers communicate with customers. Even smaller businesses have massive amounts of data and are taking advantage of sophisticated analytics to turn data, such as chats, call and screen recordings, SMS messages and more, into valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. The analysis of the Big Data provides feedback that is used to deliver a more personalized customer service. Clients who receive high-quality personalized call center service increase their purchases and prove their loyalty. Furthermore, by leveraging big data analytics, brands can identify customer pain and passion points more efficiently. Big Data analytics even help companies anticipate the client's needs in advance and quickly resolve the customer interaction. In the coming year, as companies continue implementing more unified communications platforms and strategies, look for more advancements in analytics to leverage customer data from CRM to create more tailored experiences.
3. Chatbots
A trend that is growing fast today is the use of Artificial Intelligence that is based on using big data. Call center operations, as more and more businesses are using artificial intelligence applications to help harness big data and make call center experiences for customers and agents streamlined. First, companies collect a vast amount of customer data that AI systems translate into machine learning that becomes smarter and smarter about the clients and their issues. The process of collecting data analyzing it and adding more data and analyzing it again allows the machines to give the correct answers over time. As customers today expect to receive instant service across all channels at all times, intelligent virtual personal assistants can provide fast, cost-effective and human-like customer service for almost any interface, like voice response or mobile apps, SMS, the web, and instant messaging. Since there is a large growth of these channels, companies are adopting Chatbots that meet the rising volume of online support requests and even with quicker response times.
4. Omni-Channel Communications (in a Multi-Channel World)
As call centers expand their multichannel offerings, creating an “Omni-channel” experience is crucial. A good Omni-channel experience means that the company has to connect all the applications so they can to seamlessly work together. A customer that started purchasing and item on their smartphone needs to be able to continue the order on their desktop. When the customer has a question to ask about the order on the phone, the agent (either chatbot or human) needs to be able to see the shopping cart that was last updated, etc.. Otherwise, customers will drop off the order and forget about it all together. Customers expect the process to be unified., Surprisingly, though, only 36% of contact centers can track a customer journey that spans multiple channels, and only 17% can locate problem hotspots that impact the customer experience. This is a major issue for many contact centers, as customer expectations for Omni-channel support and execution are only increasing. One thing is for certain, the move towards Omni-channel is already happening, and its implementation is one every company needs to take very seriously.
5. Mobile Customer Support
According to a BI Intelligence report, mobile commerce will make up 45% of total e-commerce, equaling $284 billion in sales by 2020. Customers are purchasing more and more products and services from their Smartphone, so they also expect to be able to receive customer service on their Smartphone at the same time. In fact, a report on mobile CX found 63% of consumers use mobile devices a few times a month or more to search online for customer and product support.
We expect that more call centers will integrate mobile customer support into their customer service arsenal in the upcoming year.
Each of these innovations can create a positive, customer-centric experience that gives consumers more of what they want, while call centers will also benefit from getting a deeper understanding of their customers, along with new ways to deploy this knowledge and driving higher profits. Sounds like a win-win to us!
Learn more about Jacada and how we are helping companies keep up with these trends through innovative solutions like Visual IVR.
Source: http://www.jacada.com/blog/5-trends-in-the-call-center
Publish Date: August 15, 2017 |
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