The following is a guest blog from Coveo. 

The overwhelming majority of support leaders have recognized that their organizations’ self-service channels are their customers’ most preferred method for getting support (and that assisted service has become something they want to avoid). Customers want to find the answers to their questions independently and conveniently. As such, 97% of companies are investing in improving their customers’ self-service experience in 2017.

Self-service is dramatically more cost effective than other service channels, both in cost per resolution, and because it reduces the overall case load on contact centers. According to TSIA, phone and email support are each well over 100x more expensive per incident than web self-service, while chat costs over 30x more. Read more about that here.

New technologies are making it possible to create an intelligent self-service experience – one that is easy, relevant, and intuitive – that can generate results quickly.

For example, WatchGuard Technologies created an intelligent self-service experience, that improved its case deflection rate from three to 11 percent within only four months.

Customer satisfaction is of utmost importance to WatchGuard. The company provides several customer support options, including a 24/7 call center, and a wide range of online technical resources such as a knowledge base, technical documentation, video tutorials, product datasheets and user forums. However, before implementing an intelligent self-service solution – and despite all their available resources – the self-service capabilities were still falling short. Results from a TSIA Benchmark Review helped them realize that their self-service site was not intuitive to their customers and there was no easy way to search and filter through all the information.

Watch Joanne Miller, Managing Director of Product Training and Publications at WatchGuard Technologies, explain her journey to intelligent self-service in this video.

Making self-service easy.

Your customers expect to be able to find the answers they need with minimal effort. Unifying your content and making it searchable allows them to do so. A unified index consolidates all of your organization’s information from across your entire ecosystem and creates a single hub that puts relevant information at your customer’s’ fingertips. Intelligent search taps into that index to find exactly what is being searched and delivers the answers your customers need, when they need them.

Making self-service relevant.

Offering access to case-resolving content is an essential first step, but self-service is even more effective when the content is relevant and proactively recommended to each customer based upon their unique situation.

By analyzing each customer’s real-time site activity, product and service history, and other profile characteristics, your intelligent self-service site can automatically deliver contextually relevant information that has proved helpful to other similar customers in the past. The relevance of results self-tunes through techniques that weigh results based upon implicit and explicit contextual factors.

Making self-service intuitive.

With the use of machine learning, intelligent self-service solutions offer predictive insights that are characterized by the most relevant information and content being anticipated, suggested and recommended. Intuitive self-service continuously adapts and evolves based on the interactions of other users with the self-service site in real-time and provide valuable insights. These insights allow your organization to automatically make contextually relevant recommendations, that promote products and offers for add-on, upsells and cross-sells.

If your executive team has considered or committed to improving your organization’s customer service this year, you’ll want to make sure the company’s dollars are put where they can make the biggest impact. Intelligent self-service unquestionably offers the highest and most compelling return on investment. By enabling your people, processes and technology to work together, your intelligent self-service site can be rolled out and show improvements in as little as three months.

To learn more about intelligent self-service and how your executive team can build it into their 2017 plans, download our eBook, Case Deflection and Self-Service Success.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

The post Intelligent Self-Service: Balancing Support Costs with CSAT appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Evan Dobkin, Marketing Manager at Aspect Software.  

I entered the contact center market five years ago, working on self-service interaction and the potential for personalized, customized experiences made possible by smartphones. At the time, the industry was planning for a multi-channel world. The domination of the “archaic” voice channel was starting to give way to native apps, social channels and SMS as the tides that would lift all customer service ships. It was very easy for businesses to get caught up in the hype of what was on the horizon and become paralyzed, wondering what changes they needed to make to their business to become part of this modern customer service world.

However, over these last five years, I’ve come to understand that despite the bells and whistles of sleek, up-and-coming communication channels, brands looking to add self-service interaction must begin by perfecting their IVR. A modernized IVR can help to improve the customer experience while providing a solid foundation for additional contact channels.

IVR has been, and will continue to be, the workhorse of your customer service offering. Often regarded by consumers as “the channel of last resort,” because they expect resolution when taking the time to call directly, it’s actually critical for resolving many customer issues. Not convinced? Consider these modern IVR realities:

– IVR is one of many contact points

– Improved speech recognition and dynamic personalization have made navigation easier

– New interactive voice solutions (Amazon Echo, Siri, etc…) emerged that are redefining how we interact with and our expectations of today’s IVR

– It is all about customer experience, ease of use – and containing costs

In 2012 Pew Research Center reported 46% of American adults owned a smartphone. By November of 2016 the number climbed to 77%. With this high adoption rate, consumers are more connected than ever before via social, apps and text and messaging platforms. In fact, KPCB reported in 2015 that six of the top 10 most used apps are messaging apps. Once upon a time voice was just IVR and live agent, but now includes virtual assistants and smart devices with the ability for voice and video.

It’s become apparent that brands can no longer afford to have their IVR operating in isolation. The enterprise IVR must become the foundation of the overall customer service ecosystem by adapting to changes in the way that customers prefer to interact, as well as adopting new technologies to enable the best possible experiences for customers. It’s time to leverage the technologies that make these new interaction points so popular to finally make good on the promise of IVR.

Join my Shop Talk, Modern IVR: Revitalize Your Most Important Touchpoint, at Customer Response Summit Vegas on Wednesday, February 8^th and learn how adding modern capabilities to your IVR can improve the customer experience and help you capitalize on your customer’s first impression.

The post The Contact Center of the Future: Everything Old is New Again appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Michael Cho at Next Caller. For more information on Next Caller, visit their website. 

“Say please and thank you”

“Smile while you dial”

“The customer is always right”

As a customer experience executive, more likely than not, you’ve trained your call center reps to assume these proverbial pieces of advice. After all, having friendlier reps translates into better experiences for your customers. Right?

Not always.

No less than a month ago, I was on the phone with a popular eCommerce brand, trying desperately to figure out why my Christmas gift to my parents had not shipped. The agent with whom I was speaking was delightful; he did everything right, asking me about my day and apologizing after every turn of the maze that my order was quickly becoming.

Alas, after nearly 10 minutes of hold time and countless questions, he figured out that my name had been improperly spelled in their system. Upon hanging up, I was annoyed: not enough to make me want to cancel my order, but enough to make me second-guess my loyalty to the brand.

It turns out. I’m not alone. According to a study conducted by American Express, “78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.” In addition, “59% would try a new brand or company for a better service experience.”

Clearly, there is enormous financial upside to providing exceptional customer service. But as having well-trained agents is not nearly enough, what steps can you take to transform your call center into a well-oiled machine?

1) Identify Your Callers

According to Contact Babel’s Contact Center Decision Maker’s Guide, 61 percent of callers are unknown in real-time. For the call center agent, this means more time spent on gathering customer information.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Benedict Cumberbatch.”

“Can you repeat that?”

“Benedict Cumberbatch. C as in cowboy, u as in umbrella, etc…”

On average, these cumbersome back-and-forths take call centers anywhere from 30-60 seconds per call. When you’re dealing with thousands of calls per day, the hard cost quickly accumulates. But more importantly, this cost transfers over to your customers, who more likely than not do not want to be spelling their names repeatedly just to find out the status of their orders. 

Adopting a caller ID solution that can identify more of your inbound callers is the first step towards avoiding these situations, creating a more efficient call center, and most importantly, leaving your customers satisfied.

2) Implement Intelligent Routing

As we’ve discussed, knowing who your callers are will minimize customer friction. Reducing average handle time, however, is only the first step. Creating an incredible customer experience over the phone requires personalization, and according to the Salesforce.com’s 2017 State of Service, 69 percent of consumers would agree.

Savvy execs should seek services that provide real-time, robust customer insights before they even hit the IVR. With more actionable customer data points, you will be able to score callers and invest efforts strategically by pairing the right callers with the right agents. Data points that cover demographic and even auto or home information will allow you to make personalized routing decisions that will elevate your capacity for personalized service.

3) Embrace Omni-channel

Omni-channel: a concept widely thrown around, but rarely executed properly. In large part, this is because businesses simply don’t have enough information on their customers.

A caller ID solution that can double as a data enrichment tool can kick back corresponding customer emails and even social media profiles to help you achieve a holistic customer portrait. Imagine being able to correlate a customer’s angry tweet complaining about bad service to a recent inbound phone call, elevating your ability to service them to a previously unattainable level of personalization.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

The post Optimizing your call center to provide excellent customer experience and make more money appeared first on Execs In The Know.