Leaders Roundtable: Don’t Gamble Away Your Customer Trust: Reliable GenAI Needs Better Knowledge Management
We’ve concluded another successful event! Thanks to everyone for their Valuable contributions.
->Click here to explore hightlights and key takeaways from this Roundtable session.
GenAI is storming the world, with promises to improve the productivity of your teams and drive better customer experiences.
In my last Ecosystm Insights, I spoke about why organisations need to think about the Voice of the Customer (VoC) quite literally. Organisations need to listen to what their customers are telling them – not just to the survey questions they responded to, answering pre-defined questions that the organisations want to hear about.
The concept of customer feedback is evolving, and how organisations design and manage VoC programs must also change. Technology is now capable of enabling customer teams to tap into all those unsolicited, and often unstructured, raw feedback sources. Think contact centre conversations (calls, chats, chatbots, emails, complaints, call notes), CRM notes, online reviews, social media, etc. Those are all sources of raw customer feedback, waiting to be converted into customer insights.
Organisations can now find the capability of extracting customer insight from raw data across a wide range of solutions, from VoC platforms, data management platforms, contact centre solutions, text analytics players, etc. The expanding tech ecosystem presents opportunities for organisations to enhance their programs. However, navigating this breadth of options can also be confusing as they strive to identify the most suitable tools for their requirements.
As CX programs mature and shift from survey feedback to truly listening to customers, the demand for tech solutions tailored to various needs increases.
Where are tech vendors headed?
As part of my job as CX Consultant & Tech Advisor, I spend a lot of time working with my clients. But I also spend a lot of time speaking with technology vendors, who provide the solutions my clients need. Over the last few weeks and months there’s been a flurry of activity across the CX technology market with lots of product announcements around one specific topic. You guessed it, GenAI.
So, I invested some time in finding out how tech vendors are evolving their offerings. From Medallia, InMoment, Thematic, LiquidVoice, Concentrix, Snowflake, Nice, to Tethr – a broad variety of different vendors, but all with one thing in common; they help analyse customer feedback data.
And I like what I hear. The conversation has not been about GenAI because of GenAI, but about use cases and real-life applications for CX practitioners, including Insights & Research team, Contact Centre, CX, VoC, Digital teams, and so on. The list is long when we include everyone who has a role to play in creating, maintaining, and improving customer experiences.
It’s no wonder that many different vendors have started to embed those capabilities into their solutions and launch new products or features. The tech landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented at this stage.
What are an organisation’s tech options?
- The traditional VoC platform providers typically offer some text analytics capabilities (although not always included in the base price) and have started to tap into the contact centre solutions as well. Some also offer some social media or online review analysis, leaving organisations with a relatively good understanding of customer sentiment and a better understanding of their CX.
- Contact centre solutions are traditionally focused on analysing calls for Quality Assurance (QA) purposes and use surveys for agent coaching. Many contact centre players have evolved their portfolios to include text analytics or conversational intelligence to extract broader customer insights. Although at this stage they’re not always shared with the rest of the organisation (one step at a time…).
- Conversational analytics/intelligence providers have emerged over the last few years and are a powerhouse for contact centre and chatbot conversations. The contact centre really is the treasure trove of customer insights, although vastly underutilised for it so far!
- CRMs are the backbone of the customer experience management toolkit as they hold a vast amount of metadata. They’ve also been able to send surveys for a while now. Analysing unstructured data however (whether survey verbatim or otherwise) isn’t one of their strengths. This leaves organisations with a lot of data but not necessarily insights.
- Social media listening tools are often standalone tools used by the social media teams. There are not many instances of them being used for the analysis of other unstructured feedback.
- Digital/website feedback tools, in line with some of the above, are centred around collecting feedback, not necessarily analysing the unstructured feedback.
- Pure text analytics players are traditionally focused on analysing surveys verbatim. As this is their core offering, they tend to be proficient in it and have started to broaden their portfolios to include other unstructured feedback sources.
- Customer Data Platforms (CDP)/ Data Management Platforms (DMP) are more focused on quantitative data about customers and their experiences. Although many speak about their ability to analyse unstructured feedback as well, it doesn’t appear to be their strengths.
Conclusion
But what does that leave organisations with? Apart from very confused tech users trying to find the right solution for their organisation.
At this stage, there is immense market fragmentation, with many vendors from different core capabilities starting to incorporate capabilities to analyse unstructured data in the wake of the GenAI boom. However, a market convergence is expected.
While we watch how the market unfolds, one thing is certain. Organisations and customer teams will need to adjust – and that includes the tech stack as well as the CX program set up. With customer feedback now coming from anywhere within or outside the organisation, there is a need for a consolidated source of truth to make sense of it all and move from raw data to customer insights. While organisations will benefit immensely from a consolidated customer data repository, it’s also crucial to break down organisational silos at the same time and democratise insights as widely as possible to enable informed decision-making.
As a second wave of the pandemic becomes more of a reality in many countries, organisations have rushed to working from home, and are now evaluating what to do about their workforce. But in the long-term – with uncertainty over when staff can return to the office, and how long that might last – the new reality is that contact centre leaders and their staff require the flexibility to #WorkFromAnywhere without compromising productivity or security. Meanwhile, the need to deliver consistently excellent customer experience in order for organisations to stay competitive remains.
The industry has also seen disruption caused by the offshore activities serving contact centres in the ANZ region. This exacerbated the number of inbound enquiries that could not be attended to – and many contact centres are still battling this issue. This disruption has created a rise in onshore activity, driving the employment of freelance or part-time agents.
With agents working from anywhere, many factors must be considered to drive agent engagement and customer experience.
In the current economic climate, most contact centres are facing much higher call volumes. At the same time inhouse agents have been forced to work from home, and overseas contact centre providers may not be able to provide their services due to local lockdown rules.
As a result, contact centres have been finding it hard to cope with the huge inflow of customer enquiries, and calls are taking longer than expected to be answered. The long wait times have led to contact centres offering a variety of different solutions to reduce the inbound load to their contact centres.
Ecosystm’s research finds that prior to COVID-19 nearly half of organisations in Australia allowed 10-20% of the agents to work remotely. That number has now grown exponentially in the past few weeks and most contact centres in Australia have moved their agents to the home.
With most contact centre agents working from home due to COVID-19, contact centres have a lot to do to make sure that operations are running smoothly. Against this backdrop, Ecosystm and NICE would like to invite you to a Virtual Roundtable on the 11th of June.
This Live Virtual Roundtable will be hosted by Ecosystm Principal Advisor Audrey William, and include Rod Lester (Managing Director, NICE ANZ) and Cameron Adams (Solution Consulting Director, NICE ANZ) who will share real world experiences based on customer interactions over the last few weeks & months.
I was a guest last week at the NICE Interactions Summit in Sydney and it was great to hear from executives from NICE talk about the journey the company is taking their customers on. Australia and New Zealand are witnessing good adoption of cloud contact centres and many organisations (as covered in some of previous blogs) are at the inflection point of investing in a cloud contact centre, machine learning, customer journey mapping and predictive analytics technologies to drive greater customer experience (CX). Across Asia Pacific and in the ASEAN region, more organisations are at the verge of embarking on transformational CX projects to help them raise the bar on CX in a highly competitive environment. We can expect the adoption of cloud contact centres to grow rapidly in the next few years across the Asia Pacific region as companies move from expensive and traditional legacy environments to agile platforms.
Investing in Analytics and Cloud
Darren Rushworth, NICE’s Managing Director APAC, talked about how NICE has moved from being an infrastructure player to become an analytics company and talked about the acquisitions that are helping them alleviate their game in CX. Key acquisitions since 2016 have been instrumental to shaping their offerings and these include Nexidia, an Interaction Analytics software company and InContact, a cloud contact centre vendor. In 2019 NICE acquired Brand Embassy, whose technology brings to CXone a full range of integrated channels, enabling any digital channel to be integrated into customer service operations. In a Mobile First economy where customers want the applications of their choice, allowing customers to use the social media or messaging application of their choice in their contact centre interactions, will be critical. The Brand Embassy platform supports more than 30 channels and these include Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, SMS, email, and live chat. This is an important acquisition and not many contact centres have addressed the issue of allowing multiple forms of messaging to be used when customers want to communicate an issue or get answer to a query. Customers are gravitating towards social media platforms and messaging apps for daily communication and being able to integrate those channels to the contact centre is important.
The Move to the Cloud with NICEinContact
It was interesting to hear Tracy Duthie, Head of Service Development at 2degrees Mobile talk about why they deployed a NICEinContact solution. She talked about 2degrees having too many legacy systems that were not all integrated. The problems with not having the systems integrated drove the team to think hard about embarking on a journey with NICE. The objective was to grow their market share and to drive greater contact centre efficiency. She mentioned that 2degrees were keen on a SaaS option and it was not just about replacing the legacy solution. The move to the cloud as many organisations are starting to tell me, is to drive transformation and further innovation including deploying agile methodologies to deliver great CX. Also because this was a cloud deployment, they invested heavily in the network. This is an important aspect for an organisation when embarking on a cloud journey especially for mission critical applications such as voice, video and collaboration applications where latency and jitter can spoil the experience. Many times, I have heard customers blame the vendor for the technology. For cloud voice, video and other contact centre applications to work well in real time, the investment in the network must not be compromised especially when working on a tight budget. When this aspect is ignored, the problems discussed early are bound to arise. She also highlighted how important it was to eventually get the agents on board the new deployment and they adopted an open culture of allowing the agents to provide feedback and an open dialogue was initiated. As this was a big change from when they were running the contact centre in a traditional environment, the change management aspect was critical for the agents.
Compliance is something that has to be adhered to seriously
Efrat Kanner-Nissimov from NICE presented on driving a proactive compliance culture. This is a highly talked about area in the contact centre, given the increase in legislation around privacy and all countries having strict legislation around customer data and data privacy. Contact centres store sensitive customer information and knowing when to dispose off that data or for how long the data can be kept is an aspect that cannot be ignored. With what the banks have been through in Australia in recent times with the Royal Commission, serious questions around compliance and how compliant the agents are cannot be ignored. Ecosystm research finds that several organisations fail to identify what could be sensitive information. The journey towards a compliant environment starts with data classification, long before security roadmaps and solution implementations.
There is a greater emphasis on compliance and whilst many contact centres will claim that they have the processes in place, some of these have not been looked at for years. Compliance impacts the IT Manager, the agents, the Supervisor and ultimately the business. An automated compliance solution will help detect violations, prevent errors and allow for better visibility across different systems. She presented how Macy’s claims to have reduced their infrastructure and storage costs by 40%, through automating and deleting interactions that were no longer required. This helped lower IT costs and reduced time on audits. With the emphasis today on data privacy, data storage, data deletion and being compliant when you talk to your customers, the CX agents have a critical role to play in ensuring compliance.
Ecosystm comment:
Organisations across the Asia Pacific region are re-inventing how they look at CX as mentioned in my previous blogs. Banks, airlines, retailers, telcos and organisations from other verticals are investing in projects to drive transformation in CX. Applying deep analytics along every step of a customer’s journey will help the contact centre and the wider organisation better serve customers. The traditional methods of just looking at inbound and outbound interactions and setting KPIs for that, are no longer enough to drive this new vision. Machine learning, customer journey mapping and analytics, as well as shifting to the cloud is needed to drive transformation and agile ways of running CX. The Brand Embassy acquisition is an important one for NICE given one of the challenges not addressed by contact centres is integrating the various social and messaging applications and making them available to customers as a way to interact with the brand. This is an area contact centres have been looking to resolve.
In a highly competitive CX market where CRM, analytics, cloud and machine learning technologies are important aspects of a CX journey, NICE is investing in these areas to further strengthen their cloud contact centre value proposition. Compliance as highlighted earlier cannot be ignored and it is an area contact centres will be looking to invest in due to the multiple strict regulations underway across the Asia Pacific region surrounding how customers data is treated.