Companies face difficult crossroads as we head into 2023. Inflation hits consumers and business, companies have difficulties finding (and keeping) the right employees and technology keeps growing and evolving.
Despite these difficulties, customer experience stays on top of every business’ priority list. The question being: how do you keep high standards, while ensuring that costs remain under control.
Here are 5 actions to align customer experience and customer service costs in 2023:1. Remove repetitive tasks from the contact center agent
The other day, my dad asked to order something online. As we come closer to the Holidays period, the delivery of his package got delayed twice. In this case, as I place the order for him, he called me and I checked the delivery status via the seller’s mobile app. But we can all imagine that many customers would pick up their phone and call to get the latest delivery status.
These are typically questions that you would not want to get to your contact center agent. There is very little added value when your support agents spends 30 seconds or more to just tell the probable delivery date. Instead, you could implement systems to avoid customers with these type of questions:
- Pro-actively send a (text) message to your customer saying that the delivery has been delayed
- Implement a chatbot for people (like me) that would go online to find their answer
- Implement a voicebot for people that would call to your call center
In all 3 scenario’s, you remove repetitive tasks from your agents so that they may handle more value added tasks.
Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect allows the integration of a chat and/or voice bot which uses data from your Salesforce implementation. It allows you to create a self-service application where customers get their information without having to involve a support agent.
2. Provide better context for incoming questions
Whether questions arrive via e-mail, chat, phone or another channel, providing the right context to your agents is most important. Having the correct context about the incoming request allows for faster and more correct responses to your customers.
Context may be:
- The IVR option(s) that a caller selected
- Open Cases in Salesforce for the person that gets in touch
- The voicebot options that a caller selected before requesting an agent transfer
- It could be based on the content of an incoming email
- But it could also be based on the caller’s sentiment
With the correct context, your agent immediately has the best possible data available to answer the incoming question. For instance
- Use Salesforce Activity Capture to activate e-mail data
- Use Sentiment Analysis of Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect to interpret incoming calls
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3. Enhance routing of incoming questions to the best available agent
Typically, incoming questions are routed on skills and availability of agents. Often, this makes that your customer talks or chats with different agents when multiple interactions are needed to solve a question. Transferring an additional question for an open Case to the same agent will show responsibility and accountability to your customers. It gives confidence to your customers that you support team follows-up on their question.
As already mentioned above, using Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect allows for using Sentiment Analysis functionalities of Amazon Web Services. This capability allows you to interpret the caller’s state of mind and, if needed, to transfer the call to a dedicated team.
4. An effective IVR system helps to align CX and support costs
We all have the experience where we have been waiting for 20 minutes (or longer) after which we didn’t get the correct feedback from the Support Agent. Likewise we’ve been in the situation where we had to traverse 5 or 6 IVR options, and then wait again for an agent to become available…
Implementing an effective IVR application will greatly improve customer experience. Things that could help:
- Reduce IVR options based on CRM data – for instance, retrieve the caller’s language from Salesforce so that you don’t ask his/her language to play the prompts in the correct language
- Allow for callback when wait times are long
- Allow to leave a voice message when your contact center is busy (or when outside business hours)
5. Learn from past contacts to enhance feedback on future service questions
As many companies, you probably also implement surveys to understand your customer’s experience. Calculating the Net Promotor Score (NPS) is a proven solution to understand your customer. However, people often don’t like to respond to surveys and so you get only a partial view on your customer’s perception on your company.An improvement could be to use (call) transcription in combination with sentiment analysis on all interaction content. So, instead of asking pre-defined questions to your customers, you interpret all content of the conversation – whether via e-mail, chat, phone… – to establish a complete view.
Many of these optimizations may get implemented with existing solutions. You want to understand how these may get implemented in your environment? Fill in our contact form to get more information.
