Infusing Digital CX With Human Intelligence

In today’s contact centers, there are plenty of avenues for using technology to provide a great customer experience. How can we make sure to maintain a personal touch? In the live Virtual Conference webcast, Dave Hoekstra from Calabrio demonstrated how to infuse digital CX with human intelligence to create a meaningful customer experience for not only your customers, but for your agents as well.

In today’s contact centers, we are constantly hearing the terms “AI” and “machine learning”. What does all of that mean? Really, we are talking about the ability for machines to display human-like intelligence; a concept that CX has fully embraced in recent years. Years ago, customer service was strictly face-to-face. Over time, the customer experience has evolved into omnichannel experiences for the customer such as e-mail, chat boxes, and SMS messaging. In 2020, IoT data will grow at 50 times the rate of other data. CX must keep up with this trend, however, it is vital to maintain humanity in these exchanges.

Customer expectations for CX are increasingly rising, demanding instant responses, personalized services, and omnichannel experience. With these rising expectations, maintaining customer loyalty is more complicated than ever.

The problem is that most businesses don’t know what their customers want. Why? Because they are simply not listening. Only one in four companies actively use their customer feedback, while only one in three actively use their customer interaction analytics. Ninety-eight percent of invaluable customer intelligence is sitting on the shelf. Businesses must turn this information into actionable intelligence to push them toward their goals.

Here is what we know: customers prefer human contact. Eighty-six percent of customers claim they prefer human contact to chat bots. Seventy-one percent of customers said they would be less likely to use a brand if it didn’t have customer service representatives available. While many believe phone contact is dying, calls to businesses are expected to exceed 169 billion per year by 2020. In response, businesses must humanize their customer relationship.

As previously mentioned, businesses are sitting on a goldmine of information. Using sentiment analysis, businesses can take information such as recordings from phone calls to identify human emotion in order to really understand what is going on in the day-to-day processing of our customers.

Another focus area is employee and agent empowerment. By empowering human intelligence in the contact center, businesses can drive an agent-centric approach while giving their employees the flexibility and balance they need. The integration of AI in this equation provides a personal assistant to your employees rather than taking their place. Thus, improving work-life balance, allowing for flexible planning and scheduling, and happier agents. That’s the key: happy agents lead to happy customers.

AI Assistance may also improve training and development. This can include VoC (Voice of the Customer) training, automated quality monitoring, a more intelligent way to schedule training opportunities, and cross-functional job training. Businesses are still living in an environment where operations are siloed because agents’ skills are very specific. Enter: training across job functions. Here, businesses can get ahead of the curve by recognizing where their employees’ strengths and weaknesses are before they are out in the field.

All of this leads to more empowered employees. Employees that are more engaged are:

• 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within the year.
• 4x more likely to stay than dissatisfied colleagues
• 3.3x more likely to feel empowered to resolve customer issues

It’s time to hear your customers out. First. audit your technology stack. Take a look at all of the different ways your customers can get in touch with you and figure out what works best. Second, tap into the conversation to gain a comprehensive view of the customer. Finally, focus on your people. Customers matter but so do your agents. It’s time for companies to focus on the people who are engaging customers on a day to day basis. CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WEBCAST

 

Digital Disruption in Fintech Customer Service – an Uber Moment for All Industries?

Two years ago, during a brainstorming session at Customer Contact Week, a customer service leader from a government agency stated that it wanted its service to be as good as Nordstrom’s. What was a surprise at the time has become a new norm. Customers expect similar levels of customer service across industries.

Now, the financial services industry always an early adopter of new technology—is going through a wave of Uber- or Amazon-like digital disruption that will not stay within just financial services but will roll over into all industries. The smarter, more agile companies—midsized companies or large enterprises—will ride the wave and grow while others will struggle to stay relevant.

So what does this wave look like and what should customer service leaders in other industries be aware of? Let’s dive into what is happening in financial services and some lessons learned to see….

Fintech, Then and Now

Digital disruption has swept up the financial services industry, as traditional big banks are challenged by digital banks like Tangerine, traditional investment firms are challenged by companies like Wealthfront, and companies like Square or PayPal become digital financial services firms using innovative technology.

Many of the old-school companies are now either buying the financial tech (i.e., fintech) companies who plan to usurp them, partner with them, or just leverage the technology into their customer services operations.

To reduce effort and increase personalization, banks have turned to biometrics to authenticate. Rather than being greeted with an impersonal “name, rank, and social security number please” message, biometrics do the work and the agent can then greet them personally. Similarly, with 90% of consumers preferring online banking regardless of age, companies have rolled out chat text communication, and other forms of self-service. And more innovative companies are looking at video to increase personalization. OmniChannel banking is here, where the best of digital self-service is seamlessly blended with agents.

The shift to digital self-service can be significant to business. Take a look at Wells Fargo, for example, which announced earlier this month that it’s eliminating up to 10% of its workforce as a result of customers moving to digital channels and self-service. This is similar to AIG’s announcement a couple years ago to slash over a billion dollars of expenses as the company made similar moves to self-service and digital channels. Many of these shifts to digital channels and self-service are lessons other industries should heed and learn from.

So how do you compete if you are a midsize financial services company or large enterprise bank—or even in another industry? Customer service and customer experience remain the top strategy to win, especially when coupling this with disruptive digital approaches.

Let’s look at some key ways to win in financial services, ways that also are relevant to other industries too.

Key #1: Digital Channels of Choice

To stay relevant, it is key that your company handle not just classic channels such as voice, chat, email and text, but also emerging digital channels like bots, messengers and video.

Chat was the fastest growing channel most recently, but experts predict new messaging channels will overtake chat in the next wave. Forrester is actually predicting the average number of channels people will use often will increase from 9 to 11. Agents need to be able to communicate over these new channels and be able to hop across them if they have the right skills for the new channels.

Similarly, channels that customers prefer need to be offered to customers as a way to communicate with their digital banks. So the first takeaway is to provide customers with their digital channel of choice, both classic and emerging.

Key #2: Maintain One Conversation in Context

As communications happen over an increasing number of channels, you need a way to unify all these siloed interactions. If you want to keep customers and deliver frictionless communications, look for the entire customer journey rather than individual communications for each channel.

If you are communicating with a bot and then an agent, the agent should have at his or her fingertips all the context from communication on previous channels so they can provide an effortless customer experience. A single unified desktop that allows agents to see the full conversation in context empowers agents and makes for a much better experience for customers—whether you’re a digital bank or are in any other industry.

Key #3: Digital Conversations for a Mobile World

In addition to unifying all your channels in context, it is important to communicate with people where they are. In our super-busy, high-tech world, people are often looking at their mobile phone on trains, planes—and all too often—their automobiles. People are on the go. COPC recently reported that mobile care will increase 41% in 2018.

So make sure that your top channels can be accessed on mobile devices wherever the customer may be. Bright Pattern, for instance, allows in ap chat, file sharing, video chat, and more.

Banks had some of the most useful apps when they first created the deposit-by-picture feature. Yet, when you hit the “contact us” button in most apps in other industries, you are routed to a general phone number where an IVR asks you what language you speak rather than offer personal service.

Companies should take a mobile, personalized approach to their communications. Put the conversation where people are—and that is on the go.

Key #4: Cloud Customer Service is a Key Enabler

So how do you do all this—add digital channels, communicate seamlessly across them, respond to new channels, and more? Look to the cloud. A true “born from the cloud” customer service architecture where all channels are native versus bolt-on can give you a nimble platform in which you are the disruptor versus disrupted.

Cloud-first architecture is a truly agile, nimble platform because it doesn’t rely on legacy technology ported from old on-premises solutions. A cloud platform approach will break down the silos and deliver a simple solution that business users can make changes to without requiring costly IT and professional services. Our e-book explains how to safely transition your contact center to the cloud.

Final Thoughts?

The wave of disruption is everywhere, rolling through financial services and hitting other industries too. Ready to join the world of digital disruption sweeping through financial services? There is a brighter way to deliver disruptive customer service that smart companies are using, and it starts in the cloud.

I hope some of these keys were helpful. To learn more about staying relevant in this world of digital disruption, see Bright Pattern’s free e-book, 5 Keys: Effortless and Personal Omnichannel Customer Service.

Is the Contact Centre Part of Your Digital Transformation Programme?

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

I say this every year, but the Technology Innovation Showcase webinar Creative Virtual does with CRMXchange is one of my favourite webinars to present. This was the fifth year running that we’ve participated in the webcast series, and it was our most popular one yet with a record-breaking number of registrations. I love this webinar because it gives me a chance to share more live demonstrations than slides, and I know the best way to understand how our technology works and what it can do for customers and organisations is to see it in action.

For this year’s Showcase, I focused on the theme of ‘Chatbots, Virtual Agents and Your Contact Centre’. There’s so much buzz and hype, as well as unrealistic expectations and disappointments, around artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots that it can be difficult to know how best to deliver, implement and support these types of solutions. My goal during the webinar was to showcase best practices in deploying chatbots in conjunction with human assistance for customer support and sales. I selected my demonstrations specifically to show how the virtual and real can work in perfect harmony to meet business objectives.

A few key takeaways from my presentation:

• Artificial intelligence on its own is not the answer for customer support. Companies like Microsoft and IBM have been responsible for setting false expectations in regards to how AI can be deployed for customer service. Chatbots and virtual agents should blend human curation of content with machine learning. This hybrid approach enables the system to continually improve while also allowing control over the reliability of responses.
• Every organisation is in the midst of digital transformation programmes and the contact centre needs to be a key part of that, although that’s not always the case today. In the future, the contact centre will be the centre of excellence for the knowledge used across customer support channels and organisations need to put the necessary tools in place to facilitate that change. By including the contact centre as part of this transformation instead of allowing it to become a siloed and outdated entity, it benefits from lower costs, reduced staff turnover and more engaged, skilled and happier agents.
• Customers are starting to specifically demand chatbots for digital self-service, with research showing that many would choose to interact with a chatbot before a human to get instant answers. To meet the demands of customers, organisations need more than just chatbots and virtual agents that are available 24/7 though. Over the past several years providing an effortless way to interact with your company has become more and more important. Instead of offering a wide range of support options for customers to choose from, you need to offer one place for customers to ask a question and for that system to be the intent matcher. Then, once you understand the intent, immediately provide the most appropriate method for assistance. You also need to provide a seamless experience that’s available on any device, can easily switch between languages and provides personalised responses.

I invite you to watch the recording of the webinar on-demand to understand more about these three points and to see the live demonstrations of chatbots, virtual agents and live chat solutions that are currently being used by some of our customers around the world.

My thanks to Sheri Greenhaus and CRMXchange for organising and hosting another successful Technology Innovation Showcase for us. I’m already looking forward to presenting again next year.