Total Experience: Taking A New Perspective To CX

Total Experience

If your organisation is providing customer service in the same way that you did a few years ago, you’re on the road to losing customers, staff and market share.

Successful businesses ensure that their customer engagement and employee satisfaction  strategies evolve and adapt to meet today’s needs.  When this happens, you increase customer and staff loyalty, and open more opportunities for business growth.

The importance of experience for your business

Take this common scenario:

A customer has a couple of questions about a product they’ve purchased from you, and starts off by checking out your website to try and find the answer. He sees the webchat and enters his question, but the chatbot can’t answer his questions effectively. So he goes to your Facebook page and leaves a message in Messenger, which is auto answered by a chatbot – who advised him to call Customer Service. After some time on hold, a friendly customer service agent takes the call, but isn’t able to give all the answers, due to their permission levels. So he is transferred to another department. More hold time follows and his frustration starts to mount. He has to start his story all over again with the new department and finally he gets the answers he’s seeking – after 38 minutes.

In this all too common situation, the customer can feel they are going round in circles trying to get a quick answer to their questions, and to speak to the right person. Even if they love your products or services, having an experience like this clouds their perception of your company as a whole.

The goal of offering multiple touchpoints is to cater for customer preferences and make it easier for them to do business with you, and of course to provide a great customer experience. But, often the opposite happens because the different touchpoints operate as silos.

And it’s not just the customer who’s frustrated – team members will be too. No-one wants to spend all day at work grappling with technology and providing inefficient service to disgruntled customers.

How have customer and employee needs changed?

Most customers want easy-to-navigate digital interactions which help them get answers or help quickly and efficiently.  No-one has the time or patience for convoluted systems and service delivery.

Customer Experience (CX) focuses on shaping the customer journey with a personalised experience which solves problems quickly. Customer feedback is used to gauge touchpoint interactions and satisfaction, and to learn where improvements need to be made.

Employees want fast and straightforward interaction with the systems and colleagues they depend on for doing their roles efficiently, and providing great service to customers.

Employee Experience (EX) refers to what it’s really like for your team members who are trying to deliver consistently good CX. A successful EX strategy and environment produces a less stressed and more driven workforce that works in a more efficient and productive way. Taking care of EX encourages commitment to the company’s vision and ethos, and improves job satisfaction and retention.

So what then is Total Experience?

Total Experience is the next step – where an organisation proactively implements strategies and systems that allow customers and employees to engage with the brand and company in a more holistic way.

Total Experience – TX – brings together all the X elements.

  • UX – which relates to the user experience on your digital assets – particularly your website or app
  • CX – the overall experience the customer has when trying to get customer service
  • EX – how easy it is for your employees to operate your systems and deliver on your promises

Creating systems that collaborate for frictionless CX, UX and EX is at the heart of Total Experience.

Gartner’s report, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022 predicts that TX-focused organisations will outperform others in CX and EX by 25%.

How to begin to incorporate TX?

Here’s a few ideas you can use to get started with building a wonderful TX for everyone who has anything to do with your business or organisation.

Take time to develop a multi-level plan

  • Gather a complete and honest picture of your business by investigating and documenting the current experiences at all levels.
  • Form a multidisciplinary team whose role is to create a strategy focussing on goal setting and collaboration opportunities.

Invest in the right technology

  • IT is a driving force of TX, but investing in the right technology is vital. Identify platforms that amalgamate the digital experience for customers and employees. Look for those that improve collaboration, visibility and recording systems to boost customer service.
  • Focus on platforms that can manage changing customer expectations by offering omnichannel communications and omni departmental connections. Move away from a purely transactional approach and towards a holistic CX. This will allow you to create a consistent and engaging customer journey that reflects your brand and  company values.

Make good use of data to support strategies and decisions

  • Use business insight information to identify channel trends and changes in key metrics.
  • Run customer surveys to find out what they love and what they find frustrating about doing business with you.
  • Hold employee discussions to identify technology issues and pinpoint silos that need to be connected to remove frustrations and provide empowerment.

Stay up to date with technologies and trends

Delivering better TX than anyone in your sector will give you the edge over your competitors and see you reap the highly prized rewards of increased customer loyalty and staff retention.

To do this, you need to be constantly aware and ready to act.

  • Keep yourself informed of new trends and technologies that drive TX.
  • Maintain flexibility and plan to adapt to the changing needs of customers and employees.

Embrace the future with TX and Premier Contact Point

Gartner’s report predicts that by 2026, 60% of large organisations will use Total Experience to improve CX and EX.

As technology continues to morph at the speed of light and using it continues to permeate every aspect of our daily lives, customer and employee expectations will also continue to grow and change.

TX is the  building block for adapting to the changes and for providing the best personalised and collaborative company experience into the future.

Premier Contact Point’s technology is helping many businesses and organisations to implement TX and enjoy the rewards it brings.

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Meet your customers where they are with device-agnostic CX

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Meet your customers where they are with device-agnostic CX

device-agnostic

Today’s customers use various devices as they move through their day. Mobile phones have dominated our daily lives, and many people communicate, browse and shop on their devices while on the go. A tablet might be someone’s device of choice once at home, but at work, they will likely access information from a computer.

As of September 2022, 91% of internet users accessed the internet via a mobile phone, 65.6% via a computer and 27.3% via a tablet. So, creating a consistent, positive customer experience (CX) across all touchpoints is essential for businesses that want to remain competitive. This is where device-agnostic CX comes into play.

In this blog, I’ll explore what device-agnostic CX is, why it’s essential to your strategy, and provide actionable steps to implement it.

What is device-agnostic CX?

Device-agnostic CX refers to creating a consistent and positive customer experience across all devices, whether desktop computers, laptops, tablets, or smartphones. It means ensuring that customers can access your services seamlessly, regardless of their device.

Device-agnostic CX includes making websites and customer service interactions user-friendly to all device types. It also means creating content that people can view on any device. For example, if video content is a key part of your CX strategy, you must optimise your content for all screens.

Increased customer satisfaction is one of the most significant benefits of device-agnostic CX. When customers can access your website or engage with your brand seamlessly across all devices, they are more likely to have a positive experience. Customers who find your services unavailable or difficult to use across devices will be more inclined to choose competitors that have optimised their services for multiple devices.

Three key elements of device-agnostic CX

Device-agnostic CX covers many elements, but a few of the main ones include: 

A highly responsive website: When updating your website, ensure it adjusts and optimises based on the device, making it easy to use and navigate. Your website layout should adjust to fit the screen size and resolution of the device being used. Responsive design also ensures the website loads quickly and functions properly if someone has a weaker internet connection.

Accessible customer service: Your CX tools must function properly regardless of the device. For example, as more and more people use voice assistants to interact with brands and make purchases, it’s becoming increasingly important to ensure customer support accommodates these devices.

Optimise content for all devices: Ensure content, including videos, images, and text, are accessible on any device that customers choose to use. Leverage video formats compatible with all devices, and optimise images for fast loading on smartphones, which may have slower internet connections than a computer at times.

By implementing these key elements and following best practices, your business can provide positive and consistent CX across all devices, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

How to create a device-agnostic CX strategy

Creating a device-agnostic CX strategy involves several steps to ensure you provide a consistent and positive experience for customers. When building your device-agnostic strategy, it is best practice to consider the following:

Know the devices your customers use: Leverage data to understand how your customers interact with your brand. How many people visit your site on mobile rather than a desktop computer? How many people are asking questions about your brand via a voice assistant? When you have the answers to questions like these, you can prioritise initiatives that make the most sense to your customers.

Conduct a CX audit: Conduct a thorough audit of all your CX touchpoints, including your website, customer service tools, and social media channels. Identify areas that need improvement; for example, you might find that the web chat function on your website is unreliable when accessed via a mobile device.

Optimise your website: Ensure your website is highly responsive and user-friendly across all devices. Leverage responsive web design techniques and optimise images and videos for mobile devices.

Test your CX tools: Test your customer service tools, such as chatbots and self-service portals, on various devices to ensure they are highly responsive and function properly. You might roll out new capabilities for specific devices and invite your customers to try them and provide feedback.

Use data to drive decisions: Use customer data and analytics to inform your CX strategy and make data-driven decisions — analyse customer feedback and behaviour to identify areas for improvement and make changes accordingly.

By following these steps, your business can create a device-agnostic CX strategy that meets customers’ needs across all devices. It is important to remember that accommodating different devices is an iterative process, and you will need to run through these steps again to ensure you continue delivering excellent CX.

Conclusion

To remain competitive, your business must provide a consistent and positive customer experience across all touchpoints. By delivering device-agnostic CX, your business can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty with a highly responsive website, customer service tools for all devices, and accessible content – to name a few. 

As technology evolves, customers will increasingly expect seamless and intuitive experiences across all touchpoints. By embracing device-agnostic CX, you will position your business to meet these expectations and stay ahead of the competition in the coming years.

Premier Contact Point can help you leverage device-agnostic CX

Customer service has become the differentiator that distinguishes you from your competitors. You need to drive strong connections with your customers across voice and digital channels to elevate CX, build your brand and grow your business.

With Contact Point, your customers can easily move through their channel of choice, including chatbots, instant messaging, email and voice. 

If exceptional customer service is important to your business, we can help you create meaningful and memorable experiences. Visit our Premier Contact Point for Business page for more on our platform.

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5 ways chatbot automation transforms CX

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

5 ways chatbot automation transforms CX

chatbot automation

Too often, your team answers calls about common queries with straightforward solutions that they might have already delivered several times that day. Such queries clog your call queue and mean that staff do not have as much time for customers with complex questions.

Chatbots alleviate these issues by simulating human conversation to handle repetitive queries. They leverage AI and ML to process the customer’s responses, deliver the information needed, or divert them to a human agent if required. Chatbot automation frees your staff to handle more complex tasks and reduces time spent on mundane calls that a robot could have handled instead.

In this blog, I’ll cover five ways chatbot automation transforms CX.

1. Improves response times

Chatbot automation can be a significant game-changer for businesses looking to enhance CX. Chatbots use advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand customer queries and provide accurate and relevant responses. Customers can get their questions answered almost instantly without waiting on hold for a staff member.

A key advantage of chatbots is that they can handle multiple customer queries without compromising the quality of their responses. So, your business can handle a higher volume of customers without hiring additional staff. Another significant benefit of chatbot automation is that it reduces customer frustration and improves satisfaction. When customers can get their questions answered quickly, they are more likely to be satisfied with the service provided.

2. Provides round-the-clock support

Providing customer service outside regular business hours is a growing need in today’s market. As customers have become used to the online world where anything they need or want to know is available at any time, they now expect businesses to be available online 24/7. Chatbot automation is an effective solution to meet these expectations.

Chatbots can handle a wide variety of customer queries and provide assistance immediately, even after business hours. Such capabilities reduce the workload for contact centre staff, allowing them to focus on more complex queries when they come to work in the morning instead of responding to simple email requests piled up from the night before.

In addition, you can integrate chatbots with different communication channels, such as email, social media, and messaging apps. By offering support through multiple channels, your business ensures customers can reach you anytime and from any location.

3. Personalises customer interactions

Chatbots can greet customers by name, offer personalised product recommendations, and provide assistance based on their previous interactions with your business. A chatbot might leverage a customer’s previous interactions with your business, their purchase history, and other relevant information to respond to their query. The result: a more satisfying and personalised customer experience, improving customer loyalty and retention.

You can program chatbots to recognise and adapt to different customer personas. For example, a chatbot can recognise if a customer is a new or returning customer and adjust its responses accordingly. This can help build a stronger customer relationship by showing that the business values and understands customer needs.

Chatbots also leverage sentiment analysis to understand the tone and mood of a customer’s message and respond accordingly, leading to a more empathetic and understanding response and enhancing overall CX.

4. Handles repetitive tasks

Chatbots can handle simple, repetitive tasks such as providing order updates or answering frequently asked questions. Manually handling mundane tasks can be time-consuming and take up a significant amount of staff time that staff could better spend elsewhere. Chatbots, on the other hand, can easily handle these tasks, providing instant responses to customer queries. This leads to increased productivity and improved customer satisfaction, as customers do not have to wait in long queues to have simple questions answered.

Chatbots can also learn from previous interactions, improving their ability to handle these repetitive tasks. Over time, they provide more accurate and relevant responses by learning from customer interactions, improving overall CX. Moreover, chatbots can be integrated with other systems, such as inventory management and CRM, to provide seamless customer support. 

5. Collects customer feedback

You can program chatbots to ask customers for feedback after they have completed a transaction or interaction with your business. By collecting real-time feedback, your business can identify areas for improvement and take proactive steps to address any issues.

Your business can also leverage chatbots to gauge customer sentiment in real-time, allowing staff to address any issues immediately and prevent them from escalating. For instance, if a customer expresses dissatisfaction with a particular aspect of the service, chatbots can alert the appropriate team members, who can then take corrective action to address the issue.

By automating the process of collecting customer feedback, your business can save time and resources while still receiving valuable insights. Chatbots can also help to increase response rates by making it easier for customers to provide feedback because they can simply respond to a chatbot message or fill out a survey rather than having to call or email customer support.

Conclusion

Chatbot automation is transforming CX in numerous ways, allowing businesses to improve response times, offer round-the-clock support, personalise customer interactions, handle repetitive tasks, and collect customer feedback. By leveraging chatbot automation, your business can provide a seamless and efficient customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. With the continuous evolution of AI and ML, the potential of chatbot automation in transforming CX will only grow stronger in the future.

It is crucial to note that chatbots should not wholly replace human staff in your contact centre. Some customers might prefer conversing with chatbots to solve their problems, and others may still prefer speaking with an agent. When deploying these solutions, it is important to balance automated assistance with the human element of CX.

Why choose Premier Contact Point to cover your CX needs?

Customer service has become the differentiator that distinguishes you from your competitors. You need to drive strong connections with your customers across voice and digital channels to elevate CX, build your brand and grow your business.

With Contact Point, your customers can easily move through their channel of choice, including chatbots, instant messaging, email and voice. 

If exceptional customer service is important to your business, we can help create meaningful and memorable experiences. Visit our Premier Contact Point for Business page for more on our platform.

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Changing the game with omnichannel customer experience

customer service providers

Customers today have more choices than ever when communicating with companies and customer service providers. They can choose from various channels, such as voice, webchat, message, email, social media, etc. So, you need an omnichannel customer experience (CX) strategy to meet these expectations.

Omnichannel CX focuses on providing seamless, consistent CX across any channel the customer chooses to contact you. It is about ensuring they receive the same positive experience with your brand regardless of how they engage.

You must consider the following points to execute your omnichannel CX strategy successfully:

1. Understand the customer journey

By understanding how customers interact with your brand across channels, you can design a strategy that meets their needs and expectations at every touchpoint. What steps do customers take as they interact with your brand? What are their needs and expectations at each stage?

It is important to understand the different touchpoints that customers use to interact with your brand and the role that each touchpoint plays in the customer journey. Understanding this helps you identify points of friction that customers may experience and the opportunities available to provide a better experience.

Once you have identified the customer journey, you can develop an omnichannel CX strategy that considers these. 

2. Develop your touchpoints

Customer service channels, such as phone, email, live chat, and social media, should be integrated into the omnichannel ecosystem to provide customers with multiple options to get the help they need. Your customers should be able to switch between touchpoints without losing their place in the journey.

The touchpoints you develop will depend on what your customers leverage the most. For example, a chatbot on your website might make the most sense for your customers if you see a lot of activity on your FAQs page.

You must also consider how emerging technology, such as AI and chatbots, enhances CX. Automation can speed up response times and improve customer service delivery. However, you must also ensure that customers still have the option to speak to a real person if they wish.

All these components should be integrated and work together seamlessly. For example, if a customer starts a chat on the brand’s website, they should be able to continue that chat on their mobile app or via phone and vice versa. This level of integration and consistency is key to delivering a positive omnichannel experience and building customer loyalty.

3. Personalising the customer experience

Personalising CX is a key aspect of creating a successful omnichannel CX strategy. Personalisation creates more meaningful and relevant CX, increasing customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty.

Here’s how you can personalise CX with an omnichannel strategy:

  1. Use customer data: A single view of the customer allows you to understand customer preferences, needs and behaviour in-depth. When a customer contacts your company, your staff will have all the necessary information to provide an effective and personalised experience. For example, if the customer has previously had issues with their product, staff will have access to information related to this issue so they can resolve it quickly.
  2. Integrate customer data across channels: By combining insights from different sources and channels, your contact centre can build more comprehensive customer profiles that enable you to deliver a tailored experience. An omnichannel approach to CX enables your contact centre to provide proactive support, suggest relevant products and services, and create a seamless journey across all touchpoints.
  3. Personalise interactions: By using customer data, staff can personalise interactions with customers, such as addressing customers by name, providing relevant offers and recommendations, and offering support tailored to their needs and preferences.

4. Select the right tools

Customer service providers need an integrated system that allows staff to track and manage customer interactions across all channels. Such a system enables your staff to handle interactions with multiple customers and provide consistent service no matter how the customer reaches out. The tools should be user-friendly and easy for staff to use when delivering a positive customer experience.

You should also consider evaluating potential tools thoroughly to ensure they suit the omnichannel CX strategy. Your approach might include conducting a pilot test with a small group of staff, evaluating the ROI of the tools, and seeking feedback from customers and staff.

5. Continuously monitor the success of your solution

Continually monitoring and evaluating your omnichannel CX strategy is crucial for customer service providers to ensure success and achieve desired outcomes. Here are some of the reasons why you must continuously monitor the omnichannel CX strategy:

  1. Identifying areas for improvement: Continuous monitoring can help you identify areas for improvement in the omnichannel CX strategy, such as areas where customer satisfaction is low or channels that do not effectively meet customer needs.
  2. Adapting to changing customer needs: Customers’ needs and preferences can change over time. Continuous monitoring means you can identify these changes and adapt the omnichannel strategy to meet new customer expectations.
  3. Ensuring alignment with business goals: Continuous monitoring will help you align your strategy with the broader business goals and objectives as these change.

To effectively monitor the omnichannel CX strategy, you should leverage various metrics and KPIs, such as customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty metrics, as well as data from customer feedback, surveys, and analytics tools.

Why choose Premier Contact Point for Business?

Customer service has become the differentiator that distinguishes you from your competitors. You need to drive strong connections with your customers across voice and digital channels to elevate CX, build your brand and grow your business.

With Contact Point, your customers can easily move through their channel of choice, including chatbots, instant messaging, email and voice. 

If exceptional customer service is important to your business, Premier Contact Point can help create meaningful and memorable experiences. Visit our Premier Contact Point for Business page for more on our platform.

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.