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.