Do you see your contact center operation as a cost, revenue or value center? If you are anything like the majority of businesses worldwide, you may say a cost center with plans afoot for its transformation into a value-based function. Customers are changing, and your company is changing with it. The issue, however, is that while your services and products evolve to keep pace with users, your contact center operation, the face of your company, may be lagging. Don’t worry. You’re not alone.
Today, many unprecedented changes have blindsided businesses across the globe. Customers have more choice than ever before. The market is the most competitive it ever has been, and, most importantly, it’s never been more comfortable for your clients to take their business elsewhere. That’s why the ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences is crucial to the success of your organization. Customer experience will soon supersede product features and even price as the reason people choose your company. Customers have incredibly high expectations of CX, especially true if you’re a large company with a loyal user base. However, while investments in operations and hiring can help you run an always-on customer support operation, they can’t help make your systems, people, and processes smarter overnight.
On the one hand, companies must deal with disconnected legacy systems and processes that make for poor customer experience. On the other, the gap between consumer expectations and company platforms means that agents juggle multiple applications and screens, all while managing increasingly difficult expectations for AHT and first call resolution. Combined with the fact that technology and processes are usually resistant to chance, a substantial challenge emerges. Even if businesses can find the budgets to carry out this capital-intensive transformation, they have to manage a complex change management exercise and the potential consequences such as increased attrition and reduced customer satisfaction, at least in the medium term.
The time to change is now. Companies that don’t transform their customer experience framework soon will struggle to survive, much less thrive. First, businesses must move their contact center thinking to a quality-driven approach from a cost-driven approach. Then, they must work out if they measure the right metrics for success. Once that process is complete, it is essential to assess the factors affecting performance before running a thorough top-down evaluation against best-in-class benchmarks. It is pertinent to note at this stage, that organizations shouldn’t just think about how they can move a step or two forward, but be prepared to redesign the way they do things. What if a whole operation could be automated? In some instances, would it be possible to offer a better customer experience by eliminating the need to phone or chat with an agent? With technology today capable of servicing practically every requirement, why aren’t companies harnessing it better?
It is widely accepted that knowledgeable and proactive staff and pre-emptive resolution are the characteristics that determine truly exceptional customer experiences. In our experience, while these qualities still stand, you would be surprised at the number of firms that fall short. Don’t look too far beyond for examples. Just think about your own recent experiences dealing with contact centers. Was the agent aware of your problem before you explained it in detail? Did they manage to address your query on a single call? Were you given contextual and relevant advice that served your purpose and strengthened your relationship with the company? Before you go ahead and answer those questions, consider the agent’s perspective. Was the agent empowered with the right tools and training that offered a comprehensive view of the customer? Do they feel like their job is to add value and not just rush through to meet an increasingly challenging AHT metric? The fact of the matter is that customers don’t think much of the state of current customer service and think it could get even worse. That’s why we decided to fix it.
Who does a great customer experience genuinely serve – Is it the business, contact center agents, or your customers? The only right answer is all three and that’s the purpose on which AssistEdge Engage was built, our automation and AI-powered solution designed to inject efficiency into your contact center operations. When we designed AssistEdge Engage, we set out to create a comprehensive solution that could help businesses reimagine and automate processes for effectiveness and quality, enable agents with the insights, skills, and tools to excel at their work, all of which is directed towards offering customers an exceptional experience. The platform does all that and more. Here is a glimpse of the tool’s powerful benefits:
For Companies
- Helps unlock the power of AI and automation for business success without the capital-intensive investment associated with a transformation exercise
- Provides the foundation and analytics to improve the efficiency of the contact centre continuously
- An integrated platform that improves operational agility, strengthens compliance, improves customer relationships, and generates valuable business insights by making continuous learning intrinsic to the contact center workflow
- Better customer experience & understanding to drive higher success rates for cross-selling and up-selling
AssistEdge Engage for Agents
- A single intuitive & intelligent dashboard that provides a unified view of all applications and all customer information on a clean and user-friendly UI
- One-click protocols to quickly build and customize powerful automations that free up valuable time
- Contextual and on the job training to serve customers with confidence while learning new or changed processes
AssistEdge Engage for Consumers
- An exceptional experience delivered by a contact centre agent who knows the products and services you use, can identify and resolve your query at speed, and has a good understanding of all previous interactions
- Higher specificity and knowledge of your context reducing the time you spend on the call
- A significantly higher percentage of issues solved successfully in the first contact
- A stronger relationship with service providers and a deeper understanding of new products and services that could benefit them
A standout feature of AssistEdge Engage is that it can be implemented straight out of the box since it integrates easily with your existing enterprise applications, with zero changes to your current IT landscape. The time and investment saved will reduce your time to market, time to value, the total cost of ownership, and increase your profitability. By improving the agent experience, the solution also has a direct effect on your attrition and employee satisfaction. The most crucial advantage is for your consumers. Through an intelligent results-driven framework, AssistEdge Engage’s frictionless performance substantially improves customer satisfaction, priming your business for a phase of unprecedented growth. You could even call it magic.
Click here to discover how AssistEdge Engage can help you create customer experiences befitting your organization’s reputation and goals.
