The future of CX is here: Harnessing technology to deliver exceptional service

future of cx

The customer experience (CX) is an area set to undergo rapid change in the coming years. Already, we have seen great shifts in how consumers interact with brands and contact centres.

While many CX leaders understand the need for change and have laid plans to execute them, they often find their organisations hindered by the same tools, approaches, and technology they have used for the past several years. For your organisation to thrive, all of this must change. Your CX strategy will need an upgrade with the latest technology, advanced organisational operating structures, and a fundamental shift in the company-customer relationship. 

Customer expectations especially are driving the need for these changes. Technology advances in automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and robotics are impacting CX delivery. In turn, customer expectations have evolved. For example, people who experience AI-backed CX from a platform like Netflix will come to expect the same thing from other streaming sites. How well you innovate to improve CX will define your competitive advantage. So, you need to understand why customer expectations are changing and the technology that will support these changes within your organisation.

Here are four ways CX will change in the future and what your business can do to keep up.

1. Customer values will drive spending behaviour

There was a time when customers procured products and services to meet their needs and at a price point that suited them. Now, with many digital channels at their fingertips, the buying experience has reached a point where customers shape it to their preferences. The ecosystem from where customers buy is now a lot more dynamic than it once was, so customers switch their choices and spending across brands that match their inclinations.

Part of this change includes the way that customers choose brands to purchase from. Their preferences now include their values, and they want to buy from companies that align with their values and beliefs. Where people might have purchased a product of the best quality or the lowest price point, many now go for brands that align with their values. While the price and quality of products and services remain key, some people are willing to pay a little more for a company that promises ethical practices.

So, your organisation will need to leverage data collected about the market and your customers to choose when and how to integrate customer values into CX to strengthen customer loyalty.

2. Hyper-personalisation will take over

Just as customers tailor their shopping experiences and follow companies that align with their values, they will naturally progress to expect hyper-personalised experiences. 

Personalisation has historically been a tricky feat to pull off. It requires a great deal of data about individual customers to be stored and accessible in connected systems. The problem is that too many companies grapple with data silos and legacy technology that cannot keep up. As technology platforms become more intelligent and better integrated, and the underlying data stores communicate seamlessly, personalisation ventures become more plausible.

Your company must embrace the power of hyper-personalisation to provide excellent CX. Doing so will help you retain existing customers and attract new ones. Embracing a personalised approach is essential for any company looking to gain an edge over its competition and make a lasting impression on its customers.

It is pertinent to note that as hyper-personalisation becomes more accessible, your organisation must be mindful of data privacy concerns and compliance requirements. People want hyper-personalisation, but they also want to buy from companies committed to protecting sensitive information.

3. Automation and AI will continue supporting CX

For decades, AI has been a possibility explored in science fiction – with some forms of media depicting it as a positive and others placing it in a negative light. Now, AI has become a reality and part of business and CX. 

When boosting CX, AI is an incredible tool for delivering personalised experiences to customers and has stretched the availability of contact centres to outside of business hours with technology such as chatbots. Automation revolutionises how customers experience businesses today by enabling companies to offer personalised, efficient customer service and faster response times. Doing so can save your business time and money while delivering higher customer satisfaction.

4. Real-time data and CX will become the norm

We are witnessing a delivery time reduction from five to three days to one day. Delivery or service time has become crucial in delivering high CX. Many companies have not configured their operations to suit, but this will change. Real-time experiences will become standard for most industries, exerting tremendous pressure on organisations to generate real-time CX signals with context, retool operations, and leverage automation to keep up with the market.

Real-time data and CX are quickly becoming the norm for businesses looking to boost growth and increase sales. In a digital world, customers expect more personalisation in their shopping experiences than ever before – they want personalised ads, product recommendations, and even customer service tailored specifically to them. As a result, businesses must ensure that they can provide a positive customer experience and collect data from their customers in real time. By leveraging real-time data and customer experience technologies, your business can stay ahead of the competition and create an exceptional shopping experience.

Premier Contact Point can guide you through the future of CX

Our cloud contact centre solution aims to improve digital CX and make life easier for your agents. We provide affordable, innovative contact centre features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel capabilities. Our solution also includes a mobile app that supports your agents when they work outside of your office.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre.

How can you measure and improve the customer experience?

Many customer experience (CX) trends are bouncing around industry discussions; artificial intelligence (AI), automation, chatbots, and virtual reality are buzzwords promising to enhance CX. 

With all these words going around, it is essential to remember that you cannot implement tactics for improving CX without first measuring your successes or shortcomings.

Measuring CX in a contact centre is important because it provides valuable insights into how customers feel about their interactions with your company. It offers an opportunity to benchmark your performance against industry standards and competitors, so you can identify areas where your customer experience solution excels and areas that need improvement to stay ahead of the competition.

How can you measure the success of your customer experience solution?

By gathering data from various sources, you can better understand your experiences with your contact centre and use this information to improve. Here are some methods for measuring the customer experience:

Customer complaints

Customer complaints are the first place you can look to measure and improve CX. What kinds of questions are your customers asking your staff? Are they complaining about wait times or other inefficiencies as soon as they get on the phone?

Complaints are direct, real-time feedback from customers about their interactions with your business. By listening to customer complaints, you can identify areas that need improvement to ensure customers get excellent service every time they engage with your business.

Net Promoter Score

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) provides a benchmark for tracking customer satisfaction over time. Your NPS will be calculated based on customers’ responses to the question, ‘How likely would you be to recommend us to someone else?’ Customers will rate you on a scale, and their collective responses will determine your NPS.

It is a metric that measures how your contact centre performs compared to your competition. By looking at NPS scores, you can better understand how your customer service is perceived.

Data from the customer journey

The customer journey can provide you with some valuable insights on any roadblocks in the customer journey.

The customer journey might include the process someone goes through when they reach out to your contact centre. For example, perhaps they call your hotline, go through an IVR workflow and then get redirected to self-service or an agent. Analytics on the customer journey can help you identify inefficiencies and make improvements to increase customer satisfaction. For example, if you experience a lot of abandoned calls within the IVR, you should analyse the points at which the customer disconnected the call and implement incremental callflow changes to determine if there are fewer abandoned calls.

What can you do with these metrics?

There are so many strategies you can leverage to improve CX. In fact, we recently wrote an eBook addressing 23 of them. I won’t go into all that detail here, so here are three areas where you can get started:

Leverage omnichannel CX

Your customers have grown used to choosing how they interact with people in their personal lives and how they interact with brands. For example, people who dislike talking on the phone can communicate with friends and family via text; they now also expect this same flexibility from your company when they reach out with an issue. So, you need a contact centre that offers various channels, such as voice, webchat, SMS, email, social media, etc.

Omnichannel CX platforms allow you to leverage various communication channels without increasing the number of applications you use or the strain on your team. It is about ensuring that your agents and customers have the same positive experience, regardless of the channel they use.

Through omnichannel CX, contact centres become more agile in responding to customers quickly and accurately, no matter the channel or device they choose. Customers will appreciate getting the help they need promptly, which can improve customer satisfaction.

Omnichannel CX also creates a more personalised experience for customers by allowing them to transition between channels and devices seamlessly.  By utilising a variety of communication channels, customers have more options to get in touch with your business, allowing you to respond faster and more efficiently. 

Refine and connect the customer journey

Consider how you can refine the touchpoints your customer interacts with when they reach out to your company. For example, perhaps your FAQs page has not received an update recently and needs answers to customers’ new questions. If you have not already, you might introduce self service customer support options, such as automated chatbots or visual IVR workflows, streamlining communication between customer service agents and customers.

For the efficiency of your agents and the satisfaction of your customers, you should consider how you can refine the processes involved with customer contact. For example, you might add a chatbot function – driven by AI – to your FAQs page so that customers can easily reach out if they don’t find what they’re looking for. If these tools don’t help, you want to ensure that customers are able to be quickly and easily routed to a human agent to address their query in the shortest time possible.

Improve the employee experience

The experience your agents have at work can impact the quality of service they deliver to your customers. Agents who feel overwhelmed and agitated might appear short and less empathetic towards customer inquiries. People that feel happy and engaged are more likely to go above and beyond expectations and deliver meaningful interactions with their customers.

Improving the employee experience is one of the best ways to ensure that customers get the quality of service they deserve. By improving workplace conditions and ensuring employees have access to the resources and support they need, you can foster a culture of excellence and ensure that customers are satisfied with their experience. 

For example, you might investigate the customer experience solution that your agents use. Their stress can increase if they switch between too many applications to serve customers or deal with data silos, making it difficult to know if they have the correct customer information. You might also ensure that your agents are up-to-date on their training, especially regarding handling upset customers.

Premier Contact Point can support you in enhancing CX

Our cloud contact centre solution aims to improve digital CX, automated customer service and make life easier for your agents. We provide affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel capabilities. Our solution also includes a mobile app that supports your agents when they work outside of your office.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

5 digital customer experience trends driving the future of contact centres

In recent years, our world has become increasingly digital. Many of us now shop, research products and interact with customer support through digital channels. In 2020 alone, the APAC region saw four years’ worth of change in customer experience (CX) between January and July.

As our day-to-day interactions have changed, digital transformation within contact centres has become imperative.

Customers expect seamless, personalised experiences every time they interact with a business. To keep up with these changing expectations, you must prioritise digital transformation to continue improving and delivering CX that places you ahead of your competitors.

The following five trends have already begun transforming contact centres and will define the future of CX.

Automation will support your CX initiatives

Automation in contact centres takes many shapes. You might automate manual processes, deploy chatbots, send emails or texts to many customers, etc. The point is that each of these will deliver a boost to CX initiatives by reducing the time agents spend on calls or manually updating data.

Automation can be your tool for creating operational efficiencies by routing calls or assigning email-based queries to agents. By doing this, your contact centre can operate more efficiently and provide better CX.

Automation can also help to improve the quality of customer service by providing agents with the ability to access information about customers quickly. As a result, they will spend less time on each call and can improve the quality of their service.

Finally, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can automate contact centre operations by taking on simple, repetitive tasks, allowing agents to focus on complex tasks and provide a better customer experience.

Chatbots will guide customers

Chatbots take the strain off your agents by assisting customers with straightforward queries and frequently asked questions. They also enable you to provide twenty-four hour support for basic queries, so a customer wanting to resolve a minor issue does not have to wait until business hours.

Chatbots can improve CX by providing a more efficient way to handle customer queries. If your contact centre leverages Interactive Voice Response (IVR), you might use that to direct customers to chatbots instead of speaking with a human agent. 

When agents have a shorter call queue, they can spend more time with customers with complex issues, reducing the chances of them becoming stressed and burned out. However, it is essential to remember that chatbots do not replace human agents. If someone has a query that a chatbot cannot help them with, the bot must be able to gauge this and help the customer get in contact with a human agent.

Natural Language Processing will refine interactions

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) where computers attempt to understand human language and respond in a way that is natural for humans. NLP is what allows chatbots and digital assistants to understand the user’s intent and provide a helpful response.

NLP analyses two types of interactions:

  • Human-to-human communication: NLP analyses language and detects emotions to learn from and generate insights.
  • Human-to-computer communication: NLP reads text-based messages and responds as a human would.

As the role of AI and Machine Learning (ML) in contact centres increases, NLP will be the key to delivering more human interactions from chatbots and improving CX provided by agents. We will see more and more chatbots and digital assistants that can easily handle complex customer queries as NLP evolves. In addition, NLP-enabled chatbots and digital assistants can provide personalised recommendations and suggestions based on the customer’s preferences and past interactions.

Hyper-personalisation will tailor CX

You would be familiar with simple personalisation techniques: an email about the remaining items in someone’s cart, a weekly newsletter delivered to a specific customer segment, all with the recipient’s first name added. You must go beyond this to achieve CX excellence and focus on delivering hyper-personalisation.

Hyper-personalised CX is about delivering content or sending messages to individual customers using real-time data and AI. Rather than viewing your customers as segments, you need to view them as individuals.

Hyper-personalisation delivers many benefits. By understanding each customer’s individual preferences, needs and wants, you can provide a tailored service that leads to improved CX. As a result, you will likely see increased customer loyalty and higher satisfaction levels.

There are numerous ways to implement hyper-personalisation, but one of the most effective is data and analytics. By analysing customer data, you can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour to inform decisions about the communications they receive from you.

While hyper-personalisation requires some investment in time and resources, the benefits far outweigh the costs. For businesses looking to improve their customer experience, hyper-personalisation is an essential strategy.

Human interaction will keep customers coming back

While technology such as chatbots, AI, ML and NLP will lead contact centre innovation in the coming years, the human touch will continue to be an important aspect of contact centres. There are only so many issues that machines can solve. We need people to demonstrate empathy and apply critical thinking to complex problems when customers feel angry, worried or vulnerable.

Finding the right balance between human agents and automation in your contact centre is essential. If you have too much automation, you may not be able to provide the level of customer service that your customers expect. On the other hand, if you have too many human agents, you may not be able to achieve the efficiency gains that automation can provide. 

The key is to find the right mix of human agents and automation for your contact centre. If you are unsure where to start, speak to a contact centre expert who can help you find the right balance.

Premier Contact Point delivers platforms for enhancing CX

Our cloud contact centre solution and customer experience solution delivers aims to improve digital CX and make life easier for your agents. We provide affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel capabilities.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

Boost your CX maturity through digital transformation

Today’s contact centres must provide a wide selection of customer touchpoints without increasing costs or agent workloads. As such, digital transformation has become imperative for contact centres.

Digital transformation is a journey in which an organisation deploys new technologies to improve or create new processes, products, services or business models. It is more than simply rethinking digital operations; it must also be a people-driven initiative that offers unique value for customers.

Digital transformation helps in boosting CX maturity. When done right, it supports your organisation in keeping up with customers’ ever-changing needs and expectations.

What is CX maturity?

CX maturity is your ability to deliver excellent customer experiences consistently. You must understand customers’ needs and expectations to action these across your contact centre. A CX maturity model is the method for gauging where your organisation sits; it covers metrics such as strategy, company culture, processes, data collection and many more.

Based on the model, your contact centre might fall into one of four categories of CX maturity:

  1. Beginner organisations have just started to focus on improving CX. They may have started a few initiatives but have not yet designed a strategy or implemented new technology.
  2. Intermediate organisations have begun integrating the new CX strategy into their contact centre operations. They have a dedicated team or department responsible for improving CX and have begun to see some results from their efforts.
  3. Advanced organisations have fully committed to CX excellence. They treat it as a strategic priority and invest accordingly. Their whole contact centre has united around delivering great customer experiences. 
  4. Expert organisations are CX leaders. They deliver excellent CX and leverage it as a competitive differentiator. They constantly innovate and strive to find new ways of boosting the customer experience.

Taking your CX maturity from the beginner to expert level requires you to build a strong foundation by investing in the right technology, reviewing your processes and focusing on the people element of your contact centre. Why not evaluate where you’re at by taking our customer experience maturity assessment?

1. Move from legacy systems to the cloud

One digital transformation initiative you can take to drive CX maturity is moving your contact centre from legacy on-premise systems to a cloud contact centre.

Legacy systems are inflexible and difficult to scale. They seldom offer the same features and functionality as modern contact centre systems, making it difficult for you to keep up with competitors or stay updated with the latest customer service and technology trends. Furthermore, they cannot offer omnichannel customer experiences handled by agents on a single unified platform.

In contrast, cloud-based contact centres offer flexibility and scalability while enabling agents to deliver omnichannel customer experiences and collect data on one platform. Cloud-based solutions provide contact centres with the agility to adapt quickly to changing customer needs. They also offer the flexibility to easily add new features and functionality, resulting in a personalised experience for customers, agents and contact centre leaders. Cloud-based solutions are scalable, allowing businesses to add or remove agents easily. When you scale your contact centre in this fashion, you can ensure you deliver good CX even during peak demand.

2. Focus on the human element of digital transformation

Digital transformation is more than a technology initiative; it must prioritise people too. For your contact centre, this means transforming how your agents work and delivering improved CX to your customers. 

Looking at the people element of your digital transformation begins with your agents. Digital transformation can be overwhelming and disruptive. Agents need to feel supported through this change to do their best work. They are on the front line of customer experience and the ones interacting with customers day in and day out. If they are not happy, it will show in the quality of their interactions.

You need everyone on board with the changes you will make to ensure that new technologies adequately support your agents. You might offer training materials on new technologies to provide agents with the knowledge to leverage new tools to their fullest potential.

You must have your customers front of mind too. It is a good idea to inform them of service changes to manage expectations and ensure they know how to contact you.

3. Leverage data in your contact centre

You can leverage data in numerous ways to improve customer experience. Data can help you identify areas where customers are struggling, their preferences, and how they would like to receive communications from you. Leaders and agents across the contact centre can leverage this information to make changes that will improve the overall customer experience.

Additionally, data can help you monitor and improve contact centre performance. By tracking key metrics, you can identify areas of improvement and make changes that will help agents improve customer satisfaction. You can also use data to benchmark your performance against other organisations.

Data not only helps you understand your customers and agents, it provides the necessary information to measure the success of your digital transformation initiatives.

Data-driven initiatives are only possible if you have the right tools and processes to collect and analyse them. Cloud contact centre technologies can deliver the real-time and visual reporting features needed to support your CX initiatives.

Start your digital transformation with Premier Contact Point

Our cloud contact centre solution delivers solutions that support your customers and agents. We provide affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel capabilities.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

How contact centre technology brings people together

Your contact centre is more than a factory for providing advice and solving problems. No longer are contact centres voice-driven departments whose goal is to get people off the phone as quickly as possible lest the call queues increase. It is a place that brings people together. It connects customers with your brand and provides agents with the tools they need to foster relationships and support customers through whatever guidance they seek.

As such, your contact centre technology should be a hub of communication platforms that enable agents, customers and other business departments to collaborate and solve problems together.

From a call centre to an experience hub

As the world becomes more digital, so do our interactions. We shop, book travel and even order food online. So it is no surprise that many of us expect customer service to include online channels. And that is where the contact centre comes in.

In recent years, leaders have shifted how they think about contact centres. No longer are they seen as a call centre for patching customer issues, but instead as an opportunity to create connected, digital customer experiences. 

Part of this comes from a significant mindset shift. Contact centres must become experience hubs where customers can get the help they need and the human interaction they want when they have queries. Such a mindset shift means considering the contact centre not as a costly business department but as a revenue generator. It also means shifting from a focus on customer transactions to a focus on customer relationships.

Technological advances and the prevalence of omnichannel contact centres have driven such changes and provided the platform for personalised customer experiences.

What challenges does contact centre technology solve?

Contact centres deal with common, longstanding issues that often make it difficult for people to bring your contact centre to an experience hub. Here are some challenges that robust contact centre technology solves to bring people together:

  • High call volumes make it difficult for agents to give customers the individualised attention they need when contacting the company with a query or complaint. Customers also become frustrated when they experience long wait times.
  • Customer dissatisfaction: When your contact centre lacks personalisation and meaningful human interaction, it becomes difficult to retain customers. Customers want to feel valued and appreciated, which can be difficult to achieve with automated platforms that lack personalisation or remove the human element from your contact centre.
  • Agent attrition rates can be high in contact centres, causing challenges such as training new employees, low staff morale and poor customer service due to agents with less experience. Agents need technology connecting them with knowledge bases, training resources and their colleagues, so new starters feel supported.

How contact centre technology fosters agent collaboration

Agent collaboration is essential to providing excellent customer service. By working together, agents can share information and ideas, solve problems efficiently, and provide a better overall customer experience.

Naturally, some agents might prefer to handle specific issues or have more knowledge of one area in the business. Newer agents may also need guidance or help from other agents and need technology solutions that enable them to connect with their colleagues quickly and efficiently.

Contact centre technology supports agent collaboration and helps contact centres run more smoothly. For example, many contact centre solutions integrate with unified communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams, which offer features like group chat and instant messaging that make it easy for agents to collaborate.

By investing in contact centre technology, you can create a more collaborative environment, which leads to better customer service, higher staff retention and improved business outcomes.

Collaboration across the organisation

One of the most important aspects of contact centre technology is its ability to unite the organisation. In the past, contact centres remained siloed from the rest of the business, but modern technology has made it possible to integrate them into the wider business.

Contact centre technology should provide a single point of contact between your agents and others working in departments across the business. If an agent does not have the answer to a customer query, they can contact someone in another department to help them answer the question or even forward the caller to that person. If the agent does not know who to contact, they can connect with the department and find the right person to connect with the caller.

Contact centre technology is, therefore, a valuable tool for organisations looking to support collaboration across the business. Contact centre technology facilitates communication and improves the customer experience by providing a central point of contact between departments.

Omnichannel technology connects your brand and customers

People are constantly on the move and always connected in today’s world. It has led to a new set of challenges for businesses, which now need to provide customer support across various channels. The aim of contact centre technology should be to seamlessly bring the human element into the contact centre technology rather than remove it. 

Omnichannel contact centre solutions bring voice, chat, email, SMS and social media into one platform, making it easy for agents to provide a seamless customer experience. These channels enable customers to connect with you in the method of their choice. One person might prefer to raise an issue via instant messaging, and another might prefer to chat with an agent over the phone.

In addition, omnichannel contact centre solutions allow businesses to track all customer interactions in one place, giving them valuable insights into customer behaviour. By using data from previous interactions, you can provide a more tailored service that meets each customer’s specific needs and maximise your ability to achieve first contact resolution.

Overall, omnichannel contact centre solutions are valuable for businesses that want to provide an outstanding customer experience. They bring people together, make it easy to track interactions and provide valuable insights into customer behaviour.

How Premier Contact Point brings people together

Our cloud contact centre solution delivers contact centre training that support your customers and agents. We provide affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

Keeping the human touch in your contact centre CX solutions

Contact centre technology has changed the nature of customer experience (CX). It has reduced the number of agents needed in a contact centre at any one time, improved customer experience by decreasing wait times and reduced the number of errors in a contact centre – to name a few.

Moreover, it has transformed how agents connect with customers and solve their problems. Despite these developments, it is important not to forget the human touch when implementing contact centre CX solutions.

Human agents bring many benefits to a contact centre by:

  • Delivering personalised experiences to customers: Human agents can measure and respond to customers’ emotions with empathy and understanding, which is a significant factor for improving customer loyalty.
  • Handling complex inquiries: A robotic or virtual agent can only take a customer issue so far. If the customer has a complex issue, they will need to speak with someone who can deliver a specialised solution.
  • Building relationships with customers: When human agents work with customers to deliver a flexible solution, they foster the relationship between the customer and your brand.

Ultimately, using human agents in your contact centre can improve customer experiences and increase loyalty. Here are our recommendations for balancing the human touch with new technology.

Listen to what your customers say

You have a difficult job balancing your customers’ needs with introducing technology into your contact centre, especially given every industry and every customer is unique. While adopting new technology is ideal for keeping your business ahead of the competition, you will fall short if you do not listen to your customers and consider their perspectives.

In some cases, customers may be unhappy with your changes. They might not like navigating Interactive Voice Response (IVR) before speaking with an agent. In other cases, they may appreciate the efficiency of new technology but still want to speak with a human when they need assistance.

The key here is to pay careful attention to what customers have to say by listening to their feedback. Of course, you cannot please everyone. But, when you take customer feedback on board, you balance deploying new technology without losing the human touch.

Happy client reading customer comment and feedback

Let customers choose their journey

Not all of your customers will have the same idea of what convenient and great CX looks like. Part of putting the human touch into your contact centre is providing people with choice.

Take AI, for example. It has proved to be valuable for contact centres by automating tasks such as frequently asked questions (FAQs). Customer service delivered by AI saves your business money and time by freeing up agents to work on complex inquiries.

However, just because AI delivers great benefits does not mean it can wholly replace human agents. For some, a chatbot will feel like enough to address their issue, and the ability to send instant messages from their phone or laptop will feel convenient. Others may prefer to speak with a person.

In considering these scenarios, you need to find the balance between AI and human agents. By offering both options, you can provide the best possible customer experience while still reaping the benefits of AI.

Optimise your tech stack to smoothen the customer experience

To get more from contact centre technology solutions, you may need to review your current tech stack and remove processes that no longer serve your business. When agents have to operate within several disconnected programs, it wastes their time and hinders their ability to provide smooth customer service.

For example, if your contact centre or call centre software does not integrate with your CRM, you might consider adopting a solution combining all of the platforms your agents need. You should also listen to agent feedback on the effectiveness of the technology. After all, they are the people speaking directly with the customers and will have heard customer complaints if they were unhappy with an automated process or felt like the agent took too long to find relevant information.

customer support - home banner

Carefully consider new technology before deployment

Deploying too much automation creates sterile CX, disrupts the human touch in your contact centre and hinders your ability to provide good customer service.

It may feel exciting at first to implement trends such as AI and chatbots. But, these technologies will not deliver to your expectations if you do not consider their role in your contact centre. Here, you will need to consider how technology and the human touch work together.

Moreover, technology does fail sometimes. In those cases, you will need human agents to take over.

Ensure agents work in tandem with technology

The key to keeping the human touch in your contact centre is to ensure people and technology work in sync. To ensure this happens, you can:

  • Provide your agents with thorough training on leveraging technology in a way that benefits them, the customers, and the business.
  • You might deploy technology that automates simple inquiries that do not require a human agent (such as FAQs). Agents can then give more time to customers with complex concerns.
  • Ensure that technology does not dominate your contact centre by providing equal access to automated options and customer service agents. You might enable customers to engage with an automated system at first, and if their problem needs specialised help, you can redirect them to the agent best suited to address their problem.

By striking the right balance between technology and the human touch, you can provide excellent customer service that meets the needs of your customers and supports the business.

customer support agents working in tandem with technology

Balance technology and the human touch with Premier Contact Point

Our cloud contact centre solution and customer experience solution delivers technology that enables your agents to add the human touch to their work. We deliver affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, overflow queues, self-service options, ivr call flow solutions and omnichannel queueing.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

Overcoming CX challenges in your business

CX challenges

Think back to your last experience making an online purchase. I trust that in these times, it was not very long ago. I imagine that you experienced a few of these:

  • You heard about the brand or retailer somewhere
  • You received an order confirmation email immediately
  • You had a question about your order and revisited the website or spoke with a customer service agent

Now here’s a question: which of these experiences defines the customer experience? It’s a trick question: the answer is all of the above.

What CX challenges does the typical Australian company face?

The expectations of Australian customers are changing fast, and your customer service arm must be a fast-moving engine to keep up. As our world becomes more connected, your customers expect more touchpoints and real-time interactions with your company. In this landscape, competition for customer retention is fierce.

Fast resolution time is no longer a competitive advantage. Customers expect empathy from your customer service agents, and they want to interact with companies that enact their values, not just shout about them.

For many Australian businesses, this keeping up to maintain a competitive edge can be a significant challenge in this space. If you have a slow response to addressing customer expectations, they can become dissatisfied with your service and their experience and move on to another company.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technology within all of our lives. Customers have increased the frequency with which they leverage messaging apps and social media to interact with your company. Today’s customers may become frustrated if there is only one method of communication with your company. Even if you are not a digital native, you surely enjoy having options when contacting a company. You may become frustrated if they lack a web enquiry form or even an FAQ page, and you have to call to address your simple question.

Moreover, CX challenges for contact centres also exist within the development and implementation of CX initiatives. You need a holistic view of your CX challenges if your initiatives are to succeed.

insights proactive customer service

Source: Gartner.

Where CX initiatives go wrong

Some companies go wrong with their CX initiatives by conflating customer service with customer experience. In reality, customer service is one slice of the customer experience pie. CX covers the gamut of interactions with your customers, from first hearing about you online to the first time they call your customer service team.

Many companies go for surveys to gauge CX in their business. While surveys are one good method of highlighting where you might improve CX, they are not the only and certainly not the best way to pinpoint areas of improvement. Again, it often goes back to customers’ expectations of service in real-time; surveys capture customer data from the past and do not allow you to improve the customer experience as people interact with your company.

There is also a need for companies to address their internal challenges before trying to fix external problems. For example, if customer service representatives are under-trained or overworked, it can affect CX. So, they need to be resolved internally first before focusing on external aspects of CX initiatives.

“A study by Forrester measured the CX maturity of the survey respondents. Only 31% of them qualified as experience-driven businesses.”

Improve your play with a CX maturity model

CX maturity is a model for measuring the capabilities needed to deliver excellent CX and whether your contact centre meets these; it essentially measures how customer-centric you are. A CX maturity model is a sliding scale, and your organisation will place somewhere on this scale based on the measurements you are succeeding in.

It tracks metrics such as the sophistication of your technology, the skills of your agents and how well you implement customer feedback. Furthermore, it can be a great way to benchmark yourself against your competitors and decide where you need to improve your play.

With 73% of customers citing good CX as a factor in their purchasing decisions, it is crucial that you increase your CX maturity. Marking where you sit on the scale can provide you with the information to target potential areas for improving customer satisfaction and implement them across your organisation.

We have developed our own CX Maturity Assessment to help you get started in this process.
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Strategies to overcome CX challenges

Once you have your CX maturity rating, you can leverage some of the strategies below to increase it.

1. Understand your customer base

Your customers will have differences in culture, generational attitudes, economic factors and geographic location, all of which you should consider if your team is to deliver CX with empathy. Your customers will have some of these metrics in common so you can create segmented lists for different types of customers.

2. Capture real-time customer feedback

Many CX challenges, such as unhappy customers and high turnover, can arise from a lack of real-time feedback.

Effective contact centres offer great service and respond to customers’ requests quickly and efficiently – but the contact centre is only as good as the agents responding. So, contact centres need to accurately capture real-time feedback to ensure they give the customer their best.

Capturing real-time customer feedback also helps you enhance training programs, so new hires have a better chance of learning and improving from day one.

3. Regularly gather employee feedback too

Employees are your most valuable asset when it comes to contact centre operations. It is seldom enough to gather their opinions via a yearly review, so you should consider regularly gathering their feedback to gather their ideas on where CX could improve. Your agents are, after all, the ones interacting with customers every day.

4. Create a clear customer experience vision

A successful CX initiative builds on a clear, future-facing vision that guides your business and your team in the right direction. Remember, your customers love companies that stick to their values and deliver on them.

You might ask:

  • Is your vision clear?
  • Does everyone in your contact centre understand how they contribute towards delivering that customer experience vision?
  • What would happen if all of your contact centres understood their role in delivering the overall customer experience strategy.

Remember: Your vision should be something your agents can realistically stick to, and it should be specific.

5. Measure the ROI of your improved customer experience

One of the most important reasons for measuring ROI is to gauge the impact of your CX initiatives. By measuring ROI, you can designate whether particular CX strategies are working and where you might need to place more focus.

There are different ways you can measure your contact centre. For example, you might measure contact centre effectiveness by assessing how well agents communicate with customers and how satisfied customers are at the call’s end. You can also measure contact centre efficiency by assessing how long it took to answer a call during peak periods.

Overcome CX challenges with Premier Contact Point

We can help you measure your CX maturity, find strategies for improving it, and implement the solutions you need to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Our solutions encompass real-time customer reporting, seamless connections between touchpoints, quality assurance, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can complete our CX Maturity Assessment to receive a report with actionable insights for improving CX.