By Simon Black
Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, once advised, “Forget about your competitors, just focus on your customers.” As statistics highlight, dissatisfied customers not only cost you time and money, but if you lose a customer, it’s going to cost even more to replace them. In fact, it can cost five times as much to get a new customer versus keeping existing ones. In a world of oversharing, your customers are likely to complain about your business, products, or service across their social channels within minutes. That’s why your customers’ first interaction with your business needs to be purposeful from the outset.
First Contact
Quite often that first conversation occurs with your contact center, the heart of your company’s customer service function. It’s usually the first point of contact, so it’s important to ensure that your first call resolution (FCR) processes are fine-tuned and effective. Making sure communication between your agents and customers is as simple and as mutually understandable as possible is critical.
From a customer point of view, their interaction with your business often means minimum effort on their part and maximum reward for them. Gartner recently highlighted that 94 percent of customers with low-effort interactions intend to repurchase, compared with 4 percent of those experiencing high effort.
These numbers aren’t really a surprise. We all know from our personal encounters that it only takes one good or bad incident to make or break a relationship. As Amazon CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, puts it, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell six thousand.” The good news, though, according to PWC, is that when it comes to making a purchase, 42 percent of all consumers would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience, which is why first call resolution is so important.
FCR, sometimes referred to as “one-touch resolution,” isn’t about the average number of support tickets your agent resolves on the first interaction with a customer. It may be a popular benchmark to measure metrics such as response rates and resolution time so that you can run your call center team efficiently, but there’s more to FCR if you really value the customer experience (CX) and their journey.
Enter Artificial Intelligence
As statistics highlight, dissatisfied customers not only cost you time and money, but if you lose a customer, it’s going to cost even more to replace them. Fortunately, the technology is now in place to support and improve these FCR interactions. By incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into your contact center, you can better support your agents and provide them with the right tools for resolution and a more seamless customer journey.
A recent survey by PointSource highlighted that 49 percent of customers are willing to shop more often when AI is present, and 34 percent of customers will spend more money. The research also found that 38 percent will share their experiences with friends and family. This means that AI causes people to shop more, spend more, and share more. So, with today’s technology, there is every reason and every opportunity to get the customer experience right.
According to IDC, 13.9 billion dollars was invested into CX-focused AI and 42.7 billion dollars in CX-focused big data and analytics during 2019, with both expected to grow to 90 billion dollars in 2022. That’s a convincing argument.
Now might be the time to look at how AI can support and enhance the experiences of your customers. This can become the game changer needed in your contact center customer relations. You only need to look at consumer adoption of conversation digital assistants like Alexa to realize the widespread acceptance of natural language query or conversational analytics (CA).
Conversational Analytics
Natural language processing (NLP) enables people to ask questions about data and receive an explanation thanks to the amazing analytics built into the platform. Conversational analytics takes this further by allowing people to ask questions verbally.
We recognize that the use of NLP and CA can enhance our experiences as a consumer, so how can it help our businesses? In 2018, Tech Pro Research reported that 70 percent of survey respondents said their companies either have a digital transformation strategy in place or were working on one. Fast-forward two years, and digital transformation projects have been fast-tracked, thanks to the accelerant we now know as COVID-19.
Almost overnight, organizations have had to transform their operations, mobilize their workforces, and meet customer expectations within new parameters. Digital transformation has put data at the center of every business. What you need to do now is use it to your advantage.
NLP and CA are so transformative that Gartner listed them in their own Top 10 Technology Trends in Data and Analytics report. The analyst house predicts that by 2021, NLP and CA will boost analytics and business intelligence adoption from 35 percent of employees to over 50 percent, including new classes of users, particularly front-office workers. And it’s your customer-facing employees—as well as your customers themselves—who stand to most benefit from CA.
Customer Service Outcomes
Think about omni-channel for a moment. It shouldn’t matter whether your customers reach you by telephone, email, or social media. They should have the same frictionless experience. CA enables your contact center agents to answer customer queries in a knowledgeable way—quickly supplying answers, resolving problems, or escalating issues so the customer gets a personalized, easy experience.
In fact, there are a lot of benefits for both your customers and your agents with CA.
Customers will enjoy:
- Customer service whenever and wherever they need it
- The ability to ask all kinds of questions and not be transferred across multiple departments
- Real-time solutions to problems resolved with insight and real-time voice-to-voice translation, which means that customers can have their query resolved in their own language, not that of your business
Call center agents will enjoy:
- The ability to provide outstanding customer service, rather than focusing on the process to make communication with customers more personalized to better meet their needs
- The intuitive way CA works, which agents require less training or can move on to different campaigns without spending hours reading reams of training manuals
- The capability to handle calls and resolve them faster than before, which means your cost per call is kept in control
With Conversational Analytics (CA), the capability to focus on the conversation, rather than the process, means that both agents and customers have a better experience. As a result, your staff retention will improve dramatically, as well as your customer retention.
Simon Black is the CEO of Awaken. He’s an established senior executive with over twenty years of experience in the software industry with a record of driving rapid sales growth and scaling businesses. Simon is passionate about delivering value and excellent service to customers and developing a strong team culture for success.