Contact Management Magazine Issue 3 2017

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 • 2017

The

People

Issue

❯❯ Transat soars and saves with new contact centre operations ❯❯ Why you need to train your outsourced staff ❯❯ “STOP TYPING AT ME IN ALL CAPS” ❯❯ How to become a digitally connected contact centre ❯❯ Want to fix CX? Address agent pain! ❯❯ Five ways interaction analytics can improve customer experience ❯❯ Why AI will enhance call centre jobs ❯❯ The 80/20 principle

The People Issue

Transat soars and saves with new contact centre operations

By Patrice Tanguay

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ransat’s recent migration to an advanced, flexible contact centre solution from Genesys saved the company $1.8 million over five years with a single administration, while enabling a more consistent customer experience and improved employee efficiency.

Whether Transat should make the switch from our antiquated contact centre system to a new all-in-one solution was something I studied deeply. As the division manager for telecommunications at Transat, my team began the search with an open mind. We wanted to see what new technology was out there to support our service goals and provide operational value.

Transat at a contact centre crossroad Transat, A.T., Inc. is a global tourism leader that specializes in holiday travel, including air transportation, accommodations and travel packaging. We recently celebrated our 30th anniversary. We’re headquartered in Montreal, Canada, we have more than 5,000 employees worldwide and 2.3 million clients. Transat serves over 50 destinations and maintains a fleet of 40 aircraft.

Our customers expect the best from us, but we were limited by our legacy Avaya contact centre infrastructure.

Transat was struggling to provide consistent, seamless service across our contact centres. With locations in Canada, England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands, each Transat contact centre was siloed with its own server, hindering agents’ ability to collaborate with each other across contact centres.

Our outdated infrastructure was also preventing the consolidated reporting view we needed to make better, data-driven business decisions. Because of these solution limitations, our information technology (IT) administration also had significant challenges upgrading and integrating new channels and applications. We couldn’t provide the differentiated experience necessary to meet evolving business needs and customer expectations.

To prepare for the future, I knew Transat needed to consolidate its service operations and simplify administration. This led to a very important decision.

We could upgrade our existing Avaya systems, which would require more servers and the need to undertake the lengthy process of onboarding more licenses. Or we could migrate to a more advanced contact centre solution.

Considering our existing maintenance costs, integration challenges and ongoing need to support new digital channels and applications, we made the move to evaluate new contact centre solutions.

The search for a technology partner 2 | contact management

After reviewing the capabilities of several leading vendors, Transat chose the PureConnect multichannel solution from Genesys to replace our existing Avaya contact centre systems.

The simplicity of the all-in-one solution offered new capabilities and channels—all through a single portal for administration. The IT department could add new functionality quickly without time-consuming and costly integrations, gaining the flexibility to meet evolving business needs. The platform also provided advanced routing capabilities to create one large agent pool, offer differentiated service and launch a follow-the-sun service model.

The Genesys team proved to be a great partner. They were very cooperative throughout our evaluation process and made us feel secure in our decision.

Improving work flow and service capabilities Prior to deploying the PureConnect solution, Genesys provided Transat with the opportunity to participate in sandbox testing, so we could assess various functions of their new solution. Genesys continued to work closely with us throughout the deployment, onboarding 575 service representatives and 2,300 business users. The migration went smoothly with service levels remaining consistent throughout the project.

Since the replacement of our legacy contact centre systems, we unified our contact centres and centralized our interactive voice response (IVR) system with a single point of entry in both English and French. We dramatically increased the consistency of our customer experience and now can reach out to customers proactively on their channel of choice to provide travel updates and other notifications. Agent satisfaction also has increased by working with the new desktop client.

Our real-time interaction data and performance metrics are instantly consolidated and correlated from all channels across their global service organization, giving us better insights to make data-driven business decisions and increase operational efficiency. The result has been measurable improvements to our work flow, increased consistency of our customer experience and cost savings of more than $1.8 million (CAD) over five years. With PureConnect, we can also leverage additional business intelligence tools and manipulate data however we need.

Success with continued innovation Transat continues to work with Genesys to maximize the value of our contact centre solution. This includes an upcoming deployment of Salesforce CRM, adding new features to stay ahead of the latest digital and mobile trends, and improving our process automation. The open platform also gives us the application program interface (API) flexibility to develop other hooks and connectors to our backend to further increase the value to our solution.

As we move into the future with PureConnect, we’re confident we’ll meet or exceed our customer requirements in every detail. We like that PureConnect is available both on-premise and in the cloud, giving us options for the future. We’re excited to respond to our customers’ rapidly changing needs in new and better ways, while seeing our satisfaction grow internally with an all-in-one solution.

Patrice Tanguay is the division manager of telecommunications at Transat.

He has 20 years of experience in telecommunications administration and management. He can be contacted at Patrice.Tanguay@transat.com.

Issue 3 • 2017

The People Issue

Why you need to train your outsourced staff

By Dolly Konzelmann

2) Knowledge and skill

5) Quality onboarding

mployee training not only delivers individual benefits, but will promote positive outcomes for the company as well. However, should you train outsourced staff just as though they were full-time employees? Is there a need for any training investment with out-sourced staff? The answer is yes! At the end of the day these individuals may not be directly employed by your company, but they are representing you when out in the field and on the phones.

Training, and especially ongoing training, is a key area for debate in many companies. The number one reason employers choose not to train their staff or work on their professional development is funding. How can a company justify the cost of training its employees? Simple—training along with professional development will further build your team’s skills and provide them with the tools to effectively and efficiently handle their everyday jobs.

Choosing to outsource your trainers can quickly expand your team by adding qualified and experienced talent.

There is an infinite list of why we should train our outsourced staff. Here are our top five reasons:

Generally, when an outsourced staff are contracted they are given a role description, company overview and training. To retain knowledge, skills need to be practiced and refreshed on a regular basis so elements aren’t forgotten, it is imperative to staff development. Staff that know more can bring more to the table.

We often hire staff or outsourced staff based on their credentials. We than leave it up to them to sink or swim within their role, rather than providing the training necessary to help them succeed.

1) Industry advancements

If your outsourced staff know what is expected of them and are properly trained, productivity will increase.

Training will improve performance and add both flexibility and efficiency to the work day. You can cross-train staff to be capable in more than one aspect of the business.

E

The industry is forever changing and it is imperative that our staff develop and transform with it. New technology is developing at an increasingly fast rate. It is near impossible to keep up with all the ongoing developments, but we can do our best to train our outsourced staff on the new programs and methods made easier through technological advancements.

Issue 3 • 2017

3) Promote job satisfaction Through continued investment from the company, staff will generally have a much higher sense of job satisfaction, which overall can improve their motivation towards their work and contributions towards the company. Training will help shape your team into a powerful machine, with all parts working as one.

4) Increase job productivity

If companies want to stay competitive, it’s time to get serious about training and investing in our staff and outsourced staff. Otherwise employees will begin to lose interest, feel disengaged and feel as though their company does not care for their professional development, in more ways than one.

Training will not only retain staff, but save companies the cost and headache of re-hiring due to high turnover.

Dolly Konzelmann is the president of Customer Service Professionals Network (CSPN). Working with clients throughout North America and abroad over the last 20 years CSPN has created and delivered over 25 world renowned training programs including customer service to leadership. CSPN has helped numerous contact centres optimize their staff, process and technology.

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The People Issue

“STOP TYPING AT ME IN ALL CAPS!” Seven tips for handling irate clients via omnichannel customer service

By Mike Aoki

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mnichannel customer care is like “doing customer service onstage” says Nygel Weishar, director - channel management, digital & contact management at CIBC. That is because social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook allow anyone to view your interactions with customers.

What are the implications of that? Omnichannel agents need to be more diplomatic. They need to think not only of their immediate customer but also how their responses impact other people viewing their conversation online.

As Weishar points out “social customer service sets the standard” as far as how current and potential customers view your organization. At its best, omnichannel customer care is about fixing a customer’s problem. At a minimum, it is about damage control and trying not to let negative messages damage your brand. That becomes even more important when dealing with irate customers online.

The following are seven tips for handling irate customers in an omnichannel environment.

1) Know when to take it offline.

One of the greatest challenges of providing omnichannel care is the need to protect customer privacy. Imagine you are a customer calling your credit card company. What is the first thing an agent does on that call? They ask for an account number and password to authenticate your identity. However, you cannot ask for that on a Facebook post because the whole world will see the customer’s answer, including their password. So if confidential data is involved, redirect the customer to a phone conversation with one of your agents.

spelling, grammar and vague word choices. To ensure you are getting the right information from customers, ask clarifying questions.

4) Emotional intelligence matters even more on social media than on phone calls.

Help your agents “read between the lines” of a customer’s writing.

Lolacher notes: “With a traditional phone call, you get all the other communication cues: tone, inflection, volume. Each of these allows the service agent to better prepare the next thing they should say, or not say. Being able to listen beyond the words being used is extremely helpful in addressing concerns and relieving anger.”

Weishar adds: “Understand what you are writing as an agent and how that can be misunderstood.” For example, other people reading your customer service tweet may not know what was said in previous tweets. So, be careful not to type things that can be misconstrued out of context.

5) Multitasking is wonderful for simple transactions and awful for complex ones.

This is the opposite of point number one. “Though social is growing as a service platform, in my experience most irate customers aren’t repeating the question/concern but rather using it to highlight their anger around their customer experience,” says Russel Lolacher, professional speaker, consultant and customer relationship advocate at www. russellolacher.com. So, be prepared for customers to say “but, I already talked to someone over the phone and they couldn’t help me!” Let your customer know you want to help them, but need a private conversation to authenticate their identity so you can help them with their confidential issue.

Agents need to know when to focus on just one customer at a time. While one of the biggest selling points about social is the ability to handle three interactions at once (versus phone agents that only handle one phone call at a time) omnichannel agents may need to put their sole focus on an irate customer during that interaction. When someone is angry, clumsy word choices or misreading of the customer’s message can cause them to become even more irate.

You would never put an angry phone caller on hold to take another call simultaneously. Do not do that with an irate social media interaction either.

3) Frequently ask for clarification and confirmation during social media interactions.

6) Know the rules. Every platform is different.

You can use social media to help customers with nonconfidential issues. However, even if your omnichannel agents are excellent written communicators, there can still be challenges. Remember how telephone agents face challenges such as language barriers and accents? Well, omnichannel agents face challenges such as customer

“Many agents treat each platform the same way” rather than understanding each platform is unique, says Russel. “The language can be similar but structure and engagement can be very different.”

2) Be aware that customers may have already tried traditional telephone customer service.

That is why they are venting on social media.

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He adds that “different channels should be treated differently. This can be done through creating scenarios unique to each channel to understand best practices.” He stresses the importance of having agents use each channel in their own life since, “practitioners understand better how to engage and connect with customers, much like they do with friends online.” Weishar points out that “each social channel has its own acronyms and style.” So, coach your agents to switch their social style and writing style to suit each channel. That could mean being more personable on Facebook and more concise on Twitter.

7) Omnichannel customer service and traditional telephone customer service are both about helping people.

Excellent communication skills, emotional intelligence and a positive attitude apply to ALL customer service channels. Treat your customers well, no matter which channel they choose to use.

As a final thought, Russel Lolacher suggests looking at any irate customer as an “opportunity to build a relationship. If we have a fight or misunderstanding with a friend, it is rarely the end of the relationship.” He recommends viewing an interaction with an irate customer as “just a stumble in a long relationship” no matter what channel they use.

Mike Aoki is the president of Reflective Keynotes Inc. (www.reflectivekeynotes. com ), a Canadian training company that helps contact centres improve their sales and customer retention results.

A contact centre expert, Mike has been interviewed by the Customer Experience Show and the Globe and Mail. He serves on the Advisory Council of GTACC (the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre association www.gtacc.ca ) and was Master of Ceremonies for four of their Annual Conferences. He was also chosen

by ICMI.com as one of the “Top 50 Customer Service Thought Leaders on Twitter” in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Issue 3 • 2017

The People Issue

How to become a digitally connected contact centre

By Holly Simmons

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oday’s contact centre leaders know that a great customer experience is key to increasing satisfaction and loyalty as well as ultimately improving a company’s bottom line. Most service strategies to date have focused on customer engagement improvements such as expanding beyond phone calls to additional channels such as the web, social media and email. While organizations should continue to focus on engagement strategies, a huge market shift is emerging to drive what Forrester calls a “tip from experiences to operations.” Moving ahead, contact centres will need to become centres of operational excellence to address everything behind the scenes and beyond the front end experience to provide the quality of service that customers demand.

What’s changed that is causing this tip? Many companies are becoming digital businesses where products are becoming services and digital technology is used to establish and maintain a relationship with the customer. As an example, Westpac Bank embarked on a transformation journey, first by investing in mobile experiences for their customers and, second, by digitizing back-end processes that deliver the services being requested by customers. Like Westpac Bank, customer service leaders must extend their vision beyond engagement.

To avoid the pitfalls, organizations can focus on three strategies for digital business that take the contact centre to the next level: 1. Customer service should be effortless and automated. Customers expect to access information when and how they want. By providing selfservice, automating workflows and using artificial intelligence to eliminate manual prioritization and assignment of cases, contact centres empower customers to help themselves while reducing case loads for agents to focus on higher level work. A Deloitte survey reveals that 83% of respondents expect higher use of web self-services going forward. Another study also revealed that effective customer service teams are 36% more likely to offer self-service options. Portals, service catalogues, knowledge bases and communities are some of the Issue 3 • 2017

key self-service technologies that can provide flexible and easy options for customers to get the information they need.

2. Connect customer service to the rest of the business.

Too often, customer service operates independently from other parts of the business with little collaboration with, or support from, other departments. By making customer service the primary focus across the organization and taking a “team sport” approach, everyone, not just customer service teams, takes ownership for resolving customer issues and requests.

Additionally, connecting customer service processes and systems across the company to support this closed-loop approach is necessary to ensure root cause resolutions and continuous improvement. The end result is an improvement in the quality of service. A report looking at customer service programs throughout the U.S. found that high performing customer service programs are more collaborative and more likely to enlist the help of various parts of the organization when working on a customer issue. By utilizing modern customer service systems to connect customers to the best qualified person or department, organizations are setting themselves apart from competitors.

3. Move from reactive to proactive service. Customer service is not always about problems and issues, it’s also about anticipating customer needs and being proactive. Taking advantage of the Internet of Things to monitor customers’ products and services enables contact centre teams to know about issues before customers call. Using modern technology such as performance analytics, organizations can better follow trends and optimize services, workflows or cost structures.

Additionally, by monitoring conversations through customer service communities organizations can find out what it is customers want and from there determine what changes, if any, need to be made to how services are delivered.

Customer service organizations can no longer delay the changes needed to keep up with current customer demands required for digital business. By modernizing customer service systems and processes, customer service leaders will see immediate changes and overall improvement to the organization.

When systems, people and workflows are connected, great customer service is no longer a dream, it’s a guarantee.

Holly Simmons is senior director, product marketing, customer service management, at ServiceNow.

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The People Issue

Want to fix CX? Address agent pain!

By Anand Subramaniam

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hat’s worse: “No results found” or 100 search results that don’t solve your problem? Sixty-three per cent of consumers surveyed by Forrester Consulting said that self-service capabilities offered by businesses had stagnated or declined in efficacy.

Human-assisted service can be equally painful.

Recently, when I needed something fixed through my home warranty company, I had to contact the company multiple times. Each time, I got a different answer. In one instance, I had to walk the agent through my contract to show her that I was entitled to something. To complicate matters even more, I got different answers when I used the company’s call centre, digital and field touchpoints. The company had failed on multiple counts: omnichannel consistency and context as well as agent knowledgeability.

Research on this is clear: Forrester’s 2016 U.S. Customer Experience (CX) Index Report revealed that consumers said that only one per cent of U.S. businesses deliver excellent customer service. The same report found that the state of CX remained stagnant among Canadian businesses, and that none of the UK companies received an excellent score.

No wonder a new phenomenon called “tech support rage” is commonplace nowadays, per a recent New York Times article (in my view, it can dwarf road rage in its intensity!).

What could be the root cause of this phenomenon? We decided to find out.

We first asked 5,000 individuals through Forrester Consulting what caused the most frustration during their service interactions with organizations across multiple industries: retail, communication service providers, banking and financial services, property and casualty insurance, health insurance, health care providers, utilities and government. Allowed to pick up to two options, consumers cited the following as their biggest pain points: 1. Different customer service agents give different answers (41%); 2. Customer service agents don’t know the answer (34%); and 3. I can’t find an answer on the company’s website (31%).

Agent hurdles Following the trail of CX pain, we set out to understand why contact centre agents were not able to deliver knowledgeable and consistent customer service. We asked more than 2,000 agents about their biggest hurdle to answering questions/resolving problems/executing a service process when the customer is on the line. Not quite surprisingly, the top agent pain points virtually mirrored those of consumers and the hurdles faced by Canadian contact centre agents were not very different from those faced by agents worldwide, as shown in the accompanying table.

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Effective KM addresses the needs of both CX and AX Fortunately, there is a common thread across all these hurdles and it is the fact that they can be addressed by a smart, omnichannel knowledge management (KM) system that can deliver fast, accurate and consistent answers, regardless of touchpoint— voice, digital, in-person, etc. If you’re thinking of implementing such a system, here are some best practices that can help you succeed with your KM initiative: • Start with the 80-20 Pareto principle, developing answers for the most frequently asked questions.

• Go beyond just documents and content to make answers easily findable by providing a variety of search options based on keywords, natural language, faceted search, etc.

• Leverage artificial intelligence (AI)-based reasoning to walk the customer or agent step by step to answers for complex questions or guide them through service processes.

• Deploy the same consistent knowledge across all customer touchpoints.

• Make sure to address people, process and culture issues so the organization is committed to a sustained KM program for customer service excellence.

Done right, KM delivers transformational benefits such as simultaneous improvements in first-contact resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT), average speed to answer (ASA) and speed to competency for agents. For example, a telco improved FCR by 37% and

reduced agent training time by half, while boosting NPS by 20% with eGain Knowledge and AI. A financialservices company reduced customer complaints by 45%, resolution time by 80% and compliance by 30% with the same solution.

In fact, many companies have experienced benefits specific to their industry as well. Here are some examples: • Banking and financial services firms and health care companies have improved compliance with industry regulations that apply to customer service.

• Telecom companies have reduced unwarranted handset returns and exchanges through better knowledge-enabled problem resolution on their websites or through their contact centres.

• Manufacturing companies have reduced unwarranted field service truck rolls the same way, while improving first visit resolution by leveraging knowledge to recommend the right spare parts and tools to make their first visit fruitful.

In short, with a successful KM initiative, excellent CX and AX (agent experience) won’t be an elusive goal; it will be a reality!

Anand Subramaniam is the SVP of worldwide marketing for eGain Corporation, the leading provider of cloud customer-engagement solutions, guided by knowledge and AI. His experience spans industry leaders, SaaS startups and growing companies with previous tenures at companies like Oracle, Lotus (now IBM) and Intel. Anand holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MSME from the University of Rhode Island.

Hurdle

Worldwide

Canada

Finding the right answer to customer questions

26%

29%

Different systems/info sources give different answers for same question

25%

26%

Hopping from one application/window to another

20%

17%

Hard to keep up with all the new info/changes I need to know about

14%

17%

Other

15%

10% Issue 3 • 2017

The People Issue

Five ways interaction analytics can improve customer experience

By Aviad Abiri

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n 1876, the customer service industry changed forever with a revolutionary piece of technology: the telephone. Since then, customer service professionals have become dependent on their ability to understand and react to the voice of the customer. But in today’s connected and digital society, the definition of “the customer voice” is much more expansive. Customers are interacting with companies through a variety of mediums, including surveys, emails, social media, SMS, chat and audio interactions. Every single interaction is an opportunity for companies to improve their overall customer service and yet the thought of mining through each individual interaction can feel extremely daunting for service providers.

The influx of data doesn’t have to be overwhelming, so long as customer service providers rely on intelligent solutions to mine through the multiple data sources.

Contact centres also need to look for analytics solutions that will analyze and operationalize customer interaction data in a way that allows businesses to be proactive in their customer engagement approach.

Interaction analytics help to improve the overall customer service experience and can also assist companies in advancing their bottom line. By 2020, Gartner analysts predict that smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%. With the many challenges facing customer service professionals today, here are four ways interaction analytics can help service providers improve their operations, enhance customer engagement and increase their bottom line.

Reduce churn Customer retention is crucial to business success and it can be difficult for companies to pinpoint exactly why a customer discontinued their services. In the past, companies would need to analyze multiple reports to understand churn, getting at the reason customers were leaving. Now, technology will proactively identify these customers and their behavioral trends based on the incoming data. With interaction analytics, companies can now spend less time trying to understand the problem and instead focus on where these trends exist, working to address and even preempt the issues.

Increase overall sales effectiveness Interaction analytics technology can help businesses identify trends in how sales offers are resonating with customers. The use of neural networks is particularly Issue 3 • 2017

effective here as they can scan a database of audio and text conversations between customers and service agents on a variety of platforms, including calls, chats, emails and surveys. Neural networks create word-level transcriptions of these conversations, perform phonetic indexing and provide customer sentiment scores. What this means is that companies can quickly and accurately pinpoint specific words and phrases that are repeated and detect triggers for customer dissatisfaction in order to understand customer issues and reactions to different types of sales pitches, which will ultimately help them enhance their sales impact.

agent interaction gives companies the ability to evaluate their staff and provide coaching and management training that will help them be more successful.

Adhere to compliance regulations In the U.S. and internationally, governments have implemented regulatory guidelines around customer service standards.

For example, the Federal Communications Commission (FFC) adopted federal standards that are aimed at improving the quality of customer service rendered by cable operators. These address a variety of operational requirements, including

By 2020, smart personalization engines will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%.

Improve cost management It is important for contact centres to manage the cost of their operations by examining customer interactions.

For example, how long does it take staff members to handle each customer and how many of them can resolve an issue during their first call?

An analysis of these statistics can help companies to reduce call volume by resolving systematic issues.

Enhance employee performance A contact centre is often a complex management challenge. With many tasks underway and multiple desktop applications in use, it can be difficult to judge employee effectiveness, measure true handle times or identify process inefficiencies. Having a platform that can analyze every

telephone availability for customers and billing requirements. By using interaction analytics, companies can more quickly identify, analyze and respond to customer issues, allowing them to remain compliant.

The telephone may have changed the customer service game in the 1800s, but today contact centres must rely on technology that offers interaction analytics to revolutionize their business strategy and improve their customer engagement tactics.

Aviad Abiri, VP, portfolio sales enablement, is responsible for equipping all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with NICE’s customer stakeholders, across the entire range of our portfolio offerings and at each stage of the customer problemsolving life cycle.

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The People Issue

Why AI will enhance call centre jobs AI can take away the stress of CSR jobs and reduce turnover rates

By John Forrester

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ith their unlimited patience and ability to find information more quickly than the human brain, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being used to handle routine customer service functions. They appear on web screens as chat boxes, they provide automated answers on voice calls and they direct customers through the myriad of response chains to a resolution—cheaper, faster and better than humans.

AI should be a harbinger of good news. But instead of celebrating, the dark cloud that looms over AI is what will happen to all of the customer service reps (CSR) that AI puts out of work—for good?

Progress creates opportunities If we have learned anything since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it is that whenever machines were invented to automate tedious jobs, those jobs were rarely eliminated. With the exception of the telephone and elevator operators, the advent of machines improved quality, increased our expectations and transformed the market by creating more opportunities, rather than less.

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Issue 3 • 2017

The People Issue Why AI works for customer service Companies are driven by mandates to improve customer satisfaction rates, reduce customer support costs, and enable 24x7 engagement with their customers.

Consumers are increasingly demanding quick answers and faster resolution to their problems. A study from NewVoiceMedia found that companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service. With so much at stake, organizations need a customer service department that is responsive, efficient and committed to putting the customer first. Yet, many organizations are struggling to keep call centre employees in their jobs, with turnover rates hovering between 21% and 53% percent.

Companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service.

The job of a CSR can be emotionally draining, as they try to resolve problems for sometimes angry customers.

In addition to being emotionally draining, the job can be monotonous and tedious. AI has the potential to change that by empowering CSRs with better information and the ability to make the job of dealing with customers less stressful, more enjoyable and more meaningful.

Why AI is suited for customer service AI does far more than understand language; AI can process sentiment, tone and inflection. Natural language processing (NLP) enables the bot to understand what a customer is trying to say and can respond with an intelligent, useful answer. AI bots can do this whether the words are spoken or printed, even if there are typos, improper grammar or misspellings. If it doesn’t understand you, it will ask for clarification. More importantly, AI is designed to learn—the more it is used, the more insights it gathers and the more useful it becomes.

High-touch AI AI can think like a human, but it is not a human. While businesses can utilize AI to handle routine transactions, there will still be times when customers will expect, even demand, to talk to a well-trained CSR. Sometimes, a customer just needs an answer quickly. They’re not interested in carrying on a conversation—they just need a problem solved. Virtual assistants can listen for keywords or phrases to identify these inquiries and can resolve these problems with a chatbot or guide customers through an online FAQ form. AI can step in to do this job for customers quickly, freeing CSRs from the monotonous aspects of their jobs so that they can focus on more engaging and exciting interactions with the customer.

Many businesses are finding ways to use AI to work collaboratively with CSRs, supporting them and enhancing their ability to gather information from the database faster so that they can do their jobs better.

Empower your CSRs with knowledge A survey by eGain revealed that one of the biggest frustrations among CSRs is their inability to find the information they need to resolve customer issues.

Issue 3 • 2017

Searching the database takes a frustratingly long time and sometimes involves switching screens to pull up the appropriate information. AI-powered semantic search technology can direct agents to the heart of content instead of giving multiple options to the searches. In addition to giving the CSR information much faster, a bot can simultaneously present critical historical data about the customer.

This supported-AI approach gives CSRs access to information, taking away one of the most frustrating aspects of the job. Plus, AI provides this information in the context of the customer’s previous interactions, so that they can respond to the customer appropriately. This is a great solution for a company that has a high number of SKUs, where the number of questions can be endless.

Emotionally intelligent customer service AI can help CSRs manage the inherent emotional difficulties with fielding an endless stream of calls from frustrated customers. People are sensitive creatures—if the CSR is tired, has low energy and is aggravated from the last situation they dealt with, the customer is going to hear that over the phone. Natural language processing (NLP) can make dealing with these situations much less exasperating. In a matter of seconds AI can gather information about the caller’s tone, vocabulary, sentiment and even silences to let the agent know how the customer is feeling. Providing this insight is an excellent way to help the CSR react appropriately so they can meet the customer’s needs with more empathy.

Strengths of the agent One of the strongest advantages of AI is its ability to gather information that helps everyone work more efficiently and improve the overall customer experience for customers and employees. With every call, the bot collects more information and gets smarter and can do a better job meeting customer expectations.

This information can be used to help identify the CSR’s strengths, knowledge, skills and even current emotional state. Over time, all of this information can be utilized by the bot to route calls to the specific CSR who is appropriately trained and skilled to handle them. This ability

to match emotions and expertise is an important part of the customer experience, helping the customer feel understood and valuable.

Improve customer service The more data an AI-enabled device collects, the more it can learn—and at a faster rate. Soon, the bot will have a history of strategic data that reveals trends surrounding the common service issues and concerns that prompt customers to contact a company. A company can then use this information to proactively eliminate many of these problems before they call customer service.

One of the biggest frustrations among CSRs is their inability to find the information they need.

The bottom line With its ability to interpret communication, assimilate an organization’s data and quickly pull up the pertinent information much faster than humans, AI can take some of the repetitive, monotonous tasks away from customer service agents. When used in collaboration to support CSRs, AI not only improves customer response times but also helps to increase job satisfaction among employees. But more importantly, giving CSRs more autonomy gives them more power and control over their jobs and that leads to a more fulfilling work experience.

John Forrester is the chief marketing officer at Inbenta, leading all aspects of global brand, demand generation, digital marketing, advertising, PR and events. His previous roles include leadership positions at Workato, Xero and RingCentral. He has held marketing management positions at VMware, YouSendIt, Samsung and Microsoft.

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The Consultant’s Corner

The 80/20 principle Naturally occurring phenomenon the key to avoiding an omnichannel problem

By Emily Nielsen

I

f you’re purchasing or deploying an omnichannel solution then consider this a sort of public service announcement to steer you clear of a common, customer-experience-impacting problem. An issue specifically affecting organizations who are trying to jump from basic call centre functionality to a full-blown omnichannel environment—in a single leap.

What’s more, if you’re feeling confused or overwhelmed by the array of channel choices available to you, how you should use all these channels and how you should deploy them, then you can also consider this article as a rather unusual—yet very effective—antidote to clear away this technological complexity. So, take a deep breath and relax.

I’ve got answers.

Now having said that, for it to take full effect I must ask you, momentarily, to suspend your beliefs and what you’ve been marketed to believe about the reasons why you should jump into deploying and unifying all of these “new” channels.

You see, we’re going to step out of the marketing hype and hoopla and go strolling through the realm of one of nature’s laws: a strange phenomenon occurring everywhere in nature—even within your very own contact centre! And I believe understanding and working with this phenomenon is the key to alleviating much confusion and avoiding one of the most common pitfalls of deploying these numerous channels.

Sound interesting? If you’re nodding your head in agreement, then let’s begin by calling to your attention what I believe to be one of the biggest perils in making a sudden jump from where you are now into a brandspanking-new omnichannel solution.

Here’s what you’ve got to understand: Many organizations—pressured by competition and marketing hype urging them toward using and unifying all these channels—have a dangerous desire to immediately deploy every single channel at once.

In doing so, these organizations are trying to leap from a basic call centre environment (often just email and voice) to a full-blown omnichannel configuration all at once.

Here’s the danger in doing just that: In their haste to deploy every channel, bell and whistle, doodad and gadget, it’s easy to overlook the more critical and more important aspect—the new business processes required to effectively and efficiently manage each and every channel.

So what happens when you try to take this leap from “zero to hero”? Well, organizations often expose themselves to poor customer service levels. Why? Because they lack the required backend processes to properly handle the prospects and customers coming through these many points of entry. These “half-baked” deployed channels, lacking the right processes and people to deal 10 | contact management

with these new and numerous “doorways” to the outer world, leave prospects and customers underwhelmed by the apparent lack of service and competency.

You see, despite what marketers want you to believe, your goal shouldn’t be to deploy—at least initially—every channel, bell and whistle engineered under the sun because rather than improving the customer experience you risk ruining it.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, how should you approach your deployment to avoid this problem?

Well, the answer is contained inside of a strange (yet profitable) naturally occurring phenomenon discovered by an Italian economist who studied wealth.

Here’s his story: Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), while studying the yields of bean fields in Italy, discovered that 20% of the bean plants yielded 80% of the peas. Also, he discovered that 20% of Italian’s owned 80% of the country’s wealth. And, oddly, he repeatedly discovered this pattern popping up in nearly everything else in nature.

This naturally occurring phenomenon was coined the “80/20 principle” and it works out like this: 80% of what you get comes from 20% of that you do—small effort, big reward. And 20% of what you get comes from the other 80% that you do—big effort, small reward.

And that’s just scratching the surface because there’s an 80/20 inside of the top 20% (this is 80/202).

And an 80/20 inside of the top four per cent (this is 80/203). This is the “Law of the Vital Few.” Now knowing this, rather than getting swept away in the marketing buzz, I recommend that you make your channel decisions based on the Law of the Vital Few, simply because not all of your channels are created equal and your time and energy are finite.

Your main priority at this moment should be in deploying, developing and optimizing what you believe to be your

most rewarding channels for your ideal customers and your business. In the words of Perry Marshall, author of 80/20 Sales and Marketing, “The information age offers you more things to fix, optimize and pay attention to than you could possibly attend to in a lifetime. That’s why 80/ 20 has never been more important. You have reams of data spilling out… 24 hours a day.

If you pay attention to the wrong thing you could waste your entire life polishing turds.”

Bang on! And this is perhaps nowhere truer than in the contact centre industry. Here’s what I’m recommending you do: Adopt the three-step 80/20-approach I’ve used with numerous clients to reap the biggest rewards with the least amount of effort. Now grab a piece of paper and: 1. List all your channels; 2. Calculate the potential value of each channel; and 3. Apply your 80/20, 80/202 and 80/203 lenses and invest and deploy in your channels accordingly.

It’s really that simple. Do this little exercise and you’ll discover, like Vilfredo Pareto, that not all your channels are equal. In fact, based on this phenomenon and law of nature, there should only be a vital few.

Find these key channels—the money-makers—and perfect them by concentrating your time and energy where they matter most. And in doing so, you won’t risk opening your organization up to more points of entry than you can effectively manage.

Emily Nielsen launched Nielsen IT Consulting in 1999, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations achieve breakthrough results using contact centre and unified communication technologies. If you’d like such rewarding results you’re encouraged to contact Emily at enielsen@nielsenitconsulting.com or by calling 519-473-5373.

Issue 3 • 2017