Intelligent Customer Service
For CEO, COO, Customer, Brand Executives, CIO and CHROs
Great customer experience differentiates your brand and creates new business value
What if you could pre-empt your customers needs before they even contact you. And what if you could make changes to your customer operations, channels, apps and offers at the speed of what your customers are telling you from one day to the next.
Just think...your business could significantly differentiate itself from your competition. You could offer a level of experience and service that your customers wouldn't want to go anywhere else!
The reality of experience and expectation
Customers' (and citizens in context of the public sector) needs hadn't changed all that much over the last 30 years. Customers wanted friendly, human interactions to help them resolve a problem or query fast, hopefully only taking a single phone call. The issue since the 90s with a shift away from face to face service to more cost-centric call centres and large scale outsourcing was that ‘customer service’ was deliberately designed to handle customer complaints and resolve questions as quickly as possible at the lowest possible cost. This resulted in a steady decline in actual experience of the customer and the customer service agent who was trying to help them.
Digital strategies in the 2000-10s then bred disjointed channels of service across websites, chatbots, agent chat, phone, email, sms, messaging apps, and social media. This compounded a frustrating customer service and experience hitting all time lows particularly in the last couple of years.
We can all recall a frustrating experience where you have had to wait an agonisingly long time on hold, then finally speak to an agent who doesn't know who you are or what you are calling about. You've had to relay a lot of information based on the agents initial screening questions, perhaps then you were put through to another agent, only to be asked the same questions again. You might even have been told they couldn’t help you on the phone and recommended you go to a website to resolve your issue or download and email a form. Annoying, time consuming and impersonal, right?
The COVID pandemic was the fundamental tipping point where many businesses and organisations suddenly realised how ill-equipped they were to deal with the crisis and unable to offer help to their customers when they needed it most. In many cases, organisations had no ability to run customer contact centre remotely at all, leaving customers with little or no basic customer services and basically told not to call for customer support. This has destroyed customers' trust in many organisations. And trust, as we all know, takes an awfully long time to rebuild.
But we've moved on.
Customers' expectations of great customer services are at an all time high. So too are the expectations of contact centre agents and customer care specialists. They want engaging and fulfilling work, and to enjoy helping customers solve their more complex problems.
Experience is your brand differentiator, new capabilities needed
Leading organisations now understand that the quality of customer experience is now the brand differentiator; trust and loyalty is gold.
Putting in place capabilities that build customer loyalty also help to drive revenue. Capabilities in this context mean:
Modern operating models (processes and people) for customer experience that cut across the organisation.
This means services designed for the customer are agnostic of organisational departments. Teams (both human and machine) are aligned to ways of working, and processes and data are designed to heighten and ensure the quality of customer experience. This does not mean that automating bad processes will make them better. This needs a careful decomposition of essential processes to identify real productivity gains. This might also mean changing traditional job roles and organisational structures to reflect a new nature of customer experience and ways of working for your teams. Human/machine combinations can enhance problem-solving, decision-making and boost employee engagement and overall productivity so have productive conversations with your teams on how work can be done. Think about spectrums - low value vs high value customer interactions, time efficient vs time consuming tasks, enjoyable vs not-so-enjoyable work, dumb things we do vs great things we should do.
Effective design of communications, product and service information, forms and documents.
These must be geared to what customers need in plain, easy-to-read human language. This is for consumer readability and understanding. This not only helps customers to trust your organisational brand, but it should align with the brand you are present to the market. Research has shown it actually helps improve an organisation’s productivity gains. For example, helping internal teams taking less time to draft, read and approve documentation, avoiding duplication and mis-information, ensuring both teams and customers are reading the most up-to-date and authorative content, and reducing call volumes because customers actually understand the information communicated to them. A recent article in the press cited that almost 45 per cent of Australian adults are unable to read beyond primary-school level. This might surprise you but ultimately this may cause you to re-evaluate your customer-facing communications, information and documents that you are presenting your organisation’s brand through. Locally and internationally, customers are becoming more aware of the plain language movement and certification services available to organisations so focus and expectations will only become greater in the future.
Use of customer and corporate data to enable intelligent and personalised customer interactions.
This means thinking of 'front stage' capabilities like customer interaction design across any channel. Think what data can be 'surfaced' to make that customer interaction personalised or can be used to create a new or better interaction. Think how might you move from a very reactive mode of customer interactions to more pre-emptive and pro-active modes to engage customers based on your organisation developing a deeper understanding of that customer, their interaction contexts and preferences.
Think what contextual information can be captured in each customer interaction, and then passed to a human agent. So say, if the customer starts in a chatbot on a website and then wishes to speak to a human agent to help resolve their query. In this instance, an agent with the context of the customer's information and their chat with the bot will undoubtably provide both a better and faster interaction for both customer and agent.
This can help you foster greater customer intimacy.
Baseline your current call centre and channel technologies with modern ‘as a service’ platforms.
Modern customer technologies are easy to deploy, change and support and enable organisations to design great 'connected' customer experiences across any channel. Think of these as your organisation’s 'back stage' capabilities. Many modern contact centre or communications platforms are low code/no-code giving business teams new agility and abilities. For example, contact centre leaders can make call flow changes on a chosen channel on the fly (in minutes) where previously an organisation might have to wait for an IT team to stand up a project to deliver the changes (in weeks and months in some cases).
Additionally, with modern platforms, significant real estate outlays for contact centre space and fitouts and major technology investments cycles, and needing specialist coding langugage skills are no longer necessary. These platforms also help to 'join' disjointed channels, giving customers a true omni-channel experience preserving interaction context over channel and over time. This also means agents can do away with multiple systems and can have a more connected view of the customer and their needs. Agents can now have in ‘a single pane of glass’ on their laptop connecting an organisation’s systems, data and agent-assist AI and knowledge-base tools at their fingertips to do their best work. Couple that with agents being able to work from anywhere, they are your happy, loyal advocates from your organisation, and the old saying of 'Happy agent, happy customer' becomes a very real and expected outcome.
With what modern technologies now offer, leading organisations are now reshaping their overall on/offshore workforce mixes and outsourcing agreements that now demand a better cost-benefit and overall experience equation for their organisation.
Data and interaction-driven insights that organisations can act on at the front line, in customer operations, at product/brand/corporate levels.
Between 'front and back stage', these are crucial capabilities for organisations to put in place. The technology exists now whereby channel interaction data can trigger automated tasks like intelligent call routing or present insights to operational managers in real-time. For example, event trending insights on what customers are calling about today and giving the manager the option to make communications or other changes on the fly to react and pre-emptively handle call spikes based on a continued event. Think of an insurer using third-party weather data to proactively contact customers about a weather event and make changes to call routing to pre-empt a call spike in customer enquires and schedule claims assessments based on the weather event and anticipated number of calls and subsequent applications for claims. Even simpler, a pro-active offer to discount a customer’s premium by a nominal amount before a customer thinks about shopping around. If you make it easy to earn customer loyalty and trust, the opportunity cost is significantly lower than retrying to retain a customer by other means or the impact of customer attrition and the investment to attract a new customer to make up for the lost one.
Whilst call volumes, wait times, average handling times, and time to resolution are all still important operational metrics, leading organisations now recognise intelligent customer services bring new business value and insights. These organisations have also moved past NPS and relentless pursuit of feedback through customers surveys. You would be lucky to get a meaningful completion rate in the first instance. Surveys don't link customer experiences to value. Executives realise these are primative instruments previously used to ascertain the quality of customer service. Data-driven insights now tell organisations a wealth of more accurate and relevant behavioural and contextual information without having to ask the customer.
Data-driven insights from customer services operations directly linked to corporate goals now give the C-suite and Board near real-time insights into how they are driving overall business value. Better metrics like overall customer cost to serve, cost to serve by channel by product, speed to conversion, revenue growth by channel by customer segment now enable executives to make more informed decisions based on an entirely new level of intelligent customer experience.
Where to start, how to deliver value
Over the years, we have helped many organisations think out their modern customer experience journey in all of the dimensions outlined above. Based on the breadth of the change and the need to act with speed, executives often ask where to start and what is the best delivery model.
We think about this an outcome-based approach to business value. Value can be evaluated based on the relative customer experience gain, the speed to deliver the gain, and the cost benefit of the gain in business/agent/customer terms.
The initial output is a value-based prioritised backlog of initiatives that can be incrementally executed. No big-bang, long technology programs here. The principles that organisations adopt are:
we re-imagine our customer experience, a strategy to deliver outstanding and differentiated brand experience to earn customer true and loyalty
we ensure a continued upwards trajectory of benefits based on incremental change, customer and agent service improvements, enhancement and new capabilities
we prioritise our capabilities for the customer experience gain and cost benefit, we do this agnostic of lines of business - we adopt a build once, apply to many style of capability deployment for scale
we focus on speed to realised value, and our incremental approach has a lower overall cost burn over time, we don't make heavier investments up front, avoiding buying capabilities or licences that are packaged but may not be needed
we deliver with tighter, more focussed scope - this means we can deliver initiatives that are generally less complex and lower risk to design, test, train, deploy, maintain and enhance
We find the best organisations embarking on re-imagined customer experience strategy and design avoid the temptation to push customers to automated channels and shield human agents with over-engineered AI bots and digital agents. These organisations are sensitive to different customer segments and their preferences. Not everyone wants to speak to an AI agent. The most important word is ‘choice’. Depending on the customer and depending on their type of query, some customers may have a preference and choose to use an digital agent instead of a human agent and this often does give a better overall outcome for both customers and the organisation.
However these organisations never make the mistake that AI can create a relationship with a customer. Humans will always pick up the humble telephone and need to talk to a human in their time of need.
The human to human connection is a necessity and this is as important as ever for customer experience and loyalty.
Are you ready for the next step on your modern journey?
Thoroughly Modern Journeys is business design practice that helps senior executives to get the best value from technology to improve their businesses. We are passionate about building business value helping executives and their teams design their organisations to be more customer and employee centric, and sustainable.
Ciaran O'Connell is the founder and Managing Partner of Thoroughly Modern Journeys. He has worked with many Australian and international public and private sector companies to evaluate and exploit emerging and disruptive technologies. Ciaran has helped these clients develop new business models, technology strategies, operating and organisational models and implement complex technology-enabled solutions to improve their businesses.
