A Digital Transformation Q&A

After a recent Enghouse Interactive webinar, John Cray took some time to answer your quesions on the topic of digital transformation.

Below is the transcript of the question and answer session, with Enghouse Interactive’s VP of Product Management.

Q: It seems like there are a lot of things to consider when trying to move customer communications to omnichannel and new forms of text media. What is a good first step? What would you recommend an organisation consider doing first?

Our best recommendation is to focus on a specific problem you are trying to solve, with a significant and measurable benefit, rather than to just open it up to any form of text media for any purpose to any agent. Key to success would be to focus on a well-defined, complete use case, not on a partial solution.

Appointment reminders is a good example of this, where you might have an automatically generated list or trigger to send out the reminder, followed by a well-defined mechanism (e.g. mobile app or website) to cancel or request a change in schedule, with a small group of agents who can handle questions via text as appropriate.

Handling a specific set of common field questions from mobile workers (with FAQ and live help available) could be another example. If it’s well focused, you should immediately see the benefit of higher success rates and reduced calls.

Q: What are the elements of a good customer contact, whether it’s voice or text based? Are there best practices or things we should make sure we do to make every contact productive and satisfying to the customer?

A: Well, we really believe that the first thing you need to do is to automatically identify the customer and make the interaction personal. It’s pretty incredible with all the technologies and ways we have of ID’ing people and providing information and background on them, but many customer-facing groups still don’t do that very effectively.

“Who am I speaking to?” is typically quite a bad way to start the conversation. But, “Hello, Mr Smith, I see we spoke to you last week. How’s that replacement part working out for you?” is much, much better. And, once you know who they are, there’s nothing wrong with treating your best customers better – minimise their wait times, get them to your best people, and so on.

The other key factors are to increase first-contact resolution and minimise customer effort, two of the key metrics that customer service are prioritizing for measuring service effectiveness.

To do this, you might leverage FAQ knowledge bases, access to experts via collaboration tools, good skills-based routing, and customer context (a history of previous conversations and information provided).

Once you empower your good agents with these tools, they get happier at solving problems, and your customers will react in kind.

Q: How does the SMS percentage change when you have a large group of independent contractors in the workplace?

A: It is much more of a challenge to train people to use a common framework; however, if you look at some of the surveys, they go into the prevalence of e-learning tools.

If you’re leveraging independent contractors and look for ways to coach them, e-learning is coming on strong. When you combine e-learning with how to formulate effective text communications/chats/emails, it can be very effective.

Using the best conversations you’ve had is a great way to coach agents as well.

You can watch the full webinar replay by clicking here.