Modernize your contact center approach

Contact centers, also referred to as call centers, are the customer-facing arm of every organization for sales and service interactions. The...

Five steps to exceed customer expectations

Modernize your contact center to scale your business.

Embrace the future

First, let’s consider the power of omnichannel and how contact centers play a critical role.

Contact centers, also referred to as call centers, are the customer-facing arm of every organization for sales and service interactions. The omnichannel customer experience demands internal and external functionality 24/7, via call, text, chat, email and more.

The future of customer service, in this digitally focused age, is all about transformation and modernization, especially around contact centers. In fact, the global contact center transformation market size was valued at USD 12.62 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.2% from 2020 to 2027.

If your organization has been struggling to get your contact center approach right, you’re not alone. The good news: You have options.

With the recent focus on innovation in strategy and technology in this space, it’s now easier and quicker – than ever – to up-level your customer experience, internal efficiency and real-time insights.

Take five steps now

Set the groundwork for exceeding customer expectations. Industry-specific insights (for financial services, healthcare and public sector) follow the five steps.

Step one: Lead with a service mindset.

Customer expectations and experience rule the game. In fact, according to a connected customer report published by Salesforce, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.

Ask yourself what those service expectations will be in five years. Make plans now to assure your customer-facing and internal-facing service units flow as one cohesive unit within your contact center organization.

Don’t think of contact center transformation as a cost reduction operational exercise; it’s an imperative customer strategy effort to drive improvements in customer satisfaction, agility, revenue, and scale your business.

Your customers expect their experience to be hyper-personalized and high-quality. Anything less and you’re missing the mark.

Step two: Prioritize your employee ‘work from anywhere’ experience.

Employees want to get their work done on their own time and in their own space. Data shows that firms with remote work capabilities enjoy a 3X increase in employee productivity, and a 3.5X decrease in service costs.

Happy employees mean happy customers.

Think about your own technology stack. Does it enable work from anywhere? Does it provide your agents with the right tools and real-time insights to deliver great interactions for customers, across all channels?

Look for gaps that exist in these key areas:

CRM
Knowledge management
Unified communications
Unified agent desktop
Artificial intelligence
Predictive analytics and relevant customer insights

Step three: Consider live chat.

The customer experience goes far beyond voice, which is the primary channel for complex inquiries and escalations. We’ve all been there (you need somebody on the phone, now, who can resolve the issue you are facing). Think about conducting an audit of all your integrated channels, as support is needed everywhere.

For example, J.D. Power found that live chat has become the leading digital contact method for online customers, as a staggering 42% of customers prefer live chat, compared to just 23% for email, and 16% for social media or forums.

Oddly, only 9% of companies use live chat on their websites. Don’t ignore this channel, as it provides the highest level of customer satisfaction rating (82%) over other channels.

Here are some core areas you should be supporting, across all channels:

Retention / escalations / dispute resolution
Sales proactive (outbound)
Sales reactive (inbound)
General customer service
Identification and verification (authentication)
Order management (including processing and tracking)
Technical support

Step four: Lean on technology, but don’t count on it to solve all your problems.

An AI-powered contact center can be set up in days and 53% percent of companies identify AI as a tool for creating a ‘customer-first culture.’ Technology fuels a solid start for a holistic customer strategy.

First, align your customer care vision with your overall business goals. You may want to design new customer journeys in an omnichannel world and map them to corresponding employee and agent journeys.

Then, once you have worked through your strategy, sample AI-powered outputs could include:

Filtering calls to route only critical calls to human agents (86% of customers believe there should be an escalate-to-agent option when talking to a chatbot).
Enhance agent effectiveness by providing them with the right tools including the next best action for customers, and fraud alerts.
Leverage natural-language tools to help agents to better understand customer sentiments to proactively service phone customer queries.

Step five: Hone in on real-time insights that matter.

Focus on the customer experiences that impact top-line revenue, such as retention, enrichment , and advocacy.

Examine your metrics and goals across customers, agents, channels and operational data. Go a level deeper and look at your key performance indicators to measure service outcomes, along with operational metrics.

Leverage natural-language tools to help agents to better understand customer sentiments to proactively service phone customer queries, like Amazon Polly, a service that turns text into life-like speech.

There are at least 40 data points you should consider, including:

Channel usage
Agent productivity
Number of cases handled
Escalation rate
First-contact resolution

There are a host of technologies to help measure and drive success, as you transform your contact center.

Financial sector: innovations in customer experience drive profits

Banking, financial services, and insurance institutions (BFSI) must meet rising customer expectations to stay competitive.

Banking, financial services and insurance institutions (BFSI) continue to face disruption from new entrants, which has increased customer’s expectations. Comparison to other financial institutions is no longer the best benchmark. Customers now compare their experiences across all industries.

Financial institutions’ focus should shift to innovation to deliver the best hyper-personalized client experiences across channels. Think like a tech company to meet customer and customer experience team demands head-on.

Customer retention is key. Contact centers account for around 10% of customer interactions at most banks, but moment-of-truth interactions (fraud, claims, stolen card, etc.) represent 30%.

Delivering great customer experience during these interactions is critical to retain customers and improve customer experience. This becomes even more important once you consider the cost difference between acquiring a new customer and retaining your existing customer. The cost of acquiring a new customer can be five times higher than retaining an existing customer.

Prioritize the treatment of these moments, and provide your agents with the appropriate tools and insights. This will make the best of these customer experiences and improve customer loyalty.

Consider the customer experience (CX) as it relates to revenue impact. For multichannel banks, the revenue impact of a one-point improvement in CX index score results in $8.19 in annual incremental revenue per customer, and with 15 million average number of customers per company. That is around $123 million in revenue impact. This should be another incentive for banks to improve customer experience through innovation.

Contact center innovation and customer experience standardization across channels are crucial for financial institutions to further enhance customer experience, in each interaction, and to create sustainable ROI.

Public sector: investing in community

Budgets can be tight for public agencies. But the right tech investment can help you connect with your constituents better, while saving money.

Public entities are often short on resources, leaving their citizens feeling ignored, invisible, or underserved.

As a first step towards remedying this issue, state, county, and local governments should identify the top issues that contribute to the majority of support requests. These might include public safety, public health (such as mass vaccination), human services, or social services. Once the major support themes have been identified, start taking steps towards modernizing the support experience.

For example, the suburban Georgia community of Johns Creek has over 84,000 residents who need support on everything from traffic patterns to upcoming events and zoning codes. By leveraging new technology and developing a holistic strategy for customer support, they were able to modernize their contact center to answer constituent inquiries faster and more efficiently using Amazon Connect and Amazon Alexa.

If your organization has been granted investment capital as part of COVID-19 response and recovery, consider transformative initiatives like revamping your contact center—a positive step towards enhancing your citizens’ experience and building their trust now.

Healthcare: connect with empathy

There's no way around it: patient and member dissatisfaction is high. AI-powered solutions can lead the way to human-centered solutions.

When it comes to designing the healthcare experience—whether for the patient or member—you should always lead with empathy. The same goes for provider or payer side (B2B).

There’s a lot of room to grow on the patient and member count, as 81% of consumers are unsatisfied with their healthcare experience. After all, they’re likely comparing it to the hyper-personalized consumer experiences they’re getting from their favorite online retailer or streaming service.

Consider different types of AI to provide a better personalization experience. Capabilities like voice biometric to greet a caller automatically, along with analyzing call interactions to improve agent performance, can highly impact customer experience.

Along the healthcare journey, there are many tasks, emotions and questions to handle—many of them urgent.

Consider chat bots, automated messaging, and human operators to streamline and customize the call center experience for your patients. Think about moving the customer through channels to maximize the user experience for that particular task, like moving an interaction from chat to a call, maintaining the same agent or adding a second channel, like mobile text, to introduce another type of authentication.

Most importantly, make security a top priority. Engagement tools—driven by consumer behavior and identity data—must be protected with the highest-level security standards, including HIPAA, HITECH, and SOC.

91% of hospital CIOs now believe that cloud computing is the most agile and effective way to manage that data. When coupled with a holistic strategy to drive a positive patient experience, cloud can empower the journey in powerful ways.

Ready to learn more?

Sign up for an industry-specific session.

Get ready to modernize and transform your contact center, across all channels, to exceed your customers’ expectations. Slalom can help you explore the power of leveraging Amazon Connect—an easy to use, cloud-based, omnichannel contact center solution—combined with Salesforce, the world’s number one CRM platform.

Start by joining us for one of our on-demand industry-specific 30-minute webinars. Register now:

Financial Connect Session
Healthcare Connect Session
Public Sector Connect Session