By centralizing all customer interactions into an integrated digital engagement platform, companies can create quality call centers that improve the customer experience.
Across corporate industries call centers are managing an ever-growing list of more complex processes digitally, be it onboarding (i.e. account opening), regulation adherence, approvals, customer authentication, and data intelligence gathering. While the majority of these tasks are completed digitally, all too often many crucial steps are occurring off the digital sphere. These non-digital activities include printing paper to collect signatures and data or to confirm activities. As innocuous as these non-digital and often paper-based activities appear, they in fact, have a detrimental effect in a call center’s ability to maximize their productivity.
Every time an activity occurs off the digital sphere valuable data that could be used to inform operational improvement is lost. At the same time, human effort is increased not only due to the additional steps involved in manual activities, but also due to the time involved in transmitting data from paper to digital.
Furthermore, the absence of an integrated digital approach to customer operations engenders disorganization. Precious time is wasted trying to streamline and coordinate a disparate collection of platforms, applications, and digital tools. Such tools may include the live video chat, email generation platform, customer relationship management platform or the corporate database. While each of these platforms is dedicated to addressing a slightly variant need, none are designed to optimize the entire customer experience. In effect, each one becomes a segregated silo where there is limited integration and limited ability to automate cross-system workflows. Finally, the customer experience is compromised, as disorganization takes its toll on the ability to provide optimal customer care.
The Quality Call Center
A centralized digital engagement platform enables call centers to “vertically integrate” their entire customer operations; from sourcing and creating the necessary administrative tools, delivering service pathways to customers, and providing quality customer engagements. Each of these can be broken down into a three-stage process of content creation, flexible publication and dynamic engagement.
Content Creation. One multifunctional platform should be used to create all forms of content; be it screens for the app, application forms, program updates or campaign promotions. This provides an easy reference and cross view of all content to ensure that the design, tone and messaging remains consistent.
It’s important that at the content creation stage comprehensive digital self-service journeys can also be designed and created. Teams focused on the customer experience can map the work flows that customers will go through in order to address a range of activities, and have the relevant content served to them in an automated process. The visual journeys, that could be accessed via an app or a digital IVR system, must be able to provide endless flexibility to adequately address a large range of customer issues.
Flexibly Publish. From the single content creation platform, it is important that these digital pathways, visual screens, application forms or tactical documents can be published to whichever channel your customers are choosing to interact with you.
An increasingly prioritized operational objective is to deliver the most complete experience regardless of whom, or where the customer happens to be. Whether the customer accesses the website from their home PC, the app while on the way to work or the visual IVR at the office, the customer should be able to enjoy an identical experience. Furthermore, even if a customer starts an interaction in one medium, they should be able to complete their activity in another medium without any interruption. For example, conduct product research on their smartphone, commence the purchase process on their computer, call up an agent to ask questions, and then provide supporting documentation via their tablet. Never having to start from the beginning, but picking up at the same point they concluded their previous interaction.
Dynamically Engage. Dynamism lies at the heart of a quality call center. On the one hand a call center needs to provide customers with the opportunity to complete more tasks in self-service, on the other hand, when it comes to more complex or sensitive matters, a tool that enhances the quality of communication becomes necessary.
For activities where human interaction is desired, the customer should be able to seamlessly enter into an agent portal over the one centralized digital engagement platform. The agent portal, should provide a rich variety of tools that enhance the quality of communication. Such collaboration tools may include the ability to share screens, participate in a live chat, co-browse complex documents, or exchange rich media such as images. The objective is to assist the agent in their communication with the customer, so that issues are efficiently resolved and in a way that supports customer experiences.
Better Companies, Satisfied Customers
WIth its focus on optimizing the ease and access of customer self-service, and agent-caller collaboration, a centralized and integrated customer engagement platform harnesses the opportunity to automate workflows, reduce the demand on human labor and focus effort on more complex calls. This leaves call call center agents to do what they do best, provide effective human contact that builds customer loyalty and trust.
