Delivery of truly outstanding customer experience requires 5 distinct sets of functionality: dynamic, personalized dialog; adaptive workflow; unified customer context; consistent experience; and, deeper insight. Each of these elements focuses on a different aspect of the interaction between you and your customer and brings a different value set. Focusing on any one of these elements will improve the customer experience, but it is the combination of these elements that will differentiate you from your competition. According to a recent Aberdeen Group report on improving multi-channel service, the top 4 goals for the next year are to:
- Increase customer satisfaction (56% of respondents)
- Increase revenue (46% of respondents)
- Increase efficiency and improve processes, and ( 36% of respondents)
- Increase loyalty and advocacy. (28% of respondents)
Those all are tied to delivery of outstanding customer service. The top strategic initiative being worked on is empowering agents with better information. Getting the right information to the right person at the right moment is critical to providing outstanding service. That information needs to allow the interaction to be personalized. The agent needs to know who the customer is, what products and services they have purchased, what troubles they have reported, what their payment status is, how they like to communicate, and a myriad of other information. That information should be used to help guide a dynamic, adaptive dialog within a process-based workflow. All of this needs to happen within a unified agent desktop that provides instant access to information the agent needs to address concerns the customer raises during their interaction. This same rich dialog should be able to take place across every channel the customer chooses to use, including voice, web self service, and website-based chat.
You need to be able to optimize the processes guiding the interactions. To do this, you need to collect every piece of information available about the interaction as it happens, every page turn, button click and piece of data entered. This information becomes the foundation to allow you to analyze not just the success of that individual interaction, but thousands of interactions to see how the process can be improved using techniques like dynamic real time comparison of different processes. The key is to have a platform that lets you collect the information you need to optimize the processes.
An important side benefit of delivering outstanding service is that when you do, you can actually reduce your operational costs. Contact us to discuss how you can both improve your customer service and reduce your ongoing operational costs. We will discuss each of the five functional sets of capabilities in individual blog articles over the next several months.
