Click here to catch up on Part 1 – Customer Expectations, Part 2 – Channels, and Part 3 – Operations.

The fourth installment of this series focuses on thoughts on technology.

• AI will begin to automate tasks for the agent and the customer – however AI will take longer to mature than previously thought, due to data infrastructure not mature enough to fully leverage.
• Companies will begin to shift from handling transaction to personalizing service.
• Digital will continue to experience strong growth, powered by mobile usage.
• Messaging channels will continue to grow social volumes.
• More conversations around the “social ethics” of AI deployment.
• Continued push on technology – moving infrastructure to the cloud.
• Deep/machine learning will play a role in 2018 for brands to meet customers where they are. I think brands are starting to get on board with the concept of machine learning and using data to predict behavior. But deep learning can extend beyond things like chatbots. If a brand can predict what a customer might be looking for, it can tailor content to the customer that allows the customer to self-service, send push notifications, etc.
• Thinking about AI secondarily to the types of use cases and outcomes desired that require it.
• Companies will have to address AI and ML in their strategies for customer acquisition and engagement. 2017 may be seen as a year of hype as lots of new vendors emerge on the scene. Expect consolidation and actual AI/ML deployments to increase in 2018.
• Interest in – and deployment of – customer journey analytics tools will increase, as companies try to identify and solve problems upstream before they occur.
• Strategic enterprise automation (front to back office) will help businesses begin to improve the customer experience, while optimizing back office operations, leading to stronger sales and a better bottom line. Examples include automated machine learning/AI, self help, chatbots/avatars, to RPA and beyond.
• People continue to overestimate innovation in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.
• We will see the first practical examples of AI in the areas of contact center routing, compliance and quality, with practical use cases.
• Some brands are testing AI for knowledge management (ie. agent support tool powered by AI vs. a traditional knowledge management tool). A lower risk approach to testing AI vs. directly with clients.
• Over the next 3 to 5 years, I believe that the majority of inquiries that come into the contact center will no longer be voice or email, but some form of messaging. SMS is only one form of messaging: it encompasses a broad swath of methods including iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Kik, WhatsApp, and more. Many people are following WeChat, which is now one of the largest standalone messaging apps with over 963 million monthly active users. Part of the reason it has been so successful is that you can do more than just send messages. Apple is moving down the path with the announcement of its Business Chat messaging solution which is an extension of iMessage and will include some ApplePay capabilities. The convergence of these technologies will be what ultimately tips the scale to shift consumers and businesses away from phone and email to messaging.
• Maturity issue with emerging virtual assistance technologies (chatbots, AI capabilities, etc.), continues to lag – requirements for specific user case studies at an all-time high.
• Buzz and hype are high, but adoption is low. Brands realize they need more data in order to leverage these technologies to be accurate.
• I’m not convinced that brands have the capacity/talent/full understanding of what precisely goes into machine learning and true AI (beyond chatbots). I think we’re going to see a wave of failed adoption on that front.
• Technology – Proliferate of technology out there – from measuring CX, to ‘omnichannel’, to speech analytics.

Stay tuned next week for the final installment in the series Part 5 – Use Case Studies/Data and Security/Risk. 

The post 2018 Predictions for the Service Leader: Part 4 – Technology appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Click here to catch up on Part 1 – Customer Expectations. 

The second installment of this series focuses on thoughts on channel choice and omnichannel digital transformation.

• The continued shift to “social channels” and the need to be adept at serving customers who reach out for help in social media.
• A key word is “predictive service”. Next era CX – what AI will enable?
• C-Suite will begin to see the potential for revenue generation on the service side of the house with new channels and old channel improvement.
• Companies must be more agile in testing and deploying new solutions and channels due to increasing competition from new market forces (e.g. Amazon).
• Businesses who do not embrace omni-channel digital transformation will lose customer loyalty, their share of wallet and overall market share, to those that do.
• The volume of calls will continue to grow even with the continued introduction of alternative channels of support.
• Amazon will disrupt the ACD market.
• IoT pervasiveness will increase call volume.
• Phone channel continues to be the dominant channel for “complex” client care issues.
• Many companies focusing on “demand management” initiatives to help clients self-serve, improve CSAT and reduce call volume.
• Mobile Messaging/SMS and MMS. More interesting and efficient use cases for text will emerge. Companies realizing that leveraging instant photos or videos sent can help reduce conversation time.
• Companies look for more true omnichannel platforms and adoption for these grow. Not just a single platform that can hook into all kinds of other technologies, but a single platform that can tie all of the conversations together, no matter what channel.
• Phone channel continues to be dominant for overall customer resolution.
• Companies will continue to add more channels and favor “cheaper” asynchronous (can respond at the same time) channels, like chat and text, in exchange for “more expensive ones”, like phone and email. Volumes of total communication will stay the same, but allow for brands to save money.
• Two way SMS continues to lag with some brands testing specific use cases.

Stay tuned next week for Part 3 – Operations.

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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.

Putting the customer first is nothing new, but service excellence is becoming more competitive than ever before. While reducing hold time for incoming calls was once a key differentiator for brands, today the growth of digital channels means every touchpoint between consumer and brand is a make or break opportunity.

A recent McKinsey Quarterly, The CEO guide to customer experience, focuses on the importance of molding customer interactions and providing high-level insight to improve customer interactions. But a good piece of advice needs specifics. So we’re taking an in-depth look at three tips for how a brand can start growing loyalty.

Simplify the move from touchpoints to a journey

According to McKinsey, customer loyalty isn’t created through individual touchpoints, but “the complete, end-to-end experience customers have with a company from their perspective.” We agree. It’s all about the customer journey!

Why? Well many times, touchpoints are the responsibility of a business silo. The focus is on providing the best experience on that channel, without communicating with the other channels.

If a consumer starts on social media and then jumps to a phone, they have to start the interaction from the beginning. After all, when a brand’s channels aren’t connected, the customer’s information doesn’t travel with them. So even when satisfaction with individual touchpoints is high, the overall satisfaction can be quite low. This is because the customer perceives a company as not centered on their interests or concerns.

Knowing key pieces of information about the customer helps transform disparate touchpoints into a connected journey. As outlined in our e-book, Navigating the Customer Journey, the following four questions are central to the transformation.

– How long have they been a customer?

– Through which channels has the customer navigated?

– What are the customers’ previous brand interactions?

– Is there additional contact information to piece a customer identity together?

The move from individual touchpoints to a customer journey is an important one. When responding to each question, including data and customer commentary will enhance your ability to navigate the customer journey seamlessly and effectively.

Help customers take the best steps on their journey

Thanks to new digital technologies, McKinsey notes that consumers expect personalization in every interaction with a brand. Research cited states that 25 percent of customers defect from a brand after a bad experience. In other words, every interaction on the journey needs to pinpoint and meet personal expectations, including seamless, consistent service across channels.

Companies can take the lead by automating the next appropriate step when a customer interacts on a traditional or nontraditional touchpoint. By making connections between touchpoints, the brand has the added benefit of customer information moving along with them.

For example, Jane places a blue shirt into her online shopping cart, but doesn’t complete the transaction. The following weekend Jane is in the physical store. When she enters, beacons trigger the brand’s app, which then proactively sends Jane an SMS letting her know the blue shirt is available in her size. At the same time, a store associate is notified with details into Jane’s journey – enabling the associate to provide appropriate assistance, and even cross-sell by suggesting complementary pants.

Because the customer’s information travels with them, the automated, next best step doesn’t leave a customer alone on their journey. The company is now an active partner is their success.

Apply metrics wisely

Without metrics, a customer journey might actually be a slog through the swamp. When implementing a system, McKinsey suggests centering on the most important customer-experience measurement for the company. Once they’ve been defined, quantify other relevant indicators with supplemental metrics.

With reams of data available from each customer interaction, identifying the top metrics and pieces together can be time consuming. But when it comes to customer retention, it’s time companies don’t have.

Surveys are a great way to get immediate feedback, especially within the contact center. For example, say a customer waits on hold for 30 minutes without speaking to a representative. When they are presented with a survey option about their experience, they note their frustration with a 3 out of 10.

Instead of sitting in a CRM system waiting for a yearly marketing or customer experience review, this information is relevant today. A customer service manager needs to know if there has been an influx of low ratings, which could indicate an immediate problem. Additionally, a chief experience officer would be interested to know how likely it is for customers that give low ratings to defect.

To remove the manual collection and analysis of information, it’s helpful to have reports that:

– Connect the journey: define customer experience flows to establish the relationship between interactions and outcomes.

– Measure the success or failure of individual interactions: associate data from structured and unstructured sources for the right level of insight.

– Leverage data from CRM systems and other enterprise tools: provide context to captured data from external sources.

To compete on excellence, companies must make continual improvements to the customer journey or risk falling behind. Companies now need to pair these insights with practical applications to show value today.

The post Three Steps for Customer Service Excellence appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Lauren Kindzierski, VP of Solutions & Capabilities | Global Growth Strategy & Marketing Team, at Hinduja Global Solutions. Learn more about HGS by visiting their website.

Your customers are texting. Do you know how many are already texting to your company toll free line? At our March 23 webinar, How to Launch Text Message Customer Service, we provided some key insights into how to provide this customer service channel to meet, and exceed, the raised bar on today’s CX expectations.

– For our poll regarding “What is the status of your brand launching text as a customer service channel,” we noted that 64% are thinking about launching text as a service channel.

– The second poll, “How are you currently using text for your customer service?” revealed that 79% of respondents are considering options. A total of 15% of attendees are using one-way notification and alerts, while 3% are using two-way text to interact with customers and resolve issues, and 3% are using both.

According to our webinar attendees, a good sampling of companies across verticals, today’s businesses are increasingly turning to text as a channel to reduce customer effort and meet the demand for optimized CX. Here are some of the questions brand leaders from across North America had regarding launching a text solution:

Q1: What should the average response time for text be?

A: When a customer is texting a business, they are definitely going to want a response within seconds, if not faster. When texting friends and family, the average response time for a text message is 90 seconds. Therefore 90 seconds is a really good starting point, because that’s what consumers have come to expect.

Q2: If a customer is in the CRM and is marked as “opted-out,” can a rep still text the customer? Is there anything that stops the rep from texting an opted-out customer?

A: In our system, if a customer has opted-out, the rep cannot text the customer. The customer would have to re opt-in through the legal disclosure process.

Q3: How do you recommend hours of service if customer care is generally offered Monday through Thursday 8 to 8, for example? What happens during off hours?

A: We have the ability to set after hours automated responses. For example, with one of our clients, if someone texts outside of regular business hours, they receive a response that says, “Thank you for contacting brand XYZ. Our business hours are x to x. We will get back to you first thing in the morning. In the meantime, please visit our self-help portal page or Frequently Asked Questions here.” You can then provide a link to the website.

Q4: How many texts can one CSR handle simultaneously?

A: Text is very similar to the chat channel. Typically, two to three texts is average, especially if it’s a new channel and a new agent learning things. As time passes, agents become more efficient. It’s important to recruit agents who are good multi-taskers and are text savvy. This is a good rule of thumb. And when beginning a pilot, take your existing call center volume and anticipate 20% of that being converted to text. The 20% rule is a good industry best practice. This will help you gauge how many people you need for the pilot, and with 20% it would be two to three conversations by concurrency.

Q5: If 20% of contacts are received via text, is that percentage a replacement for other contact channels or is it incremental volume?

A: Typically, 10% is a replacement for calling the 1-800 number and pivoting from IVR into text, while the other 10% is incremental.

Q6: You mentioned a 77% response rate with post transaction surveys. Did the scores increase or decrease based upon additional surveys being returned versus the traditional email replies with a 9% response rate?

A: Usually, you find a positive response rate with text surveys. With text, because everybody does it on a daily basis, and you have told customers that it’s only going to be two questions, they are more willing to respond. You will find that text surveys are more positive and have a higher response rate.

Q7: Does the affirmative consent requirement responding “Yes” lead to any attrition among text users?

A: You might get a couple of instances of attrition, but it’s typically not a problem.

Q8: What are standard response rates after hours, nights, and weekends? Do they vary?

A: If your contact center is open Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, it means that when agents come in on Monday morning, they may have to tackle a few that have come in over the weekend. This may be more volume than they can get to. Therefore, you might want to consider staffing heavier on Mondays, if you have those business hours in place.

If you have further questions about text message customer service and to hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Austin, September 18th-20th, 2016.

The post 8 Great Questions Answered on Providing Text Message Customer Service appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Today, our customers have everything they need to communicate in the palm of their hand. Mobile brings about a unique and powerful convergence of communication channels — voice, email, chat, social, SMS — in one very portable device. This has a profound impact on how our customers communicate with each other, with the world, and with brands. It creates new challenges for brands to adjust to the protocols, cadence and sheer scale for customer support.

We’ve learned, in the digital age, that it’s no longer enough to publish a toll free number and staff a call center during business hours to provide for the needs of our customers. There are many new communication channels we’ve had to embrace and new skills we’ve had to learn to provide for the needs of our customers, in a social, mobile, 24×7 global marketplace.

At Freshdesk, we look at customer engagement through the lens of what we call The Great Pyramid of Customer Support.

This framework, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, provides a structure to help organizations assess their support capabilities and determine what to prioritize. It can be particularly useful for determining how to address a new channel. Here we will apply it to mobile support and engagement:

Chaos to Control — When you enter a new channel it’s usually chaos. There is a learning curve on how to best communicate within a channel and how to engage.  The first order of business is usually controlling the chaos: tracking and managing tickets, and delivering a consistent and effective customer experience in the channel. The reality is though that mobile is not really a new channel. It’s a new environment, but it encompasses most of the channels you’re already using. So the key for starting to support mobile is to not treat it as a separate engagement environment. You can start out by continuing to use the channels you support today. Just be present and listen. More important than adding new channels and capabilities is to maintain a single system of record across mobile and any other channels you support, to ensure you have a single view of the customer.

Reactive to Proactive — The newest channels for support have changed the paradigm. For a long time customer support has been a one-to-one interaction. With social media, conversations have moved from one-to-one– email, phone, chat – to many-to-many. On social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook your customers are announcing their desires or problems to the world. Support is no longer about reacting – waiting for the phone to ring. Your customers are taking to social, whether you want to be there or not. Similarly, being proactive in mobile means being there, delivering a native experience. It’s not just about providing access to existing tools like your knowledge base or email. You need to consider the unique qualities of mobile platforms and the habits of mobile users, to make it easy for them to get what they need, at the time and place they need it. This is also where you can insert proactive messaging in your apps to avert issues you know are likely.

Scale — As you learn the rules and idiosyncrasies of a new channel the next challenge is scale. You need to be able to extend the level of support you have on your best channels to the new channels. And, of course, you want to do this without having to hire a large new team. Technology can help here. The caveat is to leverage technology to enhance the experience rather than put more layers between you and your customer. Knowledge bases will enable your customers to find answers themselves, if you make them easy to access. Channels like in-app messaging that feel native to mobile and allow agents to handle multiple tickets at once work well here. And automations can help those agents manage that workload.

Aligning With Business — Once you’ve gotten your tools and processes in place and your mobile support is humming, then you can begin to think more broadly about making an impact across your company. Is your support organization aligned with the goals of your customers and your business? Great customer service has the ability to do much more than solve customer problems. If done right, it can extend the value of the brand and create brand advocates. It can also be your best channel to provide feedback and insights to help guide your company’s plans. Be sure to collect data and setup a feedback loop in line with other support channels, and ensure the connections with other critical parts of your organization. This is also where you should be making sure that the systems and tools in place are working for your team and that they are engaged and happy.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post Mobile Customer Support and Engagement – Where to Start? appeared first on Execs In The Know.

This is a guest blog written by Dan Gordon, SVP Strategy & Development, West Interactive Services. Learn more about West on their website. To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Seattle, September 28-30th.

Picture this: You’re a frequent flyer, going from city to city every week, and spending hours in airports. You have your routine down to the letter and any substantial hitch has a domino effect on your schedule – not to mention work/life balance.

You roll with inevitable delays and gate changes better than most, but you have to be in-the-know. You don’t demand flawlessness, but you do expect communication at a rate that keeps up with the countless voice messages from your colleagues, emails from your boss, texts from your spouse, in-app bill-pay alerts, etc., that are hopefully punctuated by a few moments to catch your breath.

So, you opt-in to SMS/text alerts from your airline. When you land, your phone dings with a notification that your connecting flight is delayed due to plane maintenance. “Ok. Is there a gate change?” you naturally reply, knowing that it takes 20 minutes to trek from point A to point B.

The response: Radio silence or, perhaps worse, a plain old “Thank you for flying with us.” (Why? Because that alert was sent by a machine and there’s nobody manning it on the other end.)

There’s an estimated 30-minute hold-time when you click-to-call, so you ask a rep at a nearby kiosk who, unfortunately, hasn’t yet gotten the memo that there’s a delay in the first place, much less its implications. Meanwhile, dozens of other confused passengers are duplicating efforts – spending far more of the airline’s time and money – when a simple “There is no gate change at this time,” SMS response could have taken care of it.

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Pew Research tells us that 9 in 10 Americans own a mobile device and roughly 65% of them own a smartphone, proving that this scenario is a very real one – and this customer service challenge, a pleasantly solvable one.

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One-to-one agent-based support is expensive, which explains why many organizations adopt proactive communication strategies to preempt some of customers’ inbound service needs. SMS/text messaging engages customers on devices they’re already using and just so happens to provide a more bang-for-your-buck than other channels.

However, SMS isn’t so simple that you’re off the hook for two-way support; just as they would when having a text conversation with a friend, customers expect to be able to respond to SMS notifications and assume your brand will heed their replies. (It’s completely rational.) The big hitch is that not every reply is predictable and not every interaction can be automated. (They’re only human.)

Fortunately, solutions are out there. Agent-assisted SMS can do much of the heavy lifting for you – managing conversations, automating texts when possible, routing queries appropriately, and enabling agents to multi-task.
Customers fully benefit from the convenience of your SMS support offer, your contact center agents more confidently manage customer service, and costs stay impeccably low. That’s textbook “win, win, win.”

Advanced SMS solutions can interpret free-form, natural language texts and automate replies; others can route requests to an agent and provide as much freedom or selection of “canned” responses as is appropriate. Any agent on the receiving end of an escalated customer message can see the entire conversation (including an initial alert that may have prompted it) and duly engage with countless users at one time.

Unlike phone conversations, which demand undivided attention and plea for in-call resolution, SMS dialogues could take place over two minutes, 12 hours or even days, depending on the nature and urgency of the matter. Nonetheless, every interaction is recorded, every conversation is regulation-compliant, any transferred agent maintains visibility, no conversation requires exclusivity, and every customer feels nurtured.

Think back to that your same travel experience above. An offer to request SMS “HELP” with the initial notification of a flight delay could have saved multiple customer service representatives’ valuable time – not to mention your frustration. Multiply that times the hundred-some fellow passengers on your flight, times however many flights a day, in however many airports around the world, and you’re talking serious savings and skyrocketing customer satisfaction rates.

Now imagine the implications in your industry, on your contact center: Banking, insurance, utility, healthcare, pharmacy, telecom, retail, home services… You name it.

If that’s not a reason to feel great about hopping on a plane to Seattle, to join Execs In The Know at Customer Response Summit, I don’t know what is.

West will share more about how this concept works at the Idea Lab during Customer Response Summit Seattle, September 28-30, 2015. Join us!

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