How Will Contact Center Channels Change in 2019?

Customer-centric businesses are working harder than ever to support all of the channels that their customers want to use. That’s why 84% of companies who consider themselves to be customer-centric have a heavy focus on supporting mobile channels for a greater customer experience. COPC reported that mobile care increases by 41% in 2018 alone.

The results from the 2018-2019 ContactBabel Report, as shown, illustrate that as mobile becomes more widely used by end users, channels like email, telephone, letter, and fax are expected to decrease in interactions. The channel with the largest expected increase in interactions for 2019 is web chat, with 56% of survey respondents believing there will be an increase. Social media customer service and SMS followed with 46% and 36% expecting an increase in interactions.

Both the need to retain strong CX strategies around traditional channels like email, voice, and IVR, and the need to add new channels has companies wondering how to create and run a true omnichannel contact center that empowers agents and delights customers. The ContactBabel Omnichannel Report walks though more stats from their survey, which could help you in your omnichannel journey.

With traditional channels like voice, email, and chat, as well as channels like SMS/text, video, in-app, social messengers, and bots, Bright Pattern is the only true omnichannel provider that can be turned on in just days!

Cyara’s Top Tips to Enhance Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) expert Cyara has compiled six best practices that businesses should internalize to raise customer satisfaction. These insights, gleaned from Cyara’s front-line teams, celebrate #CXDay2018, a day to recognize the professionals and companies that make great customer experiences happen.

Cyara CEO Alok Kulkarni offers six ways a business can elevate the experience of its customers:

1. CX should be at the center of any digital transformation.
   Customer interactions are an integral part of the CX landscape and need to be a key component of digital transformation initiatives. For many companies, digital transformation investments are insufficiently allocated to the contact center, with the result that customers continue to wrestle with legacy systems. Recent studies show that while digital channels for customer interaction are growing rapidly, voice is still the preferred communications channel for pre- and post-sales support.
2. Without CX measurement, businesses are flying blind.
   From the anecdotal to the hard stats, CRM professionals need to know how their CX is performing. CX leaders rely on a variety of metrics—from the big-picture metrics of Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) to real-time metrics such as dropped calls and correct connections. These real-time metrics deliver the true insights into the “now” needed to quickly identify and address problems customers are experiencing as they look for help.
3. Great CX innovation requires cross-team collaboration.
   With the push for continuous integration and real-time innovation of front-line customer experience systems, it’s critical for organizations to successfully collaborate across development, testing, and operations teams, as well as between IT teams and business teams. Having a shared vision and collaboration tools are key to advancing in an agile, fast-paced mode of development.
4. Spikes happen. Systems fail. Be prepared.
   Whether it’s Black Friday, annual insurance enrollment, or holiday travel, each business sector has its seasonal volatility, major product launches, and other high-volume periods. Spikes can also be unpredictable, such as a dramatic increase in insurance inquiries after a natural disaster. “Make sure you load test and ensure your system can handle massive volumes of in-bound enquiries, rather than finding out you under-provisioned just when your contact center is deluged,” says Kulkarni.
5. Stay informed and learn from the experience of others.
   Cyara works with companies of all sizes across many industries and geographies — including their unique attributes, industry-specific regulations, and compliance requirements. Certainly, every company has its own brand values and personality—so implementations certainly vary—but the principles of world-class CX leaders remain consistent. “The attributes I consistently see with those who are most successful include prioritization of the customer experience, a cross-team dedication to excellent customer service, a culture of CX innovation, and a strong commitment to continuous improvement,” says Kulkarni.
6. Make it personal.
   “As a CX technology provider, I’m a big proponent of applying technology to automate, test, manage, and deliver on your CX. Today, there’s also a great deal of excitement about what’s on the horizon with AI and chatbots. All that’s great, but all this technology has to be applied in service to each individual customer’s experience,” adds Kulkarni. Technology must help support the company’s commitment and mission, it must empower both its customers and its front-line agents, and it must personalize each and every touchpoint with the customer.

 

 

How to Create and Improve Your Customer Experience Model

To create a consistent, customized experience for your customers, you need a well-rounded view of the entire experience and all its parts. When you’re able to see the customer experience in full, you’ll streamline targeting and optimize communication.

By streamlining targeting, you learn which customer segments are interested in specific products and services, plus which channels you should use to target these specific customers. You’ll then uncover the best ways to communicate with that specific segment, including the sort of messaging they respond to.

What You Need to Create a Customer Experience Model

Creating a customer experience model takes into account all of the different parts of the customer experience you may have already tackled, like data, the customer journey and personas. Here’s where you’ll bring them together.

Who and Why

During this stage, you’ll understand your customers and see them as humans, not as metrics. This is where you’ll define customer personas. A persona considers the goals, motivations and needs of your VIP customers, which is based on data and research. You’ll gather and understand personal details, like who they are, what they want and why they should care about your product or service.

When and What

This is where you’ll map the customer journey, which highlights the key interactions your customers have with you. In addition to when the touchpoints take place, you’ll also determine what happens at each one – what are the customer’s perceptions and experiences along the way?

How

To pull everything together, you’ll work to figure out which processes and systems you need in place.

4 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience Model

1. Choose a business objective. It should be a high-level objective, one that directly relates to your strategic plan, and it’s also good if it has broad impact. Focus on creating results for just that objective.
2. Choose one channel – and it’s okay to start small. You may choose one type of email communication or one social media channel, for example.
3. Your plan should include performance targets and metrics. You’ll want to measure and report regularly so that you and your team know how well the strategy is working.
4. Communicate with your team. Explain the reasoning behind the customer experience model, the changes that will take place and the results you’re after.

Tell us about your experience creating customer service models!

Change Management: The Most Important Step Missing from Your Service Project

In today’s world of cloud technology and apps, changing or upgrading systems has never been easier. Whether you are changing from an on-premise to a cloud solution or providing your customers with a native app for their mobile device, much of the change is as simple as pointing your data to a new endpoint. So why is it so hard sometimes for those changes to be readily adopted? Why are your customers not acting on or receiving your changes as you anticipated? Why doesn’t it just work?

Because your customers are usually human.

Change is difficult. Change has different impacts on different segments of your associates or your customers. Some adopt or acclimate right away and start realizing the benefits of your product or service. We love these customers or associates; they make things so easy. But we usually have folks who realize only some of the benefits or have a hard time with the change. They become your squeaky wheel, your biggest challenger, or worse, your apple that tries to spoil the entire bunch.

What you may be missing from your service project is change management. How do you know? Ask yourself these questions:

• Are your organization’s leaders skilled in the arts and sciences of change management?
• Do you have a change management plan or methodology?
• Is change management part of your project plan?

In my past six years as a consultant for some of the biggest brands in financial services, tech, and retail, strong change management has been the difference between extraordinary adoption and a completed project, or even the success or failure of a project.

I support using a change management methodology called ADKAR, which stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforce.

Awareness

Most successful changes start with the impacted stakeholders being made aware of the changes.  This is just an introduction to the changes that will be coming. This information may have a positive, neutral, or negative impact on morale, job satisfaction, workload, role, and/or position within the organization. Prior to making your associates aware of the change, I recommend completing a Change Management Assessment. See the following example:

Steps to Complete a Change Management Assessment

1. Identify changes or workstream
2. Provide a brief description
3. Identify a single owner
4. Judge the impact to the stakeholders
5. Is it a positive, negative, or neutral change?
6. Is training required?
7. Is a communication plan or strategy required?
8. Are there organizational changes associated with this change?
9. How aware is the organization that this change is coming?
10. Identify all stakeholders associated with the change

Desire

Often the building of desire coincides with the communication associated with awareness. This is your “why.” Having a strong understanding of the possible outcomes, consequences, and ripple effects is critical to be able to build the desire for change. While creating your plan to build desire, a great idea is to bring in two to four influential associates to understand their concerns, questions, and thoughts on what the general populous reactions will be to the changes.

Knowledge

This is where your training or continuous learning plans come into play.  In general, most people recognize this phase of change management best. This is where you develop and execute training or provide the knowledge for your associates.

Ability

If knowledge is the training or learning, ability is the opportunity to put what has been made aware and trained into practice. You will also want to make sure you are quality monitoring in this phase and that you are available to provide coaching and support.

Reinforcement

Sometimes the most forgotten area of change management, reinforcement is your opportunity to implement incentives (and consequences, if necessary) to help your associates keep/adopt the change. The most important part of this phase is credibility. Are you walking your talk? Is this a fly-by-night, flavor-of-the-month initiative? Identify multiple ways that your changes can be internalized by your teams.

The more impactful the change, the greater the need for change management. If you are discussing culture or a major technical system change, there are very few other things that could create as much impact as change management. Investing early in the change timeline and a change management methodology will help ensure your ability to execute. This model can be used for external customers as well, and I suggest just trying it for your next customer impacting initiative.

Now I have some questions for you:

• Have you used change management methodologies before? If so, how did it differ?
• If you fear process, does this sound like too much process?
• Are you considering a change on the magnitude of a culture shift?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

For more on the specifics on ADKAR, visit PROSCI’s Change Management Learning Center.