Driving customer experience success with a managed contact centre service
More businesses are seeing the benefit of using digital channels to engage with their customers, and there is a growing interest in the use of AI-powered technologies in order to enhance the customer experience and improve efficiencies. However, what needs to be kept top of mind is that while it is easy to enable more channels of communication, a failure to align with backend processes can easily result in a poorer experience and further frustration for customers.
I recently had a poor experience when interacting with a brand through WhatsApp. While the advertised promise was one of a quick signup within the messaging app, this was not possible, and I had to first engage with a sales agent via the WhatsApp chat, and then, after this interaction failed mid transaction, revert to a voice call where I was placed at number 200-odd in the queue. A frustrating and time-consuming customer journey overall.
And, this got me thinking: a big part of what Telvia does is to enable omnichannel communications through the addition of digital channels. For example, a business might want to deliver customer communications via WhatsApp or another channel; enabling these channels is relatively simple provided that one has the right infrastructure in place.
However, we should always be mindful that it is not just technology that we are delivering, but an overall customer experience and journey that is far more crucial. If the channel you are enabling is not suited to the engagement that you are trying to conclude, and if the backend business processes are not being automated correctly and effectively, then the customer is forced to engage in a complex manual process with agents – resulting in an unintended but degraded experience.
Intercape saw a 200% year on year growth in the use of WhatsApp and web chat – while the use of phone calls declined – and employed call centre staff to specifically manage chat queries from customers. Learn more in the case study.
Preventing customer service bottlenecks
As mentioned above, Telviva is able to deliver the technology to enable the addition of more digital communication channels, but this is the easy part.
Empowering an omnichannel strategy requires a customer journey mapping exercise, which is carried out by the professionals within Telviva’s contact centre team. These experts specialise in interrogating a business’s process and customer touch points in order to deliver the journey mapping process to the client. They are also able to facilitate the required automation in the backend to better manage particular engagements and make the customer journey smoother.
This process of customer journey mapping is essential before starting on this type of implementation, and even before making any recommendations on what additional channels to consider. This is critical to ensure that we are not introducing bottlenecks in the ability to effectively service the customer further down the road.
Learn how to develop a customer journey map in 8 steps, in this blog with Martie de Beer.
There are other strategies that Telviva deploys in order to help businesses enhance their customer experience. For one, managers within the contact centre are given full visibility into all of the channels, and are always notified of stale engagements; if a customer is stuck somewhere along the journey, contact centre managers are made aware and they can then escalate the engagement accordingly.
The reasoning here is sound: In a real-time digital engagement like chat, or WhatApp, the customer can make an agent wait, but not the other way around. We measure response time from when the customer sends a message, to when the agents respond, and we want to make sure that customers are responded to within a predetermined period of time.
This extends to real time support for contact centre agents, where Telviva provides tools that assist agents during the course of the engagement. These tools allow the agent to follow a conversational roadmap from A to B to C, helping them to deliver support or sales services, as well as take advantage of upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
With an omnichannel service, agents will now be able to handle multiple channels within a single interface. And unlike that traditional phone call, digital engagements mean that an agent will have to handle multiple queries at the same time. This can become overwhelming, and this support becomes vital going forward.
Did you know that Telviva has a dedicated local support team, comprising senior support engineers, who are solely involved in servicing contact centre customers? Learn more in this blog with Kelvin Brown.
Quality assurance in real-time
A major part of channel management is quality assurance (QA), in order to test the experience across all their channels and to make sure that it is working as intended. Traditionally, this has been done using historical data, such as a sample set of calls from the previous week. However, by the time a business gets to carrying out QA, it might be too late and the customer is already lost due to a poor experience.
Innovations in this space mean that we now are able to run QA in real time, including transcribing, analysing and picking up on sentiment across all channels. In addition, speech-to-text analytics now works very well even with South African accents, thereby providing automated QA on voice channels.
Telviva uses tools with a high level of automation as it can maximise the sample set of the data that you are trying to evaluate. Automated QA can sample 100% of the data that is available, as opposed to humans who can only sample a small portion, providing a more accurate reflection of the effectiveness of the contact centre.
Digital when you want it, human when you need it
Then, brands need to give some thought to right channelling, which is the process whereby a business begins to analyse and understand the preferences of its customers, and then optimises its communications by selecting a particular (“right”) channel for various types of engagements. This can include initially interacting with a customer on the channel of their choice, before moving them onto a channel that is best-suited for what they are intending to do.
Transactional engagements are best suited to simple, digital channels, and can include actions such as subscribing to a new service, submitting a form, downloading a policy or invoice, or requesting a bus timetable. These types of transactional interactions are simple and can be easily automated. This in turn frees up human agents to deal with more complex matters, or to step in when a digital journey goes wrong. However, it is crucial that this intervention is initiated by the system, rather than waiting for the customer to escalate.
With a managed contact centre service, businesses are not just given some software and then left alone to figure it all out. Martie de Beer explains how Telviva guides customers on the digital journey in this blog.
The only way to remedy a bad customer experience is to get hold of the customer as soon as possible, and to fix it. This form of human-machine collaboration means that technology is there to carry out the mundane and ensure the agent doesn’t forget anything, while the agent is there to provide complex support should the customer have a problem or want to speak to a human. The ability exists within Telviva’s technology to always ensure that we can escalate from a digital channel to a human in any channel – this is the true power of omnichannel.
Ultimately, it is pointless for an organisation to implement a digital communications channel and then not use it correctly. That is why Telviva is not just a technology provider, but a provider of the full customer journey so that the business is equipped to use the technology to its fullest.
Whether you require a basic solution or a full-function omnichannel operation, our highly experienced professional service team will help you evaluate the best fit for your needs and your digital journey. Contact us today.
By Kelvin Brown, Customer Operations Executive at Telviva.