Contact Management Magazine Issue 1 2019

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 • 2019

The Innovation Issue ❯❯ The three key innovation CX trends for 2019 ❯❯ Creating a high-value, digital-ready contact centre ❯❯ Using RPA to manage contact infrastructure ❯❯ Elevating CX with AI ❯❯ Protect against the AI/chatbot backlash ❯❯ How adding call-backs works wonders

Innovation

The three key innovation CX trends for 2019

By Stephen Loynd

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he customer experience (CX) team at Frost & Sullivan has seen three important innovation trends come across our desks in 2018, each of which has resulted in detailed white papers. We recommend that Canadian organizations examine each of them, as they will be impacting enterprise CX strategies in 2019 and beyond.

Practical, cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Frost & Sullivan notes that AI-powered virtual agents present significant potential to improve the CX in the contact centre, but also implementation challenges. (a) AI’s new cognitive abilities. AI, as a concept, has been around for decades. Why then does it seem that AI is only now being inserted into the CX in such valuable ways? One key driver of this trend is advanced speech recognition capabilities that have finally allowed contact centres to access the vast cognitive abilities that AI has to offer. Natural language understanding (NLU) means AI-enabled machines can hear, process and correctly capture intent and context, and AI solutions are now demonstrating their true power in a variety of ways.

Advancements in speech recognition and cloudenabled delivery has opened the door to the rapid expansion of AI cognitive abilities that mimic live agent behaviour across dozens of conversations: which simply wasn’t possible before. (b) Impressions of complexity. But while the advantages of automating more customer carerelated processes are real, it’s important to focus on the practical applications of AI rather than the too often overly dramatic headlines associated with it.

According to recent surveys by Frost & Sullivan’s Stratecast team, 20% of all companies have plans to adopt some type of AI-powered solution in the near future. But those surveys also show that many companies are labouring under the impression that AI is complex and costly to implement.

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Action item: approach AI a low-risk, high-value manner. Scale your contact centre by augmenting your current technology with cloud-enabled AI that seamlessly integrates with your existing systems to automate one conversation at a time, rather than undertaking a complete “rip and replace” overhaul. Taking a practical

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approach to AI simplifies the decision to implement AI capabilities, but it also ensures that AI-enabled tools will deliver value upon implementation, rather than requiring a protracted period of training and customization. Ask about the Frost & Sullivan white paper, The AI-Powered Virtual Agent: Practical Realities & Actionable Strategies.

Robotic process automation (RPA) solutions. RPA software that incorporates technologies such as AI and machine learning (ML) to automate routine, rules-based, high volume tasks that are timeconsuming and sensitive to human error promises to change the nature of business. Here’s how: (a) A virtual workforce in varied automations. RPA software “robots/agents” mimic human beings in the handling of certain types

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of processes including inputting or manipulating data, triggering other processes or communicating with other systems. This virtual workforce can work unattended, attended or in hybrid automations. Tasks can be scheduled or triggered automatically or manually. (b) Enabling digital transformation. Automation must help achieve operational optimization and increase productivity, otherwise it makes little sense. The objective is to introduce a set of solutions that will enable true digital transformation.

In essence, RPA is contributing to digital transformation on a strategic

Focus on the practical applications of AI rather than the too often overly dramatic headlines associated with it.

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Innovation

We’re living at a time of fast-moving digitization, that exponential technological change is upon us and that the contact centre needs to innovate to keep pace.

rather than simply a tactical level.

It’s also an initiative that will help to spur greater collaboration across business units.

Action item: start with a strategic assessment. Look for RPA applications that are scalable and reliable, that follow a development process that is repeatable and allows for robots that are maintainable and reusable, that provide for access control and auditing and that can be managed similar to live agents with centralized control. Develop a cross-organizational automation strategy to determine which projects require heavy IT involvement and which can be done with simple RPA tools. Identify areas of high volume and repetitive tasks and then take advantage of vendor proof of concept to initiate a “land and expand” approach to cross-enterprise automation. Use RPA to facilitate cross-organizational data dependencies and maintain consistency of data entry. Ask about the upcoming Frost & Sullivan white paper, A Strategic, Actionable Approach to RPA.

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Agile and DevOps: helping transform the CX. As the pace of technological change quickens and increasing customer expectations further catalyze a time of techno-consumerism, many organizations are adopting the IT methodology known as “Agile and DevOps” for their CX applications.

The term Agile Development describes iterative and incremental software development methodologies; it’s an approach to software development embracing requirements and solutions that evolve through collaborative efforts of self-organizing cross-functional teams and their customers. It advocates adaptive

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planning, evolutionary development, early delivery and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

DevOps is an extension of the Agile Development methodology, a blending of two disciplines in order to emphasize the collaboration, communication and cohesion between typically separate developer teams and IT operations teams.

Here are further points to examine and keep in mind: (a) Keeping up with rapid change.

In effect, the concept of Agile requires its twin concept of DevOps at a time when the pace of innovation and change is accelerating, and the typical operations team needs to deploy new releases more quickly and with less disruption. While Agile and DevOps has been around for awhile, more and more companies are beginning to apply its practices to their CX environments as a means to address rapidly evolving business requirements. Agile and DevOps are designed to provide businesses maximum efficiency and minimal interruption while making needed improvements to customer engagement applications. (b) A data-centric, selfoptimizing future. Agility and transformation are essential because the rapid adoption of digital technologies is producing waves of data that are impacting every industry, shaping a new shoreline that will characterize a data-centric, self-optimizing future. Digital leaders will be those organizations that are skilled at utilizing business analytics to offer deep insights into customer behaviours, wants and needs, developing new products and services and ultimately innovating

and exploiting new business opportunities.

Action Item: take a forward-looking approach to operational CX. Frost & Sullivan believes that a new approach to CX operations will help determine the difference between past and future, between business failure and future success. Therefore, appreciate the fact that we’re living at a time of fast-moving digitization, that exponential technological change is upon us and that the contact centre needs to innovate to keep pace. It’s not enough to measure net promoter score (NPS) or other high level, backward-looking metrics. You need to understand operational metrics about your CX so you can proactively improve and positively affect your NPS and the other metrics through a more actionable, forward-looking approach. Think more strategically about operational CX and consider an Agile and DevOps transformation process that features automated testing and monitoring at its core.

Ask about the Frost & Sullivan white paper, CX Innovation: Rising to the Challenge of Techno-Consumerism Through Agile & DevOps Transformation.

Key takeaway The customer contact landscape continues to be disrupted.

Enterprises need to be thinking strategically about how developments will continue to impact the space in 2019 and beyond. Clearly, these are by no means the only technology-related topics of importance as far as the CX goes, but it’s noteworthy how much interest we received in them over the course of this past year, and how many companies will be deploying these solutions going forward.

Stephen Loynd is global program director, digital experience, Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com), Stephen.Loynd@Frost.com.

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Innovation

Creating a high-value, digital-ready contact centre

By Rob Daleman

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ased on overall revenues and market size, the Canadian domestic contact centre market continues to face headwinds. IBISWorld recently reported that the Canadian telemarketing and contact centre industry shrank by -3.2% from 2014 to 2019 and it predicts additional declines through 20241.

The continued slowdown in domestic contact centres is attributed primarily to two trends in the market: one, the offshoring of contact centre jobs and two, consumers increasingly shifting to emerging digital channels for support.

However, the news is not all bad. By focusing on putting personalized, engaging and compliant customer communications in the hands of their customers and agents, contact centre leaders can have a strong impact on the overall customer experience.

Driving offshoring Let’s look at the first trend of offshoring and the underlying driving factors and outcomes. During my time at one of Canada’s leading contact centre vendors, I saw firsthand how many teams were focused on projects that helped them compete by increasing efficiency. These included funneling contact requests from multiple channels into the centres, allowing information collected on one channel to be presented to agents to make phone conversations frictionless, and routing customers to the best agents to fit their needs based on analytics for faster time to resolution.

As these technologies have become more pervasive globally, however, the efficiency advantage has proved to be unsustainable, leading to more offshoring of jobs.

The impact has been that those that remain in-country are shifting to more complex, higher-value activities that require more skilled employees.

Unfortunately, the technology focus of many contact centre executives has not directly supported this trend.

While traditional projects have aided customers in initiating their points of interaction with the contact centre more efficiently, the projects do very little to support the underlying digital process transformation required to allow the business to work at the speed of the contact centre. It is not a surprise then, that a 2018 market study by Customer Contact Week found that today’s top customer complaint of contact centres is unprepared agents2.

Focusing on resolution Today’s contact centre is an extremely important linchpin in business. Agents control exceptionally important customer touchpoints, including loan applications, insurance claims and health insurance benefits inquiries.

They are being asked to engage in complicated discussions and draw up complex documents in response to customer inquiries: often doing so interactively in real time with customers.

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Customers do not have visibility to the underlying complexities of your business; they are simply looking for first contact resolution, friendly agents and quick resolutions, regardless of the processes required to support the agents in delivering those experiences3.

This is where customer communications management (CCM) technology has a strong part to play in enabling skilled and efficient domestic agents. Modern CCM platforms present complex documents to agents in a streamlined interface, hiding the complexity that exists under the surface. Behind the scenes, CCM solutions are gathering data from core and legacy systems, integrating content updates from subject matter experts (such as legal, compliance and marketing) and even taking data input from the customer gathered across a variety of channels.

As the agents work through customer requests on the phones, they are able to build up complex documents through scripted dialogues that contain the most current offers, products and language from across the business and output them as customized communications for the customers. These systems also provide automated approval processes, allowing agents to create and submit documents in one step and permitting them to quickly move on to the next customer while allowing supervisors to manage document approvals.

Moving to omnichannel Now let’s examine the second trend, or force impacting contact centres today and that is the shift of customers away from voice to emerging digital channels. This trend is clearly seen in the adoption of smartphones by Canadians which, at the tail end of 2018, would likely be approaching 84%4. Meanwhile, fewer than 25% of businesses can handle complex interactions in digital channels today5.

While many companies look

to bring on new digital experience technologies to support emerging channels, line-of-business professionals and IT staff alike are faced with a difficult choice. One, embrace a digital-first strategy to get to market on new channels quickly, or two, an omnichannel approach that supports the overall end-to-end customer journey. In both instances the contact centre frequently loses out, as digital projects are not completed with an end-to-end journeys in mind, and more specifically, don’t tackle challenging business process improvement challenges. This leaves the customer stuck between a great pre-purchase experience, often powered by exceptional web and mobile technologies and a lacklustre customer experience.

It is important to focus on processes that enable digital experiences that are fully integrated with the documents and content that customers interact with. For example, migrating PDF forms to interactive digital forms to allow customers to initiate complex interactions via self-service is an important step in enabling the customer in the channel of their choice. These solutions must tie back into systems that support agents to manage complex interactions with customers. They also must quickly build and issue contracts, claims and other documents that customers are looking for and output them on any channel whether that be via print, PDF documents via e-mail or posted to interactive web sites.

Again, this is an area where CCM is poised to help companies address complex challenges by leveraging one set of communications templates and all of the core content inside the enterprise and making these available to customers across all channels.

Canada’s contact centres are challenged by a need to support increasingly complex engagements Continued on page CM 9 Issue 1 • 2019

Innovation

Using RPA to manage contact infrastructure

By Kelly Koelliker

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he hybrid workforce is a growing reality in today’s contact centre. By handling repetitive and mundane tasks, robots accelerate productivity and make it possible for back-and front-office employees, like contact centre agents, to spend their time on more substantial projects. By 2021, Forrester Research estimates there will be more than four million robots handling office and administrative work, as well as sales and related tasks1.

There is another use for robots that goes a little deeper than automating contact centre agent tasks. In an innovative form, robotic process automation (RPA) is helping to simplify, modernize and automate the processes that ensure contact centre infrastructures are running properly.

Complex needs and operations In many organizations today the contact centre is the strategic nerve centre that drives customer engagement and loyalty. Customers have become more demanding, seeking an excellent seamless customer experience (CX) on the channels of their choice. When they decide to reach out to the contact centre it is because, in most cases, they didn’t find what they are looking for on selfservice. Successful conversations between customers and agents are imperative to maintain customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance and operational efficiencies.

But a contact centre’s infrastructure is incredibly complex. It includes a tangled web of systems and vendors that demand constant support and testing. There are many points of failure that require monitoring and verification from the ACD, to the recorder and to the handsets.

Yet many organizations rely on primitive methods of evaluation, including “walking around” and spot-checking equipment. Customer loyalty suffers as a result.

Here are three key reasons that monitoring the infrastructure is a job ideally suited for this unique type of RPA. 1. Resource constraints make it nearly impossible to monitor and verify that calls are being received, routed and recorded properly. Whether it’s an end-to-end view of the system or the viability of a single handset, monitoring issues with telephony is often a time-consuming manual process. To verify individual pieces of equipment are functioning, IT resources must test each line to discover an issue, or alternatively wait until a problem is discovered: when it is too late to resolve. Too often, reliance on one-time or spot testing fails to provide the needed early warnings that something is amiss. Further, once a problem is discovered, multiple IT resources are usually required to diagnose the issue. The lost time and cost associated with this process is both wasteful and a drain on resources.

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2. Accurately and completely recording contact centre calls is imperative. Due to compliance regulations, legal requirements, quality assurance and business analytics as well as other reasons, recordings of contact centre interactions need to be retrieved. When calls fail to record, the problem likely does not surface immediately, leaving the situation to balloon into an expensive and timeconsuming headache. A call that was not recorded cannot be recreated: the moment is lost. Fines may be incurred, insights are lost and customer satisfaction can plummet, often before the problem can even be fully diagnosed.

3. Troubleshooting issues with a communications infrastructure can be extremely complex and time consuming. When there is a problem in the telephony infrastructure, there could be several reasons. There could be an issue with the phone line, the phone itself, the ACD, a configuration error, the recorder or an issue caused by a software upgrade. Cloud/ hosted contact centre as a service (CCaaS) introduces even more points of failure into the telephony stream and further raises the need for automated monitoring and verification.

Consequently, it can take weeks to find and diagnose problems.

Furthermore, it is increasingly difficult to find staff with the expertise across vendors and versions to maintain these systems end-to-end and troubleshoot issues cost effectively.

“Virtual engineers” to the rescue RPA can eliminate the timeconsuming and incomplete manual testing of these systems through using automated verification

solutions that serve as teams of “virtual engineers”, which proactively alert the organization to possible issues, potentially saving weeks of time and effort. As a result, they are making it much easier for contact centres to know that all calls are received, routed and recorded properly.

From the performance of a single handset to a holistic view of the health of an entire telephony infrastructure, this distinctive solution automates manual configuration and monitoring to create efficiencies, improve accuracy, save money and reduce risk. The net benefits are big savings and major advancements in compliance and customer loyalty for forwardthinking companies.

How RPA eliminated 10,000 hours of work Here is an example of the benefits applying RPA for contact centre infrastructure can provide. In a highly-regulated industry like banking, accurately and completely recording phone conversations is imperative. For a large European investment and retail bank, supporting 120,000 IP telephones across multiple locations, its sheer size and operational complexity posed a significant challenge in meeting this objective. The handsets are situated in a variety of locations, including front offices, branches, trading floor desks and contact centres.

The financial institution’s expansive phone lines and related systems had to be checked manually before the start of each day by staff at each location. Results were then manually recorded and any issues were communicated locally, but not shared across other locations or the broader organization. In addition, the tests were not consistent between sites and were often based on local and/or onsite knowledge. This Continued on page CM 9 Contact management | 5

Innovation

Elevating CX with AI

By David Chavez

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eople are the fabric of every company, and the engagement and success of employees directly correlates to both business results and customer satisfaction. Companies that effectively use nextgeneration digital technologies, combined with human intelligence, including emotional intelligence, have greater prospects for higher customer-centricity, loyalty, employee fulfillment and revenue growth.

Digital leaders recognize that artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary for continued growth and innovation in today’s world. In 2019 this technology will begin to see greater prevalence in the contact centre. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2022, 72% of customer interactions will involve AI in some form1.

The key to a successful implementation of AI in the contact centre, however, is ensuring the right strategy is in place. And that employees are set up for success.

Understanding customer needs What is AI in this context? AI is computer software created and trained by humans that automates some tasks and allows natural language interaction with humans. AI has the promise of raising the customer experience (CX).

When AI is combined with chatbot technology it can give businesses the ability to automate basic contact centre tasks, focusing the interactions to the actions usually needed at those specific points.

However, AI is only as valuable as the human intelligence that goes with it; the programmers need to understand what customers need at that point to foster the automation. By shifting basic tasks to automated technology, organizations will be able to provide live agents with the capacity to tackle complex interactions: interactions which go beyond the intelligence of technology and require the human touch to solve.

The return on investment (ROI) for spending resources on AI is there. Consider the top companies significantly investing in AI today: Google ($3.9 billion), Amazon ($871 million), Apple ($786 million), Intel ($776 million) and Microsoft ($690 million)2. Even among those businesses without such ample spend, research shows 46% are expecting an increase in revenue when AI is applied to customer service3.

By allowing AI to make contact centre interactions better, more intuitive and faster through intelligent routing, behaviour matching and increased access to 6 | Contact management

actionable data, organizations will be able to deliver more authentic and meaningful experiences during the customer journey than ever before.

For example, think about the application of AI to analyze past consumer behaviour and intelligently pair customers with the best resources, both agents and subject matter experts, available organization-wide. During each of these interactions, they are granted real-time knowledge from data-driven internal and external databases including CRM, demographics and psychographics. Advanced predictive information gives agents, experts and enterprises the leverage to carry out quick service inquiries and match customers with informed insight to address their needs, all while driving personalized, goal-oriented outcomes. Like understanding how likely a customer is to buy a product: all before the first “hello”.

The benefits of AI continue after every interaction. With all conversations recorded and transcribed, managers have complete coverage and supervision of their employees on demand. The AI-empowered contact centre is sure to demonstrate performance improvements across the board with employee productivity and customer service satisfaction.

Where to start There is a vast landscape that AI can applied to in a contact centre.

Selecting a place to start can be daunting yet it is critical. Many innovations fail because of a lack of focus on the desired outcome in mind, often yielding the dreaded science experiment.

Instead begin by thinking

narrowly. Find a pain point in the customer journey. If it includes repetitive mundane tasks, then it is likely ripe for AI automation. Define success criteria, better if it is clearly measurable. Pilot the programme and include in it the ability of customers to provide feedback on their likes and dislikes of the interface and iterate. Once it is complete, move on to the next pain point. This makes AI adoption gradual and practical and helps the eventual human to human interactions to be more impactful.

Consumer expectations and technology solutions are rapidly evolving and influencing major changes to the contact centre.

Enterprises that are planning to invest in AI have identified specific cases for applying, or are experimenting with transformative solutions across the organization, specifically AI for conversational intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), analytics and insights. These technologies are helping to fulfill the needs of brands that are striving to drive customer loyalty and satisfaction by meeting the demands of a contextual end-toend service experience.

By taking care of the customer first, AI brings increased profitability due to improved conversion rates, business processes and agent satisfaction. Why apply AI for customer experience now? The real question is: if not now, then when?

David Chavez is vice president, innovation, Avaya (www.avaya.com).

1 Gartner, “Gartner Advises Business and IT Leaders to Influence the Long-Term Direction of Artificial Intelligence”, press release, November 7, 2017.

2 Olivia Krauth, “The 10 tech companies that have invested the most money in AI”, TechRepublic, January 12, 2018.

3 Teradata,” State of Artificial Intelligence for Enterprises”, report, October 2017.

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Innovation

Protect against the AI/chatbot backlash

By Tom Martin

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orrester Research predicts a year of reckoning for artificial intelligence (AI) in 20191. The market research firm foresees a backlash against automated chatbots, which routinely exasperate customers searching for assistance.

The high expectations placed on AI in customer service will also fall back to earth this year. The intended cost savings through reduced headcount in the contact centre will not outweigh the damage done to customer satisfaction.

What should customer experience (CX), customer care and sales leaders do about the AI backlash?

the customer’s confidence (or lack thereof) in judging alternatives. Low risk/high confidence engagements can be mapped to automated support tools while others may be mapped to high-touch human support.

Courtesy Glance Networks.

1. Be realistic about the limitations of AI. Poorlydeployed AI can be damaging to the CX. Specifically, it can compromise trust. “AI is supposed to make our lives better,” said Keng Siau, a professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. “Smarter companies are being proactive about this by developing trust.”2 One AI practitioner at a leading financial services provider I spoke to recently expressed that keeping expectations realistic is crucial when working with chatbots. They work hard to level-set with line-of-business and contact centre management, establishing realistic cost-savings targets and making them aware of potential negative impacts to customer satisfaction.

In an April 2018 webinar hosted by destinationCRM featuring Glance Networks and Forrester Research3, it was suggested that AI has an appropriate role in the relationship between the enterprise and the customer. However, CX professionals must begin by understanding the customer journey and determine which interactions are best handled by bots and which should be handled by humans. Highcomplexity transactions should be given the human touch.

CX professionals should map customer journeys and determine which ones are appropriate for automated support versus human support. For example, in the above graphic, you can see that a Loan Calculator would be an AI function and a Loan Application would receive human support.

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2. Build better escalation paths from AI to humans. Forrester Research predicts that “a whopping 60% of chatbot deployments in 2019 will not have effective live-agent safety nets attached to web chat sessions”4.

One major reason why customers have grown to hate chatbots is they are often ineffective and offer no recourse in securing solutions to customers’ issues. CEB (now a part of Gartner) reported that, although customers may have a preferred method of communication with your brand, 84% of customers simply want their issue resolved as quickly and easily as possible5 and are willing to be directed to the best possible option to achieve that result. In other words: if AI can deliver a speedy solution to the customer’s problem, the customer will be satisfied.

But what happens when AI fails to solve the problem? It is strongly suggested that you build an escalation path that allows the customer to rapidly escalate from the failure of AI to awesome human engagement that can convey empathy, resolve the issue and save the day.

3. Invest in technology that creates superhuman contact centre agents.

Forrester Research predicts that onethird of companies will modernize agent desktops to augment the human workforce6. Instead of using technology to replace humans, this application of technology would improve the agents’ abilities to do their jobs with superhuman quality and efficiency.

For example, the same AI practitioner mentioned earlier told us his financial services company is creating a “banker bot” that does not interact directly with customers, but instead assists human agents to perform their human-to-human interactions better. The banker bot will feed agents customers’ historical records so that the agents can have more contextually relevant conversations with customers. The banker bot can predict additional products customers might find useful and tee up sales support aids for the agents. The banker bot also can predict the questions customers are likely to ask and can tee up corresponding help documents and resources for the agents.

Another example is cobrowsing or screen sharing technology integrated into the agent desktop. This allows agents to see where the customers are stuck in the web sites or apps, giving the agents an immediate understanding of the customers’ problems and enables the agents to guide the customers to speedy solutions. Cobrowsing and screen sharing can eliminate the awkward and time-consuming “game of 20 questions” at the beginning of each call where customers struggle to explain their problems to the agents.

Companies should add to the agent toolbox technologies that can connect with their customers on an emotional level, understand the customer more fully and easily, solve problems faster and communicate more effectively.

The ability of a service provider to demystify and personalize the CX is the tiebreaker in industries where service and product offerings among competitors is approaching parity; CX is the ultimate “brand enhancer” for any company.

4. Automate KPI capture in the CRM. Sales reps revile the coming of AI because of its capabilities to collect key performance indicators Continued on page CM 9 Contact management | 7

Innovation

How adding call-backs works wonders

By Shai Berger

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oday’s consumers have very high expectations when it comes to customer service in general and contact centres in particular. Providing superior service is critical, especially since “60% of consumers say they’ll drop a brand (even one they love) after just a few sub-par experiences.”1 A surefire way to fall out of favour with a customer is to leave them on hold for more than a few minutes. The solution to hold time is to offer a call-back as an alternative.

The more formal name is virtual queuing, because what’s happening behind the scenes is that each caller’s place in line is held virtually so they are free to enjoy their day while waiting. Although the concept of replacing hold-times with call-backs has been around for decades, two major changes have sparked renewed interest in recent years.

Lowering tolerance The first change is that consumers have a lower tolerance for waiting on hold, and are vocal about this on social media channels. The web site OnHoldWith.com, which shows a live feed of hold-time complaints via Twitter, provides a dramatic—and sometimes entertaining—look at the anger caused by this problem.

Surveys confirm this trend as well. A recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that putting put callers on hold is ranked first or second as the top irritant across all age groups2. The survey also found that 10 minutes is the maximum amount of time callers are willing to wait on hold, whether making a customer service inquiry or a complaint.

New technology The second change stems from the contact centre industry itself. Adding call-backs used to require equipment-based solutions that (a) required considerable effort to deploy and (b) came with hefty price tags. So, while large-scale companies like Air Canada, Rogers and WestJet have had call-back options available for years, smaller operations were priced out of this market.

Advances in cloud-based technology and new usagebased pricing models mean that contact centres of any size can now add call-back functionality. This trend was confirmed by the recent Contact Center Decision-Maker’s Guide from ContactBabel. After surveying 222 contact centre managers, it reported that 40% of contact centres now offer call-backs, up from 37% in 2017 and 22% in 20123. This is a positive trend. That same report listed the top reasons that people dislike the waiting-on-hold process: • “Not knowing how much longer you’ll have to wait”; • “Repetitive announcements”; • “Having to restate account information already given”; and • “Can’t do anything else in the meantime.”

There’s some interesting psychology behind that top reason. According to David Maister’s The Psychology of Waiting Lines, unexplained waits are perceived to be longer than explained waits. This is also known colloquially as “Dentist Chair Time” (Sorry, dentists!)

Dealing with call spikes Call-backs can also be offered on a scheduled basis, where callers can choose future time slots. This option has a very “high-touch” feel from the callers’ perspectives, but its real power comes from allowing contact centre managers to handle spikes in call volume more effectively.

Having “spikey” demand is one of the most difficult challenges for contact centre managers. If they staff to the peak volume, they will have a lot of excess agent capacity at other times. Agent labour is the costliest component of contact centre operations, accounting for up to 75% of the total4, so overstaffing is not an appealing option.

Call-backs also help smooth out spikes in call volume by deferring calls (in a customer-friendly manner) until a time when there is excess agent capacity. In a sense, call-backs let the contact centre do a better job matching the demand for agent time with the supply of agent time.

This results in more efficient use of resources.

Time to add call-backs is now If your company operates a contact

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centre and does not yet offer callbacks, you are falling behind your industry peers. But even without that pressure, call-backs should be at the top of your technology wish list because they are truly a winwin proposition: callers have more pleasant experiences and the contact centre becomes more efficient.

Keeping the pressure up As a consumer, you can help keep the industry moving in the right direction by mentioning the callback alternative to companies you do business with. And when you’re stuck on hold, consider Tweeting about the experience (try to include the company’s Twitter handle and the hashtag #onholdwith so it will be indexed by OnHoldWith.com). A little venting might make you feel better, and—you never know—it might be the final nudge that convinces a company to add call-backs.

Shai Berger is co-founder and CEO, Fonolo (www.fonolo.com). Shai is responsible for setting the company’s strategic direction, product innovation and driving growth. His experience and accomplishments within the customer service and contact centre industries have positioned him as a thought leader and innovator in the space.

1 David Clarke and Ron Kinghorn, “Future of Customer Experience Survey 2017/18”, PwC, survey.

2 “Genesys study shows people unite across age groups in their shared dislikes; everyone hates being put on hold and getting incorrect information”, DMN.ca, December 14, 2018.

3 ContactBabel, “The US Contact Center DecisionMakers’ Guide 2018-19”, report.

4 “Contact Center Decision-Maker’s Guide 2018-2019”, Ibid.

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Innovation

Creating a high-value, digital-ready contact centre Continued from page CM 4 through a growing number of channels.

But modern CCM solutions—with their combination of data management, content management and omnichannel output—are well poised to help contact centre executives in Canada make the transition to supporting more skilled agents here at home to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Rob Daleman is vice president, corporate marketing for Quadient. A subsidiary of Neopost, Quadient (www.quadient.com) is a leading provider of customer communications management (CCM) technology, enabling organizations to create better experiences for their customers through timely, optimized, contextual, highly individualized and accurate communications for all channels.

1 IBISWorld, “Telemarketing & Call Centres - Canada Market Research Report”, January 2019.

2 Brian Cantor, “2018 CCW Market Study: The Customer Experience”, Customer Contact Week, August 27, 2018.

3 Cantor, Customer Contact Week, Ibid.

4 eMarketer, “Top 25 Countries, Ranked by Smartphone User Penetration, 2016-2021 (% of population)”, October 19, 2017.

5 Cantor, Customer Contact Week, Ibid.

Using RPA to manage contact infrastructure Continued from page CM 5 impeded the availability of test results to the right teams at the right times, with key trending and incident information not properly circulated or used to improve service over time.

With automated verification, the bank reproduced its previously manual test flows, with robots simulating the key strokes and system interactions used for each test on each platform. The bank developed more than 150 tests for its critical voice platforms globally. Dashboards provided centralized views of all tests, and the testing schedule across sites and alarms and outputs, so that local and global monitoring teams could see all issues as they happen. Access to the dashboards is based on user role, enabling the bank to provide the right level of visibility to staff, as well as limit viewing by site, country, region or globally, depending on role privileges.

As the bank went about the process of automating its manual tests, automated verification helped it uncover and fix several configuration inconsistencies across sites.

Moreover, the introduction of automation challenged the bank’s support team to ensure that service and infrastructure Issue 1 • 2019

builds were standardized globally, so that automated tests would run consistently time and time again. This focus on configuration consistency not only helped eliminate issues, but also resulted in a consistent operational platform based on a standard configuration guideline.

Thanks to the process and testing with automated verification, the bank saved more than 10,000 hours of staff-time, while also increasing the consistency and accuracy of reporting and alerting. Additionally, the solution helped the bank improve adherence to voice recording compliance, thus reducing fines. Finally, the bank’s local and global monitoring teams benefited from enhanced visibility of tests, results and issues via a central dashboard.

The foundation for a positive CX As organizations implement unique RPA solutions in the contact centre they usually start by identifying a list of current tasks and processes as candidates for automation.

Many of them are self-service processes that don’t require any human intervention, such as handling customer address changes.

Still others are hybrid processes, where RPA serves up the information an agent needs to complete a customer transaction or solve a customer problem.

If your organization is making its list of candidates for automation, don’t forget to consider innovative RPA for protecting the infrastructure that makes the allimportant phone interactions possible with your customers. That is the key to a strong, positive CX. Kelly Koelliker is director of content marketing for Verint, The Customer Engagement Company (www.verint.com).

1 Craig Le Clair, et al. “The RPA Market Will Reach $2.9 Billion By 2021”, report, Forrester Research, February 13, 2017.

making it possible for sales agents to launch sharing sessions directly from the agent desktop. The solution made it extremely easy to launch demos. At the same time, the metadata of the sharing sessions are now automatically captured as activities in the CRM, making it easy for sales management to inspect the sales process to ensure that demos are being conducted at the right sales stage. As a result, ConstructConnect has seen a 40% improvement in lead conversion, driven in part by a 66% increase in the volume of demos to new leads and its sales cycles shrink by 60%.

Providing exemplary customer service is a linchpin in capturing and retaining customers. AI can play a role in customer engagement, but ultimately humans are the best resource for closing sales and maintaining high customer satisfaction.

AI can do many things, like scheduling and compiling information, but ultimately this technology simply is not equipped to provide empathy and a caring touch to a customer’s problem. Achieving the right balance between technological advances and humanity is the way to succeed in 2019.

Tom Martin is the CEO of Glance Networks where he and his team help enterprises create the ultimate customer experience with smart, omnichannel visual engagement solutions based around integrated cobrowse, screen share, mobile app sharing and one-way agent video. For more information, visit https://www.glance.net.

1 Michele Goetz, Brandon Purcell, Craig Le Clair, Diego Lo Giudice and Mike Gualtieri, “Predictions 2019: Artificial Intelligence”, Forrester Research, report, November 6, 2018.

2 Christopher Null, “Dealing with AI backlash”, ServiceNow, blog.

3 “The ROI of humanizing customer service engagement”, DestinationCRM, webinar, April 2018.

4 Predictions 2019, Ibid.

5 Matthew Dixon, Lara Ponomareff, Scott Turner and Rick DeLisi, “Kick-Ass Customer Service”, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2017.

6 Predictions 2019, Ibid.

7 Predictions 2019, Ibid.

Protect against the AI/chatbot backlash Continued from page CM 7 (KPIs), grade sales reps and penalize underperformers. Forrester Research predicts that salespeople will start to game the system and input falsified data into systems in an effort to save face7.

There is another way to take KPI gamesmanship completely out of the equation, of course, and that’s by building frictionless workflows for agents that automatically capture KPIs in the CRM system. For example, one of our customers, ConstructConnect, a data provider for the construction industry, has integrated screen sharing technology into their CRM system,

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