DUBAI — According to 70 percent of consumers, a company’s effectiveness is determined by its service. This applies to businesses of all sizes, regardless of their customer service resources. When resources are limited, the goal is to find efficient ways to optimize customer experience (CX), ease employee tasks, and manage costs.
Improving CX often starts from the inside out. New tools are constantly being developed to automate tasks, provide data and insights, inform decisions, and improve workflow. Here are some steps to use cloud-based CX tools to maximize resources, deliver unique experiences, and enhance the customer journey:
Improve employee engagement and satisfaction
Customer satisfaction relies on the tools, training, and overall job satisfaction of company employees. However, engaging and retaining employees becomes more challenging in hybrid and remote work setups. In such scenarios, it becomes crucial to maintain high productivity levels even when managers cannot physically interact with their teams. By incorporating an integrated workforce engagement management (WEM) tool, organizations can effectively enhance employee satisfaction and performance.
To boost employee satisfaction and engagement, organizations should ensure employees have the information they need. AI-powered WEM tools give managers predictive insights, making forecasting and scheduling easier. These tools also empower agents by providing schedule visibility, performance comparisons, access to coaching sessions for review, and the ability to schedule necessary training sessions. As a result, agent productivity improves, and WEM enables agents to take control of their own achievements.
Deliver seamless customer self-service experiences
Nearly 90 percent of consumers anticipate that businesses will provide an online self-service portal. And this self-service experience should be as seamless and uncomplicated as possible, providing consumers with the right information at the right time using the right resource. To ensure customers get the answers they need through self-service, organizations can design AI-powered chatbot experiences for seamless communication. Building a comprehensive knowledge base enhances the effectiveness of chatbot responses, providing accurate and relevant information. Integrating customer data enables personalized experiences, tailoring solutions to individual needs. Implementing these strategies improves the self-service experience, helping customers find information more effectively.
Understand customer intent
By understanding consumer intent, businesses can anticipate and effectively achieve optimal outcomes in service interactions. Speech and text analytics play a crucial role in this process, as they enable the identification of patterns in agents’ conversations with customers. Leveraging speech and text analytics data, AI can be trained to enhance its understanding and response capabilities, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
Organizations can use the intent information to implement if/then scenarios for desired outcomes. For instance, when a customer abandons a transaction, the AI leverages the intent data to automatically decide whether to provide relevant content or initiate another action that encourages conversion. Tools such as predictive engagement can be employed to facilitate this process.
Enhance service quality through effective routing strategies
To balance agent productivity and customer satisfaction beyond web self-service, businesses can employ predictive routing, skills-based routing, or task-based routing. Machine learning ranks agents based on their ability to handle specific inquiries, optimizing agent-customer matches for optimal KPIs. Evaluating the benefits of new routing methods through comparison tests allows organizations to optimize routing and achieve desired customer experience KPIs.
Reduce and automate administrative tasks
Organizations need agile solutions to quickly adapt to changing strategies and requirements. Cloud-based contact center platforms are essential for reducing administration time and effort. Organizations should look for intuitive interfaces that enable easy process and operational updates through drag-and-drop functionality, freeing up the IT team for more impactful projects. Enterprises must also choose solutions that allow for logic reuse across different flow types, ensuring scalability to address changes such as new queues and employees. By prioritizing these features, businesses can minimize and simplify administration while effectively meeting evolving needs.
Customer experience leaders in organizations of any size will see increased satisfaction in self-service, routing, and agent utilization by implementing these five changes with cloud contact center solutions. These changes will also boost employee well-being and engagement.
Amr AlMasri is Regional Director at Genesys, Middle East.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and may not reflect the editorial policy or an official position held by TRENDS.