Leverage Digital To Drive CX Continuity in a Crisis

Coronavirus continues to drive rapid, unimagined change across the world. So much so that for many, when looking back just several weeks, the world of work today is barely recognizable.

Now that companies have absorbed the initial business disruption caused by the COVID-19, it’s becoming clear that the next step to take will be adapting organizations and their customer experience (CX) delivery to a reality where, whether widespread or localized, shutdowns may be the norm for months, or even years to come.

Brands that act rapidly to adapt to this new reality and create consistent experiences that offer customers straightforward, accessible support through the crisis will be the brands that consumers continue to rely on when the pandemic is behind us. Emotional brand engagement and loyalty can be built by consistently meeting everyday needs and demonstrating that your brand is taking steps to adapt and actively align with customer expectations, as they continue being reshaped by this crisis.

For example, companies leveraging technology to deliver secure, efficient work from home solutions such as those offered through Sitel at Home are creating continuity of customer experience delivery for a number of brands.

As well as offering a more resilient platform for meeting customers’ needs, Sitel at Home ensures the health and well-being of employees – an immediate and top priority for many businesses. Yet, enabling agents to work from their homes and in doing so continue to engage with customers, while an important element, is only one piece of the CX continuity puzzle.

For the greatest positive impact, work at home needs to be deployed alongside digital innovations that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation to eliminate effort from your customer journey and ease the burden on your contact center employees.

Empower your customers

With the right combination of intelligent digital CX solutions, you can put your customers in control. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system will cut customer wait times when calling a contact center. Instead of having to hold until an agent is available, you can present customers with voice-activated or (if it’s a visual IVR) on-screen options for solving a problem or addressing an issue without the need for human interaction and even offer them the option of moving to live chat, social messaging or using a text-based chatbot. What’s more, these automated options are live 24/7 – meaning your customers always have access to information.

Take it further and integrate the IVR and chatbot with your existing self-service portal and customer-facing knowledge base so that they are empowered to resolve their own problems regarding issues such as billing inquiries, account questions, password resets and order tracking.

Empower your agents

The role of your contact center agents should be to connect with and engage customers in instances where an interaction will add value to the customer relationship, to the brand and, ideally, to both. It’s in those moments where compassion, empathy and expert knowledge come together to solve a problem for a customer that your front-line CX staff are engaged and empowered and delivering an experience that technology cannot replicate.

With an IVR and chatbots helping to reduce the number of calls coming into the contact center, you reduce the pressure on your agents and also ensure that more of their time is spent on value-adding activities.

But digital innovation doesn’t stop there. Leveraging AI and automation contacts can be intelligently routed to the agent most able to deliver a first-contact resolution. The same technology can be used to screen as well as route incoming contacts so agents don’t get too many similar requests during a shift.

With AI and natural language processing (NLP), the information given by customers during calls can be captured automatically and used to populate forms and fields, eliminating repetitive tasks and potential transposition errors.

While as part of a speech analytics platform, the same technology can be used to monitor every conversation in real-time and deliver corrective coaching or greater agent support each time it is needed.

In our own contact centers, this approach improves the outcome of over 40% of voice-based calls; the figure is even higher when the technology is used for supporting agents who are new to a campaign or who are helping to meet volume surges.

A bright idea

Coronavirus casts a long shadow and with the combined challenge of fewer available staff and a greater volume of customer contacts, many organizations are struggling to move into the light.

But with intelligent digital solutions, companies can illuminate the customer experience. For brands seeking stronger connections with their customers, embracing these technological tools will enable them to harness the power of analytics to transform data into actionable insights and leverage AI to create seamless, consistent experiences.

Digital solutions can empower your customers, drive agent efficiency, fuel first-time resolution and increase customer satisfaction. But, don’t confuse these capabilities with a pandemic panacea. Combining agents’ emotional intelligence with proven AI is always a CX best practice.

Coronavirus is simply the reason why you need to embrace (and accelerate) that best practice now. 

To support our clients through the current global health crisis, Sitel Group is offering a wide variety of innovative and fast to implement solutions designed to add immediate value for your customers. From FAQ bots delivered in as little as a day, to chat and messaging solutions with no client costs for the first 60 days, contact us to see how Sitel Group can support your business today.