Contact Centres Need to Act on Digital DNA


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Jeremy Payne explains the strategies companies can implement today to drive the customer experiences of tomorrow.

1. Understand the DNA of the modern family to gain insight into customer needs

If you want to understand a family and how it interacts, you increasingly need to understand its digital footprint, and to get to the real heart of what makes it tick, you need to have an insight into its digital DNA.

Today’s new breed of digital enterprises needs to be able to understand the modern family, and in particular the digital DNA of the people who constitute it. After all, it is these individuals who are their customers today – whether as individual consumers or as businesspeople – and will continue to be in the future.

2. Segment customers to deliver the service they are looking for

We are living in an age of polarised customer service. While the younger generation will typically want to interact using tools like social media, web self-service or webchat, older customers may want to engage using email or traditional voice-based communications.

Equally, while it may be possible to handle simple queries through online FAQs, more complex queries or those that potentially have legal ramifications are likely to need human interaction.

3. Gather customers’ digital information to proactively resolve issues

The above is a useful starting point. Organisations need to segment their customers – but they also need to understand individuals’ precise needs.

At the point of engagement, businesses need to know what each of these customers is trying to do and who within their organisation is best placed to help them achieve it.

That’s where the ability to track digital DNA and accurately interpret it is so important. Organisations need to have captured and recorded previous interactions with each customer and use these to quickly analyse behaviour patterns and likely preferences, enabling them to route individual interactions to the point of contact best suited to address or resolve their query. It’s the kind of process that the likes of Amazon and Google do so well.

4. Optimise the journey

Understanding the DNA of the customer is just one part of the process, however. Businesses also need to ensure that they have the right robust and flexible underlying infrastructure in place to be able to act on this understanding.

They need to think about what the best customer journey would ‘look like’ for a given customer trying to do a particular kind of interaction at a specific time of the day. Next, they need to look at how they orchestrate the people, processes and systems within the business to provide the best possible service to customers at an affordable price.

5. Build the connected enterprise and deliver the benefits to customers

To do the above, businesses must implement integrated intelligent systems architecture, capable of routing calls and other modes of interaction either to experts who understand customers’ problems and can address them or to systems they can use to self-serve or otherwise obtain the answers they need.

This is the essential purpose of what we call the connected enterprise. To answer customer queries in this increasingly sophisticated environment, companies will need to draw on the skills of staff in the back, middle and front offices.

By combining an intelligent flexible customer interaction platform with the latest unified communications (UC) technologies, organisations can create a connected business, where everyone is part of a virtualised customer support team focused on resolving customer engagements in the most efficient, cost-effective manner.

6. Think ahead when implementing a technology solution

One of the areas contact centres and customer service departments should increasingly be looking at is the role of artificial intelligence and automated service operations and the interplay between these areas and their staff and customers.

It’s a dynamic that is changing rapidly as technology advances; people become more willing to embrace automated systems, and those systems provide increasingly human-like interactions. The impact of these kinds of systems on family life has been explored, but it’s in the world of business that this kind of technology is likely to have the biggest influence.

We are already seeing the use of robot agents in contact centres that can recognise and understand words and phrases and can automatically interrogate knowledge management systems and FAQs before escalating calls to human agents as and when required.

7. Remember it’s digital by design not by default

Businesses are likely to raise the level of investment they make in this kind of technology in the future. The cost of servicing interactions in this way is, after all, very cheap, but companies must not fall into the trap of pocketing all the extra money they gain as a result as profit.

Jeremy Payne

Jeremy Payne

The chosen approach should effectively be digital by design not digital by default. Depending on the nature of their business, organisations are also likely to need to invest in competent human staff that can deal with those kinds of interactions and that can make use of technologies like unified communications or Skype for Business to reach out to customers and solve their enquiries.

With thanks to Jeremy Payne at Enghouse Interactive

Author: Megan Jones

Published On: 29th Jul 2015 - Last modified: 18th Dec 2018
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