Issuu

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 4 • 2019

The

Technology Issue ❯❯ How to accomplish digital transformation ❯❯ Ensuring happy B2B customers ❯❯ Text to better service ❯❯ Enabling access ❯❯ Don’t mess up messaging

Technology

How to accomplish digital transformation By Rajan Kohli

he digital future is upon us. Almost every aspect of our lives has been made easier thanks to technology, and digital transformations have dramatically changed industries from hospitality to transportation to retail. Consumers are now accustomed to controlling their own experiences. And with the rise of on-demand services, companies must adapt to retain their customers, keep up with start-ups and remain viable. So, what exactly is digital transformation? In the context of a business, it means continuously developing and evolving products, services and experiences for customers that drive increased revenue and profitability. Digital transformation is the effort and journey a company needs to undertake to truly “be digital,” not just “do digital”. And when done right, this helps enterprises deliver on their brand promise to customers.

Success redefined Digital disruption has redefined how companies determine success. In the past, success was reflected only by the bottom line, which is a lagging indicator when the world moves so fast. Today, it includes customer experience (CX), customer advocacy, nudging and many other leading indicators of business. End users expect more, because they can. With online reviews, social media and more, customers can make or break a business with the click of a button. It is up to companies to leverage digital tools to keep up with these heightened expectations and maintain brand loyalty.

CX strategy In a competitive market, CX is the sum of all interactions a customer has with a business, whether through phone, live chat, email, social media or digital marketing. The best CX strategies deliver high-level, meaningful experiences for customers at each of these touchpoints. This is why companies need to track and understand these interactions at every stage of the customer journey and understand how technology can improve the CX. We’re all familiar with using technology to help collect data from direct and indirect customer interactions while keeping regulations like PIPEDA, Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA in mind. When implemented correctly, the results are a win-win for customers and businesses. 2 | Contact management

Here are some examples: • Personalized communication. By learning more about the customers (demographics, location, engagement history), companies can better meet their needs and offer them exactly what they want. For a telecommunications company, this could allow it to know exactly whom to contact about a new plan or communicate outages; and • Channel optimization. One of the benefits of having multiple channels for customers is being able to analyze key data from a variety of sources. This provides companies with a thorough understanding of outreach trends, and it can illuminate why and how customers reach out, and how companies can optimize their channels for a desired behaviour. For example, this may mean targeting online chat options to customers who prefer electronic communication over phone calls.

Mixed results Implementing new technology can have many benefits on the CX. Yet many Canadian business leaders continue to struggle with digital transformation. A recent Wipro survey of 1,400 global C-suite leaders, including 200 in Canada, yielded several key findings about executives’ digital transformation programs and the barriers to their success. When it came to digitally transforming their businesses only 14% of Canadian business leaders said their efforts were “very successful” while 64% said their initiatives were “somewhat successful.”

Improving programs Executives shared that digital transformations seem overwhelming at first, so it’s important to adequately prepare their companies for what comes next. When organizations properly manage expectations, keep senior leaders aligned and ensure they have the right partners working with them, they see success and increased profitability. One of the best ways to ensure a successful digital transformation is to work with a partner that has expertise in both strategy and implementation. It’s never too late to start. 82% of our Canadian survey respondents believe companies that started their digital transformations later than others still have a chance to beat their competitors in the long run. Those respondents are right. The speed of return of investment (ROI) from digital transformation in Canada is striking. In fact, 18% of Canadian executives saw measurable results of their digital transformation in less than six months, 26% saw it within six to twelve months and 54% said one to three years. Our most promising finding? No one waited longer than three years to see a ROI. Digital transformation is a process, not a one-time event. Regardless of the industry, it’s never too late to innovate, especially when it comes to better serving customers. Customers increasingly drive the business process and they have options to go elsewhere. Executives who embrace the right strategy and digital tools can help ensure those customers continue to choose their company well into the digital future. Rajan Kohli is president of Wipro Digital, the digital services unit of Wipro. Issue 4 • 2019

Ensuring happy B2B customers How JDR Solutions provides excellent customer care

Sharon Miedema is on the team of JDR Solutions’ customer service representatives who handle customer contacts from their home offices.

By Steve Leer

appy customers make for happy equipment leasing executives. Often that business bliss begins with the frontline customer service representatives who answer lessee phone calls and email messages. Reps just like the seven Toronto, Ont. area women who work for JDR Solutions, Inc. The seven — Lesley Evans, Debbie Forbes, Andrea Medeiros, Sharon Miedema, Mary Mancini, Tina Ventura and Dale Barillari — juggle more than 350 inbound and outbound calls and emails each day for JDR, which provides back office services to the finance and leasing industry. The calls and emails come from JDR equipment lessor clients throughout Canada and the U.S. and run the gamut from questions about monthly payments to delinquency notices and to general lease finance information. It’s a challenging but important job in the high-paced world of lease finance. “Customer service means going above and beyond what it takes to make the customer happy,” says Mancini, “whether it is answering questions or listening to a customer’s concerns. We try to be as efficient and timely as we can and maintain a positive attitude.”

inquiries and when and how those inquiries were met. The Internet and social media also have proven invaluable. Sharon Miedema utilizes the online platforms to skip trace companies and individuals whose addresses have changed yet have not notified JDR. “Nine times out of 10 we’re able to locate them and adjust their accounts accordingly,” says Miedema. “We’ve also used the Internet to locate personal guarantors who may have moved and didn’t advise us. The Internet and social media have been fantastic tools for us.” On the hardware side, more documents are scanned and transmitted by email today than are sent to clients via fax. “Faxing has become almost obsolete,” says Medeiros.

Critical role of technology

Some processes haven’t advanced as quickly as others. One example is invoicing. Many lessors still prefer mailing paper invoices to lessees despite the trend towards electronic invoicing. That leads to more manual labour. “We spend an awful lot of time doing manual interventions to give the customer what they are looking for,” explains Evans. “That is the biggest part of my job right now. It’s probably 90% of what I do.” Customers who ask that their invoices be structured differently than ordinary invoices sent to a company’s other lessees also can pose problems. “They may ask for information that we can’t add to our system to make it display on their invoice, or they want it broken down in a certain way by group or assets, and we’re not able to do that in the system without manual intervention,” she says. “The system cannot automatically produce

Continuous improvement is an everyday goal for customer service reps. In a business climate where problem-solving often is measured in minutes, not hours, successful reps look for ways to work more efficiently. Even minor improvements in service practices can save time, and ultimately money. Technology has played a big role in moving the efficiency needle forward. Customer service reps today must be equally adept at computer applications and old school postal mail, to meet the specific needs of every lessee who calls, writes or who receives a payment notice. The JDR customer service/collections staff has seen its share of technology changes in careers that average 25 years per team member. Work that traditionally was done in one central office is now done remotely at home. Which means no traffic or weather to worry about in getting to work on time, so that customers are not left on-hold. Digital records have replaced — for the most part — paper records. What once was kept in large file cabinets now fits neatly in folders on computer desktops. “The office has become primarily virtual,” says Forbes. “It allows for faster resolutions of customer issues.” One popular go-to software package of the JDR team is the Microsoft Office Suite, particularly its Excel spreadsheet program. Excel is used to track customer Issue 4 • 2019

Moving to portals

everything some customers are looking for.” Medeiros points out that many invoice issues will be resolved as more lessors add payment portals to their web sites. A portal is a separate password-protected web page within a web site for authorized users. Most customer-dedicated portals allow users to check invoice histories, view their lease contracts, submit online credit applications and a host of other things, in addition to submitting payments. JDR builds both customerand sales staff-centric portals as a value-added service. “Customers are constantly asking about the ability to pay online, which is where a portal comes in,” says Medeiros. “Portals minimize the number of emails coming in asking for invoices, which often must be mailed to them. Customers complain that the mail is very slow and that they don’t have time to make the payment on time before they are assessed late charges. We offer to email invoices to them to make the process quicker. We’ll do what we can to help them.” Adds Forbes, “With the addition of reseller and customer self-serve portal technology, it is much easier working with clients and customers, regardless of location, time zone or when they wish to do business.” In the end, it’s all about keeping customers happy. When it’s working right — as it usually is at JDR — both the customer and the customer service rep are pleased. “We rely on good communication and listening skills, and are patient as we assist each customer,” says Mancini. “It contributes to customer satisfaction, and that is our top priority.” Steve Leer is director of marketing and business development at JDR Solutions Inc. (www.jdrsolutions.com).

Contact management | 3

Courtesy JDR Solutions

Technology

Text to better service By Ted Guggenheim

oday, business is moving faster than ever. We live in an on-demand economy. Your customers can get whatever they want — a ride to the airport, the latest Avengers movie and even a date — with the apps on their phones. With the world at their fingertips, customers expect instant service. Patience for waiting has all but disappeared, and your customers simply will not wait on hold, wait for representatives to respond to their emails and/or wait for solutions to their problems. Because it’s a consumer’s market, if you ask them to wait too often, they will simply move on to a different solution. To respond to an eager customer base quickly — without losing the personal touch — businesses need to shift their communication strategy away from phone calls and even email and towards messaging-based outreach. Think about it. You don’t even call your friends and family anymore without sending a quick text to see if they’re free to talk. So why rely on telephone outreach when it comes to customer service? Text has quickly become the preferred form of communication for today’s on-demand economy. It’s why more than 90% of customers want to message with companies, according to a cited in an Inc. article. And why over text messages are responded to 60x faster than emails reports HubSpot.

Text has quickly become the preferred form of communication. Here’s why your customer service team should start using texting today.

Move at the speed of today’s customer. Think back to the last time you had to wait for something. Maybe you were stuck in a traffic jam, or in line at Starbucks or waiting for a call back from a customer service rep. If you’re like most people, these moments of waiting for something have become few and far between. So, instead of wasting time in traffic, you might take a Lyft and get some work done during your commute. Or to combat that afternoon slump you’ll order your latte ahead on the Starbucks app, so your drink is waiting for you, instead of the other way around. And more and more, customer service teams follow the same model. They don’t make their customers wait at all: they use text messaging and other messaging services to connect them with real people in real time. 4 | Contact management

Builds better customer relationships. It’s not just quick service your customers are looking for. The on-demand economy doesn’t just bring anything to you quickly: it brings precisely what you are looking for. More and more, companies are moving away from a transactional mode of interaction — in which money is king, to a conversational mode of interaction — in which the relationships rule. The hard fact is that customer personalization has become missioncritical for businesses. A third of customers recently surveyed by Accenture, published in its report, Put Your Trust in Hyper-Relevance, said they abandoned a business relationship because personalization was lacking. And according to a Forbes article written by customer service expert Shep Hyken, poor customer service is costing businesses more than $75 billion a year. With this in mind, there are a few ways that text helps customer service teams build better relationships: • Text meets customers where they are: on their phones and on the go; • Text is instant, casual, friendly and easy to personalize, thus making it a natural tool for starting conversations; and • Text has 10x the response rate over email and phone. A text-enabled communication strategy boosts your inbound and outbound conversion rates at all points throughout your contacts’ journeys.

Texting makes phone touches more effective. When phone calls are necessary, such as for delving into more in-depth issues, discussing complex options, text messaging helps you connect by

phone more quickly and makes better use of your time once you do. Here are some tips on how to make the most of the text-phone one-two punch: 1. Text-enable your business phone number. Allowing customers to text and call you at the same number takes the guesswork out of communicating with your customer service team and makes it easier to switch between text and voice calls. Plus, when you do text-enable your number, you’ll likely find a backlog of messages from customers who have already been trying to text you! 2. Follow up on voicemails with quick texts. The majority of your contacts are not listening to their voicemails. With the popularity of voicemail-to-text features, voicemail is becoming more like text because that’s what people prefer. 3. Schedule phone calls by text. If you’ve been having trouble getting a customer on the phone, text is an unobtrusive way to find the best time for a call. It can bypass lengthy rounds of phone tag, save your team’s time and make your customers that much happier. What we talk about when we’re talking about customer service has changed. It’s not just what you communicate to customers; in this day of constant information, how you communicate with customers is increasingly crucial. Texting is a simple way to meet your customers right where they are. Ted Guggenheim is CEO and co-founder of TextUs.

Texting is a simple way to meet your customers. Issue 4 • 2019

Courtesy Semafone/iStock

Technology

Enabling access Aging customers, those with disabilities face buying/payments obstacles By Gary E. Barnett

n many organizations, the call or contact centre serves as the central hub for customer service, sales and

customer engagement. Even today, with the multitude of different communication channels available – including web sites, email, social media, online chat and more – speaking on the phone remains one of the most popular ways for consumers to connect with businesses for customer service and to make purchases. In fact, Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report shows that 74% of people choose to contact customer service departments via phone, which is more than any other channel. Why? Because people still value human interaction. Contact centre agents make customers feel valued and understood, ensure transactions are completed correctly and even up-sell or cross-sell additional products and services when appropriate. However, when it comes to making purchases or paying bills over the phone, certain members of our society face challenges. Many phone-based payments solutions require customers to manually enter their payment card details directly into telephone keypads. But elderly customers and those with disabilities may struggle to accomplish that task and require an alternative method. While advanced speech recognition applications have, to a considerable extent, resolved that problem, they are far from foolproof, they can also be frustrating to use, and keypad entry is still the fallback. The information entry Issue 4 • 2019

issue becomes exacerbated when wireless devices are used: on account of their small keypads.

Canadian accessibility requirements Like many nations, Canada’s population is growing older, driven by the aging Baby Boomer demographic. In 2016, seniors outnumbered children for the first time, according to Statistics Canada, and the imbalance has only continued to grow. At the same time, also according to Statistics Canada, one in five Canadians over the age of 15 has a disability, whether it’s related to vision, hearing, mobility or something else. To help ensure that these individuals have equal access to participate in all aspects of society, accessibility laws have been written in Canada to protect their rights and to prevent discrimination. The Accessible Canada Act, which became law in June 2019, is aimed at preventing accessibility barriers in information and communication technologies, including digital

content and the technologies used to access it. Organizations can now face a fine of up to $250,000 if they do not comply. Similarly, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) makes it compulsory for public and private sector businesses to follow established sets of accessibility standards. This is relatively straightforward when it comes to ensuring that a businesses’ web site(s) are accessible because the standards are published.

Multi-channel challenges However, difficulties can emerge when a business is dealing with multi-channel customer engagement. Most of Canada’s current accessibility regulations focus on setting standards for a single customer engagement channel (such as the web site) and tend not to consider customers’ needs in situations where they start in one channel but then switch to another to complete the transaction. With the rise of personal, digital voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Contact management | 5

Technology Google Home, many people no longer need to physically dial a business’s number on their phone. Instead, they simply issue voice commands, such as “Siri, call Hydro.” The ability to use voice commands to manage routine daily tasks like this has dramatically improved accessibility and the quality of life for many people living with disabilities. However, when a customer uses a voice command to call a contact centre, but then is forced to switch from voice commands to using the telephone keypad in order to input their payment card information, it can be frustrating, thereby negatively affecting their customer experience (CX). It may even cause the customer to abandon the call, potentially causing the business to miss out on sales revenue.

A new technology and practice Given Canada’s aging population and its accessibility legislation, businesses must begin to design multi-channel accessibility as standard in their customer journeys. Fortunately, new, multi-channel payments solutions are emerging that enable them to seamlessly and securely accept payments across any channel, while improving accessibility, compliance and the CX. For example, live voice capture technology allows callers to make payments over the phone without needing to physically input their payment card details into the telephone keypads. Callers are on the lines with contact centre agents or salespeople as opposed to computerized or automated speech recognition voice assistants. When

it comes time for the customers to make their payments, the agents or sales personnel places the calls into a secure voice capture mode and the callers speaks their sensitive payment card details aloud. The agents/sales personnel cannot hear the sensitive payment card details, but they are able to monitor customers’ progress and follow each steps of the payment transactions, while remaining available if the customers need help at any points along the way. Once the payment data is captured, the agents/sales personnel can take back control of the calls to complete the transactions and collect any additional nonsensitive information that is required. With live voice capture technology the customer’s sensitive payment data are securely routed directly to the payment processors. This both helps keep their sensitive data secure and reduces the risk of fraud or data breaches because the data are not collected, recorded or stored by the contact centre. Likewise, because the agent/salesperson on the line cannot

hear the payment card details, there is no risk of a malicious employee copying down a customer’s card numbers and using it for nefarious purposes. And because the payment card data never touches the contact centre network, the technology helps keep the contact centre in compliance with data security and privacy regulations and standards. At the same time the easy-to-use nature of the technology and the fact that a customer simply speaks their sensitive data makes it an ideal solution for elderly customers and those with disabilities, enabling the business to comply with Canada’s accessibility regulations. With the right mix of technologies, businesses can provide a convenient and highly secure, multi-channel sales process, thereby delivering accessibility and inclusivity without compromising on security and the customer experience. Gary E. Barnett is CEO of Semafone.

Don’t mess up messaging A light touch is key for successful customer communications By Cliff Bell

n theory, digital tools make things easier for people. But that’s not always true in our hyperconnected, app-fatigued and always-on lives. When it comes to technology, there’s a whole lot of friction caused by the mental labour required to use our ever-growing list of “simple” tools. But what if communications between businesses and consumers was as easy as a text message? The way we communicate with friends is not radically different than when we’re trying to communicate with companies. We’re working through logistics, providing information and getting answers back to make a joint plan. The rise of messaging platforms like Apple Business Chat and WhatsApp Business have the potential to alleviate friction, but only if brands are intelligent in their use of this communications channel. The key is to learn from past failures and abuses (see email) and to respect the admittedly fuzzy boundaries of acceptable behaviour that consumers have already established for messaging exchanges. 6 | Contact management

Changing tools and behaviours Digitalization hasn’t replaced any of the ways we talk to one another: it’s just added new choices. Your mom still leaves voice messages on your ancient answering machine. Your employer insists on Outlook for external correspondence, although Asana or Slack are your internal preferences. Your sullen teenager only speaks with you via emoji. You still need to call, email, text and Tweet to get your co-worker to answer a question. These multiple choices require management and can add complexity to your daily life. Thus, there’s a never-ending search for an allpowerful tool that will work best for everything that doesn’t transpire

face-to-face. Right now, that tool is a messaging platform.

Messaging magic Be it WhatsApp or WeChat or Viber or Telegram, billions of people, according to industry sources, have signed on to the messaging bandwagon. This is bigger than mere texting. Messaging platforms allow people to exchange images, GIFs, video and audio. And they are rapidly enabling access to myriad other services and applications, such as ordering lunch, setting appointments, buying gifts and tracking shipments. Messaging technology supports incredible communicative flexibility, all within a single personalized environment. As the platforms mature, they will let you deploy Issue 4 • 2019

Technology almost every mode of digital communication within one app. It’s no wonder people are embracing the charms of messaging in droves. And where people go, businesses follow. Messaging offers companies more than a novel venue for advertising. It represents a new means for doing business and popular platforms are lining up to welcome commerce. Witness WeChat miniprograms or Facebook’s launch of WhatsApp Business and its Calibra digital wallet for Libra, its new cryptocurrency, which will be available in Messenger, WhatsApp and as a standalone app. Already, individual investors can even fund a TD Ameritrade brokerage account with Apple Pay through Apple Business Chat. But brand forays into messaging require finesse.

Conversations ebb and flow It’s important to consider what is driving users to the messaging world. People adopt these platforms because they support a new model of ultra-convenient, asynchronous (start-stop-and continue-at-will) communication. With messaging you can have in-the-moment, realtime exchanges, broadcast to groups large and small, with innumerable stop-and-go threads. You can conduct meandering one-on-one conversations extending as long as you like, and you’re free to enter and exit them on your own timetable, to suit your needs. For brands, it is a behavioural transformation to have conversations with consumers in the way they already communicate with their peers and friends. As this ebb-and-flow custom takes root, it’s important that brands are able to engage with the same kind of convenience that their customers have come to expect through messaging. Many younger consumers may become frustrated at a company’s unresponsiveness, not realizing that their requests went into limbo because the company phone number doesn’t receive texts. But here’s where finesse enters the picture. There is a key difference between the way we communicate with friends and family versus the way we would communicate in an asynchronous world with businesses, and it relates directly to expectation.

Who controls the clock? With messaging, the expectation on the customer side is asynchronous communication, with continued conversations. If they come back in two minutes, two hours, two days, two weeks or two years, they want that

Issue 4 • 2019

business to pick up the thread correctly — and instantly — with the information that’s already been given in the stream of the conversation they’ve been having. On the business side, it is definitely not acceptable to respond in an equally whim-based asynchronous manner, but the customs of conduct are still a bit loosey-goosey. WhatsApp’s enterprise product instituted a 24-hour window for brands to reply to consumer messages before incurring charges to encourage business responsiveness and a growth feedback loop. But messaging platforms require restraint from over-solicitousness. It would be quite off-putting if a customer service agent sent an “R U still there?” inquiry in a messaging thread. That pressure for a response is the worst thing to do in an asynchronous world, where the expectation is that the customer controls the clock and will reply to the agent on their own timetable. Brand messaging practices will require nuance to be of service without seeming pushy or smug or discourteously familiar.

Those who forget the past … The growing popularity of messaging platforms presents an opportunity for brands to correct the failures that drive users away from other communication technologies. For example, feature bloat on business web sites can ruin the user experience by making it hard for customers to find the needle in the overwhelming haystack of information. But with an asynchronous messaging thread, customers should be presented with only the answer they want, based on what they’ve asked. To keep the thread clear and

simple, brands must exercise restraint. If a customer service agent can send video when it would be more effective than text, great! And if the agent can send images or take payments or send options, fine, but only if needed. If messaging is to remain compelling and convenient for the customer, brand responses should be driven by necessity. There’s also a lesson to learn from the original digital asynchronous communication technology: email. The danger is that brands may see the same financial incentives that drove them to abuse email as a marketing spam channel. Consumer embrace of messaging has a direct correlation to it not becoming a perceived nuisance like email, which is now largely an archive facility. That’s partly why we keep our friends and family on the message thread: they don’t pound us with stuff that we didn’t ask for and don’t like.

Brighter future The asynchronous way people now communicate with one another in their personal lives is turning into an expectation for the business contact centre as well. With messaging platforms, businesses have an opportunity to be intelligently proactive in addressing customer needs: as long as they respect the customer’s time and the emerging platform etiquette. If a business can resist the temptation to turn its messaging platform into a spam channel, it will serve as a huge differentiator in the modern customer experience. Cliff Bell is senior director of the Innovations Foundry at Genesys (www.genesys.com).

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