The following is a guest post by West Corporation, a leader in CX solutions. To learn more about West Corporation, visit their website.

Exceptional customer experiences don’t just happen. They don’t happen when someone finds their favorite movie on cable or gets a good deal on a blender. Those moments excite us, sure. But they’re just touch points in the relationship.

Real customer experience is not defined by a single moment. It’s made up of the person’s view of the total sum of interactions with a brand. The good, the bad and the utterly forgettable.

A top customer experience can’t be found with the flip of a switch. It must be earned. And there are five key customer experience factors to fix to make that happen. These factors already exist in your organization. But with a few tweaks, these customer experience factors will become a source of loyalty and ROI for years to come.

Building Customer Experience from the Inside

So where do great experiences come from? They’re not defined by one moment, purchase or conversation. Although if you’re not careful and your first interaction is poor, that may be the only chance that customer gives you. Instead, customer experience is made up of all interactions someone has with your brand.

Across all channels, people refine their impression of you. On billboards, TV ads, in-store chats, service calls – all of these represent a chance to connect and build on that specific person’s customer experience life cycle.

With so many touch points to consider, customer experience must be built from the inside with all aspects of your business pointed toward the same goal: earning their loyalty. When brands successfully earn loyalty, it’s a sign of maturity in managing the relationship across the life cycle.

Slowly, your business moves from disconnected pieces to a connected unit, focused in the end on prescribing the best options for your customers. That’s no easy task, but here are the five customer experience factors to fix to start transforming from the inside out:

• Organizational Structure
• Interaction Strategy
• Technology
• Data and Analytics
• Success Measures

1. Organizational Structure

The first of the customer experience factors, your organizational structure includes staff, stakeholders, processes and key functions within your company. Align your organization to your experience goals at every opportunity. Do your staff and functions work in tandem to build trust and exceed expectations? Or do you have distinct methods for different groups focused on their own immediate problems?

To reach the connected level, emphasize customer-centric operations. Focus on raising efficiency and decreasing effort for customers and employees. And assign customer experience roles to people throughout your business, too, to deeply embed your new goals.

2. Interaction Strategy

Because every interaction affects the total experience, create a plan to make every interaction the best it can be. Know what channels you use and what you want to say in each one. Are you being proactive and viewing the process through your customers’ eyes? Or are you just serving them by reacting to their calls?

To reach the connected level, focus on new ways you can use technology. Maintain a customer-first mission with cross-channel engagement strategies, self-service and proactive support. Then make it easy to hand off customer service from one channel to another.

3. Technology

Hardware and software is more important in customer service today than ever before. Boosting your service with an IVR or contact center software makes it simple to provide personal customer service using individual data and preferences. Is your technology easy to use and meeting your customers’ needs? Does it allow your staff to provide the human touch your customers crave?

To reach the connected level, maintain a scalable ecosystem of platforms and tools that is easy to access across the enterprise. Keep data and solutions out of silos. And always consider new options that can make people even more satisfied.

4. Data and Analytics

Technology feeds off the data you put into it. Customers want to feel like you know them, so keep track of your interactions with each customer and their personal preferences. Are you bringing all of your data points into one place and making that data visible across the enterprise? Are you using it to predict what customers want from current and future interactions?

To reach the connected level, have processes in place to continually collect, maintain and update customer data. Then house this data in one place, accessible across the enterprise. And use business intelligence to learn how to make the most of this data when making decisions.

5. Success Measures

The last of the customer experience factors, success measures help you see your success in making changes to the other four factors. These key performance indicators define detailed metrics that show how much your business has grown and how far you still have to go to meet your goals. Do you have a clear road map to emphasize the value in every person? Or do you focus inwardly on business metrics without considering the customer journey?

To reach the connected level, set metrics for financial, operational and experiential goals. Focus on problem resolution and sanctification, especially in customer-initiated exchanges. Lastly, set metrics that lead to enterprise-wide efficiency. Read more about these five customer experience factors and see where your company fits in our Customer Experience Lifecycle Management Maturity Model.

Customer Experience Factors in Your Business

Strategically differentiating your customer experiences can’t be done by buying the latest technology or even by just visualizing the customers’ journey. Exceptional customer experiences are built by aligning all the customer experience factors – including people, processes, technology and data – to make your vision a reality.

All businesses have different levels of maturity, from disconnected to prescriptive. So view your current interactions through the lens of your customers. Be 100 percent honest in your capabilities and shortcomings, and you’ll be well on your way to building a differentiated customer experience that will set you apart and convince your customers to stay for life.

For guidance on how to start changing these five customer experience factors in your business, check out this next blog post, 30 Customer Experience Questions to Guide You Through the Jungle.

Exceptional experiences rest within your organization, ready to wake. By understanding your customers’ views and looking beyond one-off interactions, customers will rave about your customer experience and become long-term, loyal advocates for your brand.

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Over the last few years, the word ‘omnichannel’ has been used (and overused) to describe a utopia of marketing and customer care. We all have heard and read about how an omnichannel approach solves all customer care issues and allows brands to prove their customer obsession. Then why do brands still pursue a better approach?

The answer is simple: because every brand has defined ‘omnichannel’ using the best of their abilities and technologies at hand. We saw many multichannel or cross-channel solutions being called omnichannel only to be found incapable of delivering what they promised. What we needed was a solution capable of delivering a true omnichannel experience. And what differentiates a true omnichannel solution from its counterparts is the technology that empowers it.

Let’s start with the definition. We believe that a true omnichannel solution does not make the customer bend their ways to engage with the brand, it allows customers to switch through various channels of their choice to complete a transaction without being limited by rules and predefined menus. It offers a personalized experience for the customer using the data and customers past behavior. And it maintains context and persistence throughout the customer journey so they don’t have to repeat themselves as they change channels.

Here’s a quick checklist of items you should be looking for while selecting an omnichannel solution:

CHANNEL CHOICE

A true omnichannel IVA solution spans all channels of customer communication and maintains conversations and brand persona across those channels — from traditional telephony to digital channels like text, web chat, mobile apps and from new messaging platforms such as Facebook messenger and apple business chat to smart speakers like Google home and Amazon Echo.

PERSONALIZATION

Customers like when brands show that they care by offering personal and relevant service. A true omnichannel solution recognizes a customer when they start the engagement, greet them with their name and carry out a conversation using what they know about the customer – past behavior, purchases, and preferences.  A true omnichannel IVA achieves this by tightly integrating with a brand’s CRM or data stores and retrieving customer profiles and relevant information in real time to offer a personalized experience.

Ex. Good morning Tim, how may I help you?

CONTEXT AND PERSISTENCE

When it comes to customer service interactions, context is everything. Repeating themselves again and again when switching channels or personnel is one of the biggest cause of frustration among consumers. A true omnichannel IVA avoids all of this by maintaining a context either by transferring session IDs or history of the transaction across channels.

Ex. Good morning Tim, are you calling about your recent purchase of a vacuum cleaner or how may I help you?

INTEGRATIONS

Modern customer experience expectations have taken customer service beyond the contact centers. Now, it is widely distributed among various departments — for example, the social channels are managed by a marketing team and web or mobile chat channels are managed by digital teams. These teams need to access central CRM systems, knowledge management systems, agent desktop softwares and other repositories to deliver a coherent experience. A true omnichannel IVA integrates with all the pieces of the customer service jigsaw puzzle in real time.

THE BEST OF AI AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

A true omnichannel solution uses the best of AI technologies to understand and predict customer behavior. Technologies such as automated speech recognition and natural language processing help the IVA understand the customer in spite of complicated prompts, stacked intents or background noises. The dialog management technologies ensure a conversational interaction over voice and digital channels. A true omnichannel IVA also offers a second source of recognition — human intelligence — when the AI produces lower confidence score in what the customer is asking. The machine learning algorithms complete the feedback loop so the system learns from its experiences and gets smarter with each interaction.

With the current misuse of terms describing a variety of automated customer care solutions, it’s important to understand what technologies are required to empower a truly omnichannel solution — so you can be sure you’re selecting the right technology for your organization. To learn more about how Interactions omnichannel solution is truly unique, watch our on-demand webinar today.

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Despite all our collective emphasis on customer experience, culturally, and via systems that drive more customer intel to Customer Service Reps (CSRs) so they can deliver improved Customer Experience (CX), I’m still having challenges when I contact my own service providers. For example, I’m either explaining something a third time, being told something by one agent and something different by another, or my all-time least favorite, hearing ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience’ with a tone that tells me otherwise!

What’s missing in our service exchanges?!

Humanity!  Connection!  Warmth!  I remember a CSAT turnaround project that was wildly successful because we taught associates how to better connect with people – how to just be real instead of sounding so ‘official,’ how to inject their personality into their conversations, how to demonstrate interest and caring, and generally how to have more fun!

 

It’s not technical proficiency, but ‘professionalism’ burdening our CX!

I’ve listened to thousands of calls and read hundreds of emails and texts through the course of consulting for contact centers – and in them I rarely heard or saw a CSR that didn’t know the technical aspects of handling inquiries regarding their products and services, instead, it was almost always that they sounded impersonal and uninvolved, overly ‘professional’.  The major thing those interactions had in common was that representatives went straight to servicing the customer’s needs but spent little to no time reacting to the customer’s emotion!  In talking with them about it, it was as if they avoided connecting because the people they were interacting with were customers, not someone they knew.

How do we help CSRs better connect? Practice what we teach!

To help CSRs better connect with humans, we need to teach, expect, and measure the use of interpersonal communication and influence behaviors (aka, soft skills!) like warmth, personalization, informality, interest, and caring (aka, empathy!).  The simplest and fastest way to help them understand how to demonstrate those behaviors with customers, and ensure they actually take time to do so, is for our leaders to model these personal connection behaviors with our CSRs!

It’s ironic, but so simply true that the behaviors we want and expect CSRs to use to connect with customers, the ones that we know drive high CX, those are the same behaviors we need our frontline leaders to employ to better connect with our CSRs!

Employee Experience (EX) is a huge driver for higher CX, and that means frontline leaders and trainers have to use similar skills with team members that we teach team members to use with customers!   We have to better develop our leaders, so they model right-way connection behaviors with our customer-facing employees, so they, in turn, know in our culture that that relationships matter – internally, and externally.

5 ways leaders can model high-CX behaviors with their team members

Here are five communication behaviors that frontline leaders can easily use to better connect with their team members, which are ironically parallel to what we ask team members to use with our customers:

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The Bottom Line

I love this from Shep Hyken; he said, “a brand is defined by the customers’ experience… the experience is delivered by the employees.”  And who delivers the employees’ experience?  We all do.  But, who’s got time to always do everything the right or best way?  There are platforms available now that can give us that time – augmenting frontline leaders’ performance management workflows and tracking so they can be more consistent, more efficient, more organized, and more effective – as teachers, as coaches, and as motivators and celebrators.

If we intentionally work to ensure our frontline leader behaviors demonstrate value in creating interpersonal relationships with customer-facing employees, then we’re not only delivering higher EX and boosting retention. We’re also building a culture where those employees are MUCH more likely to place importance on and engage in those connection behaviors with our customers, which in turn means we’re delivering a better CX and improved business results!

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Messaging Customer Care: Real-World Deployments, Real Results

The goal of this blog post is to clearly identify the business value of implementing messaging customer care alongside traditional care channels such as phone, email, and live-chat. In my role as Head of Product, I have the privilege of meeting customer service and customer experience leaders on a weekly basis. Over the last several years of my career, I have racked up several hundred such conversations.

These conversations are a part of my role that I love and value immensely because they help me understand our customers’ priorities. While every organization has its own way of articulating their customer service priorities, they generally fall into three main buckets: improving customer experience, controlling customer service costs, and improving agent satisfaction. Agent productivity impacts all three of these commonly held priorities.

Improving agent productivity means conversations are being resolved faster which is a key component of customer satisfaction. It also impacts agent satisfaction because higher productivity is achieved by eliminating repetitive, mundane or wasteful actions that agents are required to do for issue resolution. Finally, and most significantly, agent productivity is directly tied to cost control since its presence enables organizations to handle higher volumes of customer service requests.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about how messaging customer care provides superior CX for consumers. What’s often overlooked is that customer care over messaging channels is also significantly cheaper compared to other, more traditional channels including voice and textual channels such as email and live chat. This is largely because messaging enables agents to dramatically increase productivity.

Voice vs. Messaging

To understand how much more productive, we analyzed a representative sample of our customer base. We found that agents on our platform are able to resolve between 5.7 to 14.5 conversations per hour. This resolution rate is about 25-65% higher than that of voice teams. The median messaging customer care team resolves 7.2 conversations per hour. This is about 42% higher than the benchmark of 4.2-5.2 resolutions per hour for a voice agent. This does not include conversations that did not require a response (e.g., conversations resolved by bots and automation, or a “Thank you” from a customer after a conversation was already marked resolved by an agent). Also excluded are additional conversations conducted by agents that were never resolved.

This disparity in productivity is driven by a messaging agent’s ability to handle many more simultaneous conversations than a voice agent is able to. Agents on our platform often have more than 10 conversations being actively handled at once without jeopardizing the quality of service.

Email vs. Messaging

Messaging provides an even higher productivity gain over email. Email, like messaging, is an asynchronous channel. This means that conversations don’t have to happen in real time and can span minutes, hours, or even days. However, from a consumer’s point of view, email is a highly dissatisfying channel, associated with high response times (often a day, sometimes several days) and high friction.

Emails tend to need more words compared to messaging which wastes agents’ time without adding much value to the actual problem resolution for the consumer. This communication style often requires a lot of back and forth, which feels natural in a messaging-style conversation, but can get frustrating in a more “offline” format. Email issue resolution costs for enterprises that we’ve talked to tend to be in the range of $6-7 per resolution. Compare this to the $2-2.5 cost per resolution for an average messaging team on our platform and it translates into a 60-65% productivity gain over email agent teams.

Chat vs. Messaging

Live chat has been around for a long time and is a well-established service channel in many organizations. On the surface messaging and chat look similar enough that enterprises tend to assume that they also have similar costs. However, this is not the case due to a key difference between messaging and chat: asynchronous versus synchronous interactions. Chats often suffer from a high abandonment rate whereas a messaging conversation can never be abandoned. This is the source of messaging’s productivity advantage over chat. Messaging conversations never get abandoned as there are no session timeouts.

Timed out chats often lead to either channel hopping or new chat sessions (e.g., if a user gets timed out because they were browsing a different webpage and didn’t see an agent’s reply). For each abandoned chat that drives a new session or a phone call, the time spent by the first chat agent is wasted productivity.

Messaging also allows more simultaneous conversations than live chat’s typical 3-5 range. We estimate that eliminating involuntary abandons and enabling higher simultaneous conversations can add up to 15-30% higher productivity over live chat. Abandonment rate being the key variable for the extent of these savings.

Whether comparing messaging customer care to voice, email or live-chat, it is safe to say the messaging provides a superior customer experience. Perhaps most importantly, it drives 20-60% agent productivity compared to traditional channels, creating a win-win situation for the consumer and the enterprise.

Messaging provides a superior customer experience and drives 20-60% agent productivity compared to traditional channels, creating a win-win situation for the consumer and the enterprise.

What is your experience? Have you looked at what a messaging operation could save your organization?

Interested in finding out more about this topic or Sparkcentral? Sparkcentral is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Marina del Rey, September 10-12, 2018. CR Summit Marina del Rey will feature keynotes from Chick-fil-A, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Upwork. Sparkcentral will be delivering a Customer Shop Talk session titled “Digital Messaging Customer Care at Scale”. 

For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website. 

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The following is a guest blog by Charles Schrier, Director of Marketing  at SmartAction.

As a lifelong customer service professional, you’ve watched the customer service function change from necessary evil to cornerstone of business success. For so long, businesses found ways to cut costs and increase efficiency in the call center because it was always viewed as a “cost” center. But with today’s customer demands for experiences that are easy and effective, and with more contact channels than ever before, it is getting near impossible to forecast and staff the call center, train agents in the proper skills, and offer consistency across channels and touchpoints.

Companies have an amazing opportunity to meet customer demands and create a strategic advantage over the competition by incorporating AI automation into their customer service operation. Forrester research tells us that 2/3 of consumers said that valuing their time is the most important thing to them, which helps to explain the rise in self-service adoption. With conversational AI automation, businesses are offering self-service for many of the simple and complex repetitive tasks that their call center agents had always been doing. Thanks to consumer tech products like Siri and Cortana, customers are actually very adept and comfortable interacting with conversational AI, whether through voice or digital media. Therefore, companies with AI automation are outpacing competitors by offering the effortless experience their customers want while migrating their operations towards sustainable growth.

AI automation’s most impactful ROI promise is in helping call centers conquer headcount challenges. As contact volumes explode through more and more channels, it has become increasingly difficult to forecast and accurately staff the call center. Even when volume spikes are predictable, they are still expensive to manage using live agents alone. The answer to higher volumes is no longer to hire more people, but rather to use AI agents mixed with live agents in order to automate more and make the live agents more effective for the inquiries that require the human touch. Many companies have found success using an AI virtual assistant service to:

• 1. 1. 1. Automate repetitive calls, chats, and texts with live agent failover. This helps agents focus on the top priority customer conversations because the routine tasks, like checking order status or making payments, are taken care of by AI.

   

  1. 2. Gather customer data upfront before passing to live agent for assistance. An example is customer account authentication with screen pops for agents so that customers do not need to repeat information.
  3. 3. Automate outbound calls and SMS texts for appointment confirmations, delivery reminders, reorders, or other alerts. This is normally a huge cost and time-suck for live agents.
  5. 4. Offer a conversational AI Front Door, which uses a natural language greeting like, “How can I help you?” to capture intent. Conversations then get routed either to the IVR, a live agent, or additional AI self-service.

  By using AI automation for these four types of engagements—automating more than ever before possible—businesses are optimizing their human resources in new ways while maintaining customer satisfaction scores. Moreover, with these new capabilities, agents have a better opportunity to be heroes for the customer. They are providing real value and being rewarded for critical thinking and problem solving, which makes the job more fulfilling and creates incentive to stick around.

  AI automation will change the face of your customer service operation, just as it has for so many others, but you must invest now. Interested in finding out more about this topic or SmartAction? SmartAction is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Marina del Rey, September 10-12, 2018. CR Summit Marina del Rey will feature keynotes from Chick-fil-A, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Upwork. SmartAction will be delivering a case study with Electrolux on “A Cost-Benefit Analysis: How Electrolux Major Appliances Successfully Brought AI to Their Customer Experience”. 

  For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website. 

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