In today’s competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences is crucial to winning new clients and fostering long-lasting customer loyalty. Research has shown that poor customer service can cost businesses around USD 75 billion in a year and that 1 in 3 customers is likely to abandon a brand after a single negative experience. Organisations excelling at personalised customer interactions across channels have a significant market edge.
In a recent webinar with Shivram Chandrasekhar, Solutions Architect at Twilio, we delved into strategies for creating this edge. How can contact centres optimise interactions to boost cost efficiency and customer satisfaction? We discussed the pivotal role of voice in providing personalised customer experiences, the importance of balancing AI and human interaction for enhanced satisfaction, and the operational advantages of voice intelligence in streamlining operations and improving agent efficiency.
The Voice Advantage
Despite the rise of digital channels, voice interactions remain crucial for organisations seeking to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Voice calls offer nuanced insights and strategic advantages, allowing businesses to address issues effectively and proactively meet customer needs, fostering loyalty and driving growth.
There are multiple reasons why voice will remain relevant including:
- In many countries it is mandatory in several industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, & Government & Emergency Services.
- There are customers who simply favour it over other channels – the human touch is important to them.
- It proves to be the most effective when it comes to handling complex and recurrent issues, including facilitating effective negotiations and better sales closures; Digital and AI channels cannot do it alone yet.
- Analysing voice data reveals valuable patterns and customer sentiments, aiding in pinpointing areas for improvement. Unlike static metrics, voice data offers dynamic feedback, helping in proactive strategies and personalised opportunities.
AI vs the Human Agent
There has been a growing trend towards ‘agentless contact centres’, where businesses aim to pivot away from human agents – but there has also been increasing customer dissatisfaction with purely automated interactions. A balanced approach that empowers human agents with AI-driven insights and conversational AI can yield better results. In fact, the conversation should not be about one or the other, but rather about a combination of an AI + Human Agent.
Where organisations rely on conversational AI, there must be a seamless transitioning between automated and live agent interactions, maintaining a cohesive customer experience. Ultimately, the goal should be to avoid disruptions to customer journeys and ensure a smooth, integrated approach to customer engagement across different channels.
Exploring AI Opportunities in Voice Interactions
Contact centres in Asia Pacific are looking to deploy AI capabilities to enhance both employee and customer experiences.
Using predictive AI algorithms on customer data helps organisations forecast market trends and optimise resource allocation. Additionally, AI-driven identity validation swiftly confirms customer identities, mitigating fraud risks. By automating transactional tasks, particularly FAQs, contact centre operations are streamlined, ensuring that critical calls receive prompt attention. AI-powered quality assurance processes provide insights into all voice calls, facilitating continuous improvement, while AI-driven IVR systems enhance the customer experience by simplifying menu navigation.
Agent Assist solutions, integrated with GenAI, offer real-time insights before customer interactions, streamlining service delivery and saving valuable time. These solutions automate mundane tasks like call summaries, enabling agents to focus on high-value activities such as sales collaboration, proactive feedback management, and personalised outbound calls.
Actionable Data
Organisations possess a wealth of customer data from various touchpoints, including voice interactions. Accessing real-time, accurate data is essential for effective customer and agent engagement. Advanced analytics techniques can uncover hidden patterns and correlations, informing product development, marketing strategies, and operational improvements. However, organisations often face challenges with data silos and lack of interconnected data, hindering omnichannel experiences.
Integrating customer data with other organisational sources provides a holistic view of the customer journey, enabling personalised experiences and proactive problem-solving. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) breaks down data silos, providing insights to personalise interactions, address real-time issues, identify compliance gaps, and exceed customer expectations throughout their journeys.
Considerations for AI Transformation in Contact Centres
- Prioritise the availability of live agents and voice channels within Conversational AI deployments to prevent potential issues and ensure immediate human assistance when needed.
- Listen extensively to call recordings to ensure AI solutions sound authentic and emulate human conversations to enhance user adoption.
- Start with data you can trust – the quality of data fed into AI systems significantly impacts their effectiveness.
- Test continually during the solution testing phase for seamless orchestration across all communication channels and to ensure the right guardrails to manage risks effectively.
- Above all, re-think every aspect of your CX strategy – the engagement channels, agent roles, and contact centres – through an AI lens.
The Philippines, renowned as a global contact centre hub, is experiencing heightened pressure on the global stage, leading to intensified competition within the country. Smaller BPOs are driving larger players to innovate, requiring a stronger focus on empowering customer experience (CX) teams, and enhancing employee experience (EX) in organisations in the Philippines.
As the Philippines expands its global footprint, organisations must embrace progressive approaches to outpace rivals in the CX sector.
These priorities can be achieved through a robust data strategy that empowers CX teams and contact centres to glean actionable insights.
Here are 5 ways organisations in the Philippines can achieve their CX objectives.
Download ‘Securing the CX Edge: 5 Strategies for Organisations in the Philippines’ as a PDF.
#1 Modernise Voice and Omnichannel Orchestration
Ensuring that all channels are connected and integrated at the core is critical in delivering omnichannel experiences. Organisations must ensure that the conversation can be continued seamlessly irrespective of the channel the customer chooses, without losing the context.
Voice must be integrated within the omnichannel strategy. Even with the rise of digital and self-service, voice remains crucial, especially for understanding complex inquiries and providing an alternative when customers face persistent challenges on other channels.
Transition from a siloed view of channels to a unified and integrated approach.
#2 Empower CX Teams with Actionable Customer Data
An Intelligent Data Hub aggregates, integrates, and organises customer data across multiple data sources and channels and eliminates the siloed approach to collecting and analysing customer data.
Drive accurate and proactive conversations with your customers through a unified customer data platform.
- Unifies user history across channels into a single customer view.
- Enables the delivery of an omnichannel experience.
- Identifies behavioural trends by understanding patterns to personalise interactions.
- Spots real-time customer issues across channels.
- Uncovers compliance gaps and missed sales opportunities from unstructured data.
- Looks at customer journeys to proactively address their needs.
#3 Transform CX & EX with AI/Automation
AI and automation should be the cornerstone of an organisation’s CX efforts to positively impact both customers and employees.
Evaluate all aspects of AI/automation to enhance both customer and employee experience.
- Predictive AI algorithms analyse customer data to forecast trends and optimise resource allocation.
- AI-driven identity validation reduces fraud risk.
- Agent Assist Solutions offer real-time insights to agents, enhancing service delivery and efficiency.
- GenAI integration automates post-call activities, allowing agents to focus on high-value tasks.
#4 Augment Existing Systems for Success
Many organisations face challenges in fully modernising legacy systems and reducing reliance on multiple tech providers.
CX transformation while managing multiple disparate systems will require a platform that integrates desired capabilities for holistic CX and EX experiences.
A unified platform streamlines application management, ensuring cohesion, unified KPIs, enhanced security, simplified maintenance, and single sign-on for agents. This approach offers consistent experiences across channels and early issue detection, eliminating the need to navigate multiple applications or projects.
Capabilities that a platform should have:
- Programmable APIs to deliver messages across preferred social and messaging channels.
- Modernisation of outdated IVRs with self-service automation.
- Transformation of static mobile apps into engaging experience tools.
- Fraud prevention across channels through immediate phone number verification APIs.
#5 Focus on Proactive CX
In the new CX economy, organisations must meet customers on their terms, proactively engaging them before they initiate interactions. This requires a re-evaluation of all aspects of CX delivery.
- Redefine the Contact Centre. Transforming it into an “Intelligent” Data Hub providing unified and connected experiences; leveraging intelligent APIs to proactively manage customer interactions seamlessly across journeys.
- Reimagine the Agent’s Role. Empowering agents to be AI-powered brand ambassadors, with access to prior and real-time interactions, instant decision-making abilities, and data-led knowledge bases.
- Redesign the Channel and Brand Experience. Ensuring consistent omnichannel experiences through unified and coherent data; using programmable APIs to personalise conversations and discern customer preferences for real-time or asynchronous messaging; integrating innovative technologies like video to enrich the channel experience.
COVID-19 has been a major disruption for people-intensive industries and the BPO sector is no exception. However, some of the forward-looking BPO organisations are using this disruption as an opportunity to re-evaluate how they do business and how they can make themselves resilient and future-proof. In many of these conversations, technology and process reengineering are emerging as the two common themes in their journey to transform into a New Age BPO provider.
In 2022 BPO providers will focus on mitigating their key challenges around handling client expectations, better people management and investing in the right technologies for their own transformation journeys.
Read on to find out what Ecosystm Advisors Audrey William and Venu Reddy think will be the key trends for the New Age BPO in 2022.
Click here to download Ecosystm Predicts: The Top 5 Trends for the New Age BPO in 2022 as PDF
Consistent customer and brand experiences should be at the heart of every digital strategy. In the first part of this feature, we explored the barriers to creating memorable customer experience (CX). Here we look at what organisations who have mastered the art of great CX have in common.
Best Practices
Through Ecosystm research and interviews with organisations we have found that businesses that are already creating a consistent, effective, and memorable digital customer experience have these traits in common:
Had CEO and Board-level support for their strategy. Your ability to create a memorable and consistent digital experience lives and dies by the support of your senior management team. Without the CEO telling the rest of the business that this is a priority, the employees simply won’t come along for the ride.
Gained Employee support for the strategy. There is no point in creating a digital customer strategy at the Board and senior management level if it is not consistent with the lived experience of employees. An Australian bank made the mistake of making all their digital experience decisions at the most senior levels without taking the employees on the journey too. Change needs buy-in from all levels of the business – so make sure all levels are heard and that they understand why and how you will change the way they work and deliver customer value.
Made the delivery of a brand-consistent experience into a key KPI. In these businesses, a consistent CX is a given. That doesn’t mean they are not personalising their customer experiences or optimising them for specific touchpoints – it means that collaboration with other teams and channels is a base expectation. Changes are not made without the knowledge of other teams.
Prioritised governance over management. The risk of collaboration and including many people in decisions is that it slows decisions down and impacts business agility. To enable their collaborative approach to digital experience delivery, these businesses have set rules and guardrails into their decision-making processes to ensure they continue to deliver on-brand and consistent experiences. Many also have created cross-channel teams or sewn their digital skills across the different channel teams to ensure consistency of customer experience.
Consolidated on fewer platforms and CX ecosystems. Five years ago, businesses needed to source smaller, more innovative CX software and cloud components just to keep up with customer expectations. The trendsetters had built their own CX capabilities and weren’t relying on the traditional ISVs for their CX innovation. Smaller providers were emerging to fill these gaps for businesses who were not digitally native. Sourcing best-practice solutions is much easier today. Some of those smaller vendors have emerged to create their own platforms and CX ecosystems, and other suppliers have acquired and innovated their own software to meet and exceed customer requirements. For example, you no longer need multiple content management systems or platforms – a single content source can now meet the different needs of your different channel teams and feed consistent content to all customers tailored to their journey stage or chosen touchpoint.
Used data for their customers – not against them. Many personalisation or automation attempts have failed. Not because they used the wrong data, but because they were driving the wrong outcome. They were designed to corner a customer into a decision, versus helping them make the best decision for their circumstance. We all know what that looks like – if an interaction feels “creepy” like they are following you around the web and across touchpoints, or they seem to know too much about you. This is when a business is using data against you to try to force an action. Smart businesses use data to help customers achieve their goals – in the knowledge that happy customers will not only return to the business or brand, but also tell their friends and family about the experience.
Creating a consistent and on-brand digital experience will drive many positive outcomes for your customers and your business. Your customers will know what to expect and be comfortable in their interactions with your brand in whatever channel or touchpoint they desire – with the knowledge that the experience will be consistent and integrated and their time will not be wasted. They’ll return to your business over and over again. The consistent experience will also drive down your costs – with less rework, fewer platforms to support, more automation and hopefully a simpler technology architecture. Done right, it will also create a single unifying digital initiative across the business that will help to break down barriers, improve collaboration, and unlock innovation in and between your business teams.
