There’s a mantra for the new normal: Don’t waste my time. The novel coronavirus sent organisations scrambling to assert their dominance in the digital space, and with this came a renewed focus on seamless, easy interfaces across all channels. Customers, now more than ever, demand effortless experiences with those they do business with. But it hasn’t always been this way.
Until recently, companies mostly consumed CX solutions independently, often in siloes and frequently only loosely orchestrated. While I can’t arbitrarily dictate all companies should plot an immediate course to deliver effortless experiences, those who differentiated and sustained a people-first strategy built lifetime loyalty internally and externally. Here’s how:
(Great) experience comes first
Brand perception is cemented through consumer and citizen experience. Stickiness and loyalty are fleeting if organisations cannot deliver effortless experiences in a sustained and orchestrated manner. We believe when you leave out pieces from that omnichannel and intelligent automation roadmap, you’ll likely come up short of enabling intelligently enabled, customer-inspired experience.
People and technology need to be built into the quilt of effortless experiences. As I’ve written before, a seamless experience allows customers to easily navigate the channels and services your organisation offer while never missing a beat. The foundation of a great customer experience begins and ends with:
- Customer-centricity: Identify the most critical customer touch points and journeys that need improving. Rather than aiming for all the above, narrow down on the most common areas of frustration and pounce on it with data analytics, voice-of-the-customer and voice-of-the-employee.
- Intelligent automation: Often-overlooked aspects like multiple login screens, redundant forms, and call disposition processes can be untapped opportunities for productivity and efficiency improvements. Automate simple, repeatable tasks with robotic process and desktop automation. Introduce intelligent virtual assistants to help your customers find the information they need easily and instantly
- Channel optimisation: Shift channel focus to customer focus for a more well-rounded understanding of the customer and their value to the business. This way, relevant triggers and actions can be automated or semi-automated to enable a more cohesive, valuable experience that doesn’t take years to build.
- Scaling operations: Get buy-in from the top and ripple that throughout the entire organisation. With a customer focus, traditional siloes can be overcome with a collaborative, cohesive organisation that embraces customer centricity and shares goals around delivering effortless interactions.
Effortless is not a destination. It’s an ongoing journey that requires constant tuning and improvements over time. It's these insights that enables TTEC Digital to orchestrate CX across an extended enterprise by bringing systems together, front to back.
Effortless experiences in times of need
We continue to see a shift toward segments that are experiencing overwhelming voice channel demand since the pandemic began—the public sector serving citizens in so many ways, and in healthcare and financial services assisting through confusion and hardships, for example. This is all contributing to an accelerated move to digital channels of service to address opportunities to augment agent experience and optimise the consumer or citizen experience, all in near-real-time.
For example, we recently delivered an end-to-end CX services outcome which included contact centre technology, virtual associates and messaging channels to citizens seeking pandemic-related unemployment assistance in a U.S. state. The solution has delivered both cost savings to the state and improved services to unemployed citizens.
The state’s Bureau of Unemployment Insurance swiftly deployed TTEC’s cloud contact centre solution early into the crisis to provide immediately available, highly scalable and secure at-home technology and agent solutions to support the needs of its unemployed citizens and ensure continuity. TTEC also partnered with the State’s Bureau of Unemployment Insurance to identify new opportunities to improve citizen satisfaction and reduce costs through digital channel expansion.
The first step was to get live agent messaging in place as a convenient and preferred contact channel. Within days this new digital channel was available to give callers facing long hold times the option to conduct conversations via messaging. They could now quickly and conveniently access vital information about unemployment payment status, appeal processes, website login issues, filing new claims and eligibility questions via messages on their mobile devices.
Within 2 weeks of making live messaging available:
- Nearly 35% of all voice calls were deflected to messaging
- The state realized a 50% cost-per-interaction savings compared to the voice channel
- Messaging associates closed 3.5 times as many contacts per hour as voice associates
Solutions such as this are imperatives to form the backbone of Digital Customer and Citizen Experience as a service.
It’s time to open the next door
The pandemic cleared the way for digital transformation and a new era has begun. Now we make the most of it. The CX winners will be those who can intelligently automate with the best of both human and technical capabilities to empower employees and customers. As we go forward, it’s incredibly important to make sure that the digital front door leads to amazing possibilities.
