By Donna Fluss

All companies should strive to deliver an outstanding customer experience (CX), as it’s a primary driver of customer satisfaction, retention, and relationship-building. The question is how to achieve this objective, which remains an elusive goal for most companies. And even if a company has a moment in time when they deliver a great service experience, ever-changing customer expectations require them to update their strategy again and again.

Companies need tools and processes to capture and measure the quality of the service experience they deliver to their customers continuously so they can see how they are doing on an ongoing basis. This is where analytics-enabled quality management (AQM) comes in. This solution gives contact centers an automated, timely, and cost-effective tool for monitoring and evaluating 100 percent of voice and digital interactions.

Since an AQM system uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to conduct evaluations, its findings are more objective and useful than quality evaluations performed manually by a QM specialist or supervisor using a traditional approach.

AQM is an application (and process) that leverages interaction analytics technology along with business rules and automation to identify, classify, and score voice- and text-based conversations between agents and customers based on defined quality criteria. An AQM solution can be a module of an interaction analytics (IA) suite or a stand-alone best-of-breed application. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Analytics-Enabled Quality Management

Source: DMG Consulting LLC, July 2023

Proven Benefits of AQM

AQM solutions can elevate the performance of contact center agents and the brand, as they use machine learning and other AI technologies to self-improve. Analytics-enabled QM provides a comprehensive, fair, and effective method of assessing many aspects of agent and contact center performance. Although humans are still required to address certain elements of conversations, AQM can monitor 100 percent of customer interactions on a timely basis, providing valuable insights that cannot be captured when a contact center uses traditional QM and is able to evaluate only a few interactions per agent, per month.

Automated solutions are likely to reduce the number of QM and coaching specialists required, but they are not intended to eliminate the QM function or team entirely. However, because they evaluate a much larger sample of customer interactions, AQM solutions provide more insights into agent performance, engagement, and the CX. Analytics-enabled QM solutions improve many aspects of a contact center, including the agent coaching process, which is essential for agent engagement and retention and also delivering a great CX.

Personalized Coaching

A feature-rich AQM solution comes with a coaching module that generates personalized coaching and eLearning content for agents. Equally important, it has the ability to monitor and assess the effectiveness of the training content and trainers. These sessions can be triggered automatically by low QM scores, negative customer feedback results, or even negative sentiment ratings, and can be delivered to agents immediately following a transaction.

Additionally, the AQM application should be set up to monitor how each agent performs after they’ve received guidance or coaching and provide agents with ongoing support while also recognizing when they perform well. Giving agents a consistent flow of positive and negative feedback is a best practice that generally improves the customer experience and agent retention, which reduces hiring, onboarding, and training expenses.

Final Thoughts

It should be clear, given the increasing volume of complaints, that most companies need to enhance their CX. Enterprises need an actionable flow of insights into their customers’ needs and wants to understand what is required for them to deliver a great CX. This is where AQM fits in, as these applications are designed to provide feedback and coaching to the people who represent the brand and interact directly with customers.

AQM applications improve the performance of contact center agents, but their benefits are broader because they find issues on a timely basis, enabling a company to take rapid corrective actions. This improves the CX, EX, and the bottom line, all while enhancing the brand.

Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting LLC, provides a unique and unparalleled understanding of the people, processes and technology that drive the strategic direction of the dynamic and rapidly transforming contact center and back-office markets. Donna can be reached at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com.

Admit Your Service Faults Instead of Blaming the Pandemic

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Different countries around the world and various areas within have had differing responses to the covid pandemic. For some it is but a memory—albeit a painful one. Others, however, are only now beginning to emerge from its grip, with its influence lingering on. Regardless, it’s impacted our call centers and how we do business. Many are quick to blame it for their staffing shortfalls and service failures. I call this the covid excuse.

Citing the covid excuse for low staffing levels, reduced hours of support, and delayed response times may be truthful, but it’s wearing thin. Some businesses have successfully responded to the pandemic and rebounded appropriately, returning to their prior levels of service, or even surpassing them.

Yet others continue to struggle. They blame covid for their ongoing issues. And, for the most part, using the covid excuse to justify their shortcomings reached a receptive audience. But don’t expect the public’s acceptance of covid as the explanation for continued ongoing service problems to last much longer.

Initially, virtually every company was quick to use the covid excuse as justification for everything that went wrong. But as we inched forward, many companies have moved away from blaming the pandemic. And wisely so.

The purpose of call centers is to serve customers and react to prospects. If there’s a service shortfall, regardless of the reason, that’s a bad reflection on the call center and poor customer service. It must be corrected, covid or not.

Provide Excellence

Many call centers initially struggled as they attempted to deal with lockdown restrictions, work-at-home mandates, and employee concerns. Yet they adjusted and adapted. They persisted in holding high their ideals of providing excellent customer service.

And despite having glitches along the way, they soon stopped using the covid excuse and simply assumed responsibility for their service shortfalls. Not having enough agents working or seeing key performance indicator slip didn’t matter if it was pandemic related or not. Instead, it was something to fix, and they fixed it.

They focused on providing service excellence, pandemic or not.

Use the Covid Excuse

Other operations, however, took the opposite approach. They used the covid excuse whenever they could, and they continue to do so—even when it’s not true. This occurs for understaffing, offering poor customer service, and failing to meet caller needs.

While the pandemic may have initially caused these problems to surface, it’s disingenuous to continue to use the explanation—even if there remains an element of truth to it. The covid excuse is blamed for price increases, service delays, and supply chain issues.

The public is tired of hearing it; they don’t care. They expect service and expect companies to deliver. It’s that simple.

Moving Forward

Every person and every company had to navigate the covid pandemic. While we may never forget it and the long-ranging effects it produced, it is time to move beyond it. It’s time to focus on serving our clients and not blame circumstances when we failed to deliver.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.  Read more of his articles at PeterDeHaanPublishing.com.

By Renaud Charvet

Fans of Friends may recall the episode in which Phoebe works as a call center agent for Empire Office Supplies, desperately trying to sell as much toner as possible. Luckily, the time of isolating cubicles and reams of contact lists are over and contact centers are the way forward, where data-driven contact centers elevate customer experiences.

The US remains a global competitor in the call center market. In fact, Statista reports that over one hundred call centers opened across the nation in 2021, more than any other region worldwide.

Call centers’ primary industries include financial services, technology, media, and telecommunications. The South is particularly significant for call and contact center operations, as Texas has the highest employment in telemarketing with approximately 22,500 employees, followed by Florida with 15,000 workers. But times are changing for many of these facilities. We’re seeing a move from what’s traditionally considered to be a call center, and towards the notion of a contact center.

Instead of relying on just one communication channel—the telephone—contact centers are multi-channel facilities that use several forms of communication to talk to their customers. They rely on advanced analytics to learn more about the people they’re contacting and dig deeper into data to inform their decisions.

So how can a call center become a contact center?

The Relationship Hub

Call centers have long been considered as a means of making sales and dealing with customer problems. The general strategy has been to react to the needs of the customers, rather than adapt. A contact center goes beyond the immediate goals of making sales and managing complaints. It is instead positioned as a hub for all forms of customer relationships.

A contact center is where all critical communication from customers comes in, and everything customers tell agents inform a business of what their customers are like, how they’re feeling, and what is and isn’t working. This doesn’t mean contact centers aren’t making sales calls and dealing with customers. The key difference is that they’re capturing data from customer interactions and using it to benefit all areas of the business.

Data-Driven

In a contact center, data is king. A customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure is an essential piece of contact center technology that’s used to track, compile, and analyze all areas of communication. A CRM stores information such as who has been contacted, how many times they’ve spoken to an agent, and whether they’ve made a purchase—all in a single system.

A data-driven contact center gathers relevant data from multiple channels, be it via the phone, email, webchat, or any other platform. This data lets contact center agents gain insights on their target audiences, allowing them to offer personalized services.

Typically, a contact center team will have an overview of not just who they have contacted but other data including what stage a sale may be at, who their direct contact person is, how this person prefers to be contacted, what language they speak and what information was already provided. This data, and having easy access to it, sits at the heart of any successful contact center.

Rise of the Super-Agent

If a bot can do it, why should a human? The super-agent is the idea that using technology and automation can move every agent in the contact center up a notch, elevating their level of expertise. The process of creating super-agents involves automating administrative tasks that take up valuable employee time and gives agents time to focus on more advanced responsibilities.

A good CRM system that’s linked to the contact center’s calling system also helps create super-agents. Aligning a center’s CRM with its cloud-calling system provides the ability to update customer data in an instant, without manually adding in details. Some CRMs even have automated features that listen in to phone calls and make transcripts for the contact agent to review later.

Implementing an advanced call routing software solution can further enhance better business relationships. Having call routing software connects callers with qualified agents who have the skillset required to best assist the customer, without needing to pass them between agents before reaching the right person.

Contact centers continue to play a crucial role in building better relationships. But there is no need to opt for yesterday’s lines of desks and endless printed contact lists à la Friends’ Empire Office Supplies. Embracing the contact center allows employees and customers to have simpler, more meaningful conversations.

Renaud Charvet is CEO of business phone system software provider Ringover, a leader in cloud communications. Ringover combines unlimited calling, group messaging and video conferencing into one easy-to-use app.

Offer Call Backs and Customer Service Options

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

In thinking about going beyond the call, you may assume this is an article about offering web chat, text messaging, and email response in addition to handling phone calls. Though I’m an advocate of these options, thereby turning your call center into a contact center, these are not my focus this time.

Instead, I’m addressing what you can do with the telephone to go beyond the call. Here are some considerations:

Call Backs

Offering to call back the caller instead of having them wait on hold—in queue—is an option call centers can offer. Some callers like this flexibility and others don’t. Some are skeptical they’ll receive a call back, while a few have tried it and never got the promised call—or it came hours later instead of the few minutes they were led to believe. Yet many delight in this option.

The benefits of a call back for the customer is not having to wait on hold, being able to attend to other activities, and a feeling of greater control.

Benefits to the call center are fewer callers on hold, lower toll-free costs, and agents who have a chance to prepare to engage with the caller before placing the call. Even something as simple as bringing up the customer’s account in advance saves agent time and reduces customer angst.

Abandoned Calls

What do you do with callers who hang up in frustration while on hold? Hope they’ll call back? It might not happen. Be glad for one less call to handle? This is a short-sighted response that misses the reason for the call center in the first place.

What if you took the initiative and called the customer back? “We see that you called us earlier today, but we couldn’t get to your call in time. Is there anything we can help you with now?”

Yes, some customers will have given up, figured it out on their own, or decide to vent their frustrations. But many will be impressed you called to check with them and have heartfelt gratitude you made the effort. In doing so you can turn around a negative experience and correct it. As you do so, you’ll forge a stronger relationship between your organization and your customers.

Surveys

Some organizations do follow up surveys, either at the conclusion of a call or afterward. If you conduct surveys, what are your goals in doing so?

Is it merely to amass a statistical database of C-Sat (customer satisfaction) scores? There’s nothing wrong with this, but too often the end-of-call surveys try to learn about the effectiveness of the call before the caller knows if the advice they received is correct.

A better reason for follow up surveys is to determine customer service failures, providing a chance to correct your call center’s shortcoming. Then you can work to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.

Going Beyond the Call

These are ways you can go beyond the call to better serve your customers. And that’s the reason your call center exists.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.  Read more of his articles at PeterDeHaanPublishing.com.

Make Customer Service a Distinguishing Factor for Your Organization

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Companies are increasingly offering chat services as a way for their customers and prospects to reach them. Not only is this an option that more and more people want to use, but many businesses find it’s a cost-effective customer service solution. As such, you’d think that customer-focused enterprises would make chat availability a priority. Yet in my experience as a customer, too many do not.

Avoid Turning Chat On and Off

I’ve experienced multiple companies that turn their chat option on and off throughout the day. Though their posted schedule says they’re available during business hours, their practice runs counter to that.

One site indicated that their chat was online. Excited, I begin typing my message, but before I could press enter, the chat availability indication turned from online to offline. Hopeful it was a momentary glitch, I stared at the screen for the next several minutes, poised to press enter as soon as the chat availability changed back to online. I got tired of waiting and went on to my next project. This was most frustrating because I needed to reach them, and chat was their only option.

I’ve seen this occur on other websites as well, with chat toggling between online and offline throughout the day. This is no way to serve customers. But it is a way to frustrate them.

Have a Schedule and Follow It

A retail operation would never open and close throughout the day; no self-respecting business would ever do that. When a customer shows up during regular business hours, they expect to come in and make a purchase. The same mentality should apply to chat service.

Make a schedule and staff accordingly to meet that schedule. Yes, when it’s difficult to hire and keep staff, meeting a desired schedule is problematic. Yet it should be a priority for any company that cares about its customers. And every business that wants to stay in business must put their customers first.

If staffing levels drop too low to support chat in a reasonable time frame, don’t shut it down. Instead note what delay customers may encounter, apologize for the inconvenience, and offer an alternate solution.

One company I deal with boasted 24/7 chat availability. That didn’t last long. They soon scaled back to business hours availability. And a few months after that, they reconfigured their chat window to be a front end to email. You type in your question is normal, and they tell you they’ll get back with you in a couple of hours. The answer comes by email, even if you leave the chat window open.

Offer Alternatives

In addition to chat, other common customer service options include the telephone and email. Presumably if a company can’t staff their chat service, they can’t operate their call center either, which carries an even more time-critical expectation than chat. But many companies have cut their telephone support altogether.

That leaves email. Of the three communication options, it’s the most frustrating, with lengthy delays lasting days—or being ignored altogether. With email, back-and-forth interaction, which happens with ease on chat and phone interaction, is difficult and time consuming. Imagine waiting two days for an email response and receiving a message that says, “What is your account number?”

Yes, there are also self-service options, with many companies offering FAQs, blog posts, and customer forums where users help each other. FAQs and blog posts seldom address the more specific questions I have. And I try to avoid forums because I have no way of knowing if the help they’re offering is reliable or not. And too often no one ever responds to the questions I post.

Chat Solutions

Offering accessible and prompt customer service is even more critical today than ever before, where a business can lose a customer at the click of a button. Offering chat service is a common and cost-effective way to do this.

But to be successful, do it wisely. This means no turning on and off chat throughout the day, posting and adhering to a realistic schedule of chat availability, and offering customer service alternatives.

And if your staffing levels don’t allow for this to occur, look for a contact center you can outsource this to, either to back you up as needed, according to a set schedule, or around the clock. This is the perfect solution to providing consistent chat availability to your customers.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.  Read more of his articles at PeterDeHaanPublishing.com.

By Megan Hottman

We all know that providing an excellent customer experience is vital for business success. Customers expect interactions with your company to be fluid and singular, referred to as an omnichannel experience. 

HubSpot defines omnichannel as a lead nurturing and user engagement approach in which a company gives access to its products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices. Omnichannel starts with being present everywhere your customers are so that they have no trouble interacting with you through a convenient means. 

Why Is an Omnichannel Experience Important to Your Customers?

The point of an omnichannel strategy is to provide customers with seamless interactions across all channels, which will make them feel like there’s no disconnection when interacting with your brand—no matter where or how they reach out.

I remember this past summer when I was buying a ticket from an airline. My preference is to purchase tickets online, which I usually do. However, for some unknown reason to this day, their “system” would not allow me to apply a previous unused credit towards the cost of the new ticket. I’ve used credits on my own before without incident.

I immediately clicked around to find their online chat function, only to discover that it was out of commission, along with their email option. Frustrating.

As a result, I had to call the airline. After holding for 3 hours and 52 minutes (yes, that’s right, holding because their call back function was inoperable at this time), an agent finally answered my call. 

No one has that kind of time to spend waiting on hold. The ability to engage with the airline in the way I preferred and expected to, wasn’t available. We’ve all been there. We’ve all had the same experience. Think of your customers’ experience with your brand. 

Omnichannel Experience Provides Choices and Drives Loyalty

Customers should be able to engage with a business through their preferred channel and when they want. Providing options like text, in-app chat, email, phone, live chat, or social media enables customers to access whatever they want or need whenever they want or need it. Let customers choose how they’d prefer to engage. Give them options. 

A fluid experience gives customers a deeper connection with the brand, boosting customer loyalty. But, of course, everyone knows that keeping existing customers is always easier and less expensive than attracting new customers.

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Builds Relationships

An omnichannel experience targets making consumers’ lives easier from start to finish, ironing out any friction they may face while engaging with a brand.

Providing a quality experience is vital and can make or break customer relationships. All it takes is one terrible experience or a few small repeat bad interactions for a customer to stop using your services or buying your products. 

Omnichannel communication strategies ensure a consistent experience that helps customers understand what to expect with your brand. As a result, customer satisfaction increases as they come to know the quality of service your brand delivers.

It’s Convenient

Consumers want convenience, and many companies have found ways to meet their wants by providing an omnichannel experience.

We can order coffee on an app and pick it up in person, skipping any potential lines. Consumers can do the same with groceries, clothes, and more. These examples illustrate the convenience an omnichannel experience provides today.

An omnichannel experience can be the secret sauce to earning your customer’s loyalty, whether a start-up or a market leader. 

Give Your Customers an Omnichannel Experience

A fluid omnichannel experience is critical to satisfying customers, driving loyalty, and building long-term relationships. Customers want their experience to be seamless, convenient, and personalized, and they’re willing to go out of their way to find it.

Megan Hottmanis the copywriter and editor for Quality Contact Solutions. Megan’s experience includes working as an outbound telemarketing manager for a Fortune 100 company for many years. Megan has been both a client and an employee of QCS, so she knows first-hand the quality, productivity, and passion the team brings to work each day. Reach Megan at megan@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5120.

By Bob Grohs 

Chatbots are becoming increasingly responsible for assisting with customer service queries. Most customers have already used chatbots, whether they are aware of it or not. In a 2021 survey of over 1,000 chatbot users, some 47 percent of respondents said it’s possible they have mistaken a chatbot for a live service agent and another 11 percent said they weren’t sure. Of these users, 69 percent said they would often or always use a chatbot if it could resolve their issue more quickly. Yet, there were still holdouts, showing that even consumers with positive chatbot experiences harbor biases. 

Just because consumers have hesitations doesn’t mean businesses should. As the importance of customer support continues to rise, it’s time to dispel any reservations you have about investing in chatbot technology for your business. Here, we will address common chatbot biases, consider misguided perceptions, and discuss why the pros outweigh any cons. 

Bias 1: Chatbots Try to Come Off as Real Human Agents

For this first point, we need to delve into the debate surrounding chatbot disclosure. A 2019 study produced evidence of a phenomenon known as the “negative disclosure effect.” When companies disclosed to customers that they were interacting with a chatbot rather than a human, results showed a 79.7 percent reduction in sales. This is due to customers perceiving bots as less knowledgeable and less empathetic. 

However, consumers unknowingly interact with chatbots all the time. The same study found undisclosed bots to be just as effective sales agents as proficient human agents. And they were four times as effective as inexperienced agents. 

So, what’s the best way forward? 

Across-the-board disclosure of bots. Through mass exposure, customers will become accustomed to working with chatbots, and their bias will dissipate. They will learn that positive interactions with chatbots are the new norm. Openly disclosing chatbots will help build trust with your consumer base and ensure ethical chatbot use in sales. Companies should consider naming and depicting their bots in a way that makes it clear to the consumer that they are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI). 

Bias 2: Chatbots Don’t Understand Natural Language

This is a common misconception. Leading AI chatbots have built-in intelligence and understand what people mean—what their intent is—regardless of how it’s phrased. This is known as natural language understanding (NLU). In addition, AI chatbots can continue to learn and improve their accuracy in understanding customers over time with their built-in machine learning capabilities.

Chatbots can learn from every chat or email attached to a successful ticket or case resolution. The bots can also pull information from external sources to create optimized answers. These sources are often public knowledge content, such as help centers, FAQs, and manuals. 

NLU is already a powerful technology that will only become more sophisticated in the future. Chatbots can learn how to understand misspelled words, and the best ones can even understand poorly phrased questions. 

As NLU develops, customers will soon overcome the bias that chatbots can’t understand varied human language.

Bias 3: Chatbots Don’t Provide Relevant Customer Insights 

Many businesses use chatbots to answer quick and simple questions, leaving more complex problems to the humans in customer service. As chatbot technology advances and can process more sophisticated cases, you can tap into the data and insights gathered much more efficiently. 

Chatbots are a first line of defense in your customer support stack. They can quickly pinpoint issues, gaps in your knowledge base, and product defects. Immediate customer feedback from a chatbot dashboard helps support and customer experience management (CX) leaders understand what their customers are doing in real time and react more quickly and effectively. 

Today’s chatbots can identify frequently used words or recurring topics in support tickets and attach search labels or tags to them. This process makes it simpler to categorize queries and issues for easier prioritization and actioning.

Bias 4: Chatbots are Expensive to Install

Installation may seem costly, but only if you are thinking in the short term. In just a few months, the benefits will more than cover the up-front costs. 

Integrating chatbots with customer relationship management (CRM) software and other forum software platforms will result in a huge reduction in ticket volume. This can eliminate the need for adding contact center staff or outsourced solutions, even as you grow. 

In addition, customers want quick answers. The speedy, accurate responses generated by chatbots mean an increase in satisfied customers who are more loyal and valuable to your brand over the long run.

Fully integrating bots with other platforms and making them available 24/7 will ensure that any small problems will find efficient, easy solutions. This frees up human customer support to respond to more complex, time-consuming issues and to better address spikes in requests during traffic peaks. 

It’s Time to Overcome Biases and Invest for the Future

It is understandable to have reservations about how chatbots might impact customer service. But many of the biases we hold toward chatbots are misinformed. In reality, next gen chatbots can be powerful customer service tools that hugely improve the customer experience. Chatbots can hold valuable insight that only AI has the capacity to produce. In addition, with NLU development, their role in customer service is only going to grow. 

The installation and integration costs are worth it. Boost customer service with chatbots, and reduce unresolved tickets and customer turnover. Your return on investment will speak for itself.

Bob Grohs is the director of marketing at Solvvy, a next gen chatbot and automation platform. Bob has been in marketing and product management roles at top technology and SaaS companies for twenty years.

By Donna Fluss

The pressure is on for enterprises to improve their customer experience (CX). Executives are trying, and many have spent more to enhance their CX in the last couple of years than ever before, displaying their willingness to invest in improving their performance, perception and brand. This is particularly important now that service quality is one of the primary—and sometimes only—differentiator between what most consumers consider to be commoditized products and services. But the investments are not fully resolving their service problems, based on the rising level of complaints about customer service in the market, as contact centers are only one of the many departments within companies that participate in the customer journey. 

Investing to enhance contact centers is an excellent and overdue first step. Whether it’s an evolution, transformation or a combination of both, the new direction will benefit companies, employees, and their customers. This underscores the growing importance and contributions of contact centers in enterprises, and these investments and changes couldn’t come soon enough, as the quality of customer service seems to continue to degrade with each passing year. What’s ironic is at the same time executives are recognizing that they have a service issue, many are claiming to receive higher and higher Net Promoter Scores. Something is clearly out of sync and needs to be fixed, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why service quality keeps getting worse. 

Some people are blaming the pandemic or the work-at-home situation, but these recent events are not the cause. There were major service issues long before COVID-19. Other industry thought leaders have identified the explosion of digital channels as a reason why the quality of service seems to be falling like a rock. While this is a contributing factor for enterprises that previously handled only calls and are now scrambling to support digital interactions, it’s not the primary cause of poor service quality. 

One of the most significant drivers of the increasingly inadequate service experience delivered by many companies is rapid growth. Companies scaled up and added new customers at a much faster rate than they built out their service organizations and contact centers. Their hope (or bet) was that fewer customers would want service, but it seems that the opposite is happening. With each passing year, customers are demanding more and a higher touch service. This a reality that companies need to accept and address. 

C-level executives in many companies hoped to fill the contact center resource gap by increasing agent productivity and providing self-service solutions. The technology vendors are doing their part and, during the past two years, have delivered a new generation of smart and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled contact center systems and applications that are more productive, but it’s not enough. Consumers’ appetite for help and information is outpacing the productivity improvements. So, other changes need to be made if companies want to put an end to their rapidly deteriorating service experience. 

Getting Service Back on Course

It’s great that executives are investing in their contact centers at a rate never before seen, and that they are making commitments to improve the agent experience. But this is just a necessary first step in righting the servicing and CX ship. 

Companies that want to create lasting improvements that position them to deliver a consistently outstanding customer experience need to identify the reasons why customers are unhappy and reaching out for assistance at an increasing rate. This means that enterprises must find a way to track and measure all aspects of the customer journey—what happens throughout the customer lifecycle, from their first touch at the website through product retirement or replacement. 

An ideal way to address this issue is to roll out contact center applications throughout their organization. By design these solutions give them the visibility and insights they need to identify and resolve service issues and bottlenecks across the enterprise. Contact center applications should become standard productivity tools for most, if not all, enterprise employees. 

The AI-enabled omni-channel routing and queuing engine should replace unified communications (UC)/unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions. Workforce optimization (WFO)/workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities, including recording, quality management, interaction analytics, workforce management, robotic process automation and customer journey analytics, need to be put in place to give managers better employee oversight and clearer understanding of customer needs and wants. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions need to be available to all employees so that they have the information they need to make the right decisions up front, instead of leaving it to the contact center and customer service departments to fix after the fact. 

Final Thoughts

It’s time for enterprises to transform their perspective about customer service. For this to occur, companies need to alter their culture. Instead of saying that they care about CX and put customers first, they must demonstrate their commitment in every department in their company. The tools and know-how are available to deliver an outstanding CX cost effectively; the unknown factor is how long it will take executives to accept the inevitable and put in motion the changes necessary to convert to a customer-centric mindset, one dedicated to great service across the enterprise. 

Donna Fluss is president of DMG Consulting LLC. For more than two decades she has helped emerging and established companies develop and deliver outstanding customer experiences. A recognized visionary, author, and speaker, Donna drives strategic transformation and innovation throughout the services industry. She provides strategic and practical counsel for enterprises, solution providers, and the investment community.