The power of 3: Your guide to putting the human back into your CX delivery
There’s no denying that technology in customer service is a wonderful thing. Software tools and digital channels deliver huge benefits to customers, such as convenience, speed and 24/7 availability. For businesses it can reduce call volume and empower agents to respond to more complex problems. But have you swung too far towards the digital experience and lost sight of the experience your customers actually want from you?
How do you strike that right balance?
If you want to ensure your CX strategy has enough of the ‘human-touch’ in it, there are three key aspects of your operations to take a closer look at: People, Processes and Technology.
Attracting and recruiting the right people
How?
- Through offering not just attractive salaries and benefits, but strong company values, and lifestyle and wellbeing options.
Do your advisors have to work in the office? Working from home opens up the talent pool, as do
recruitment practices such as Impact Sourcing – providing career opportunities to people from disadvantaged communities. Consider offshoring too, as location should really be no barrier these days. A big plus in the current climate of skills shortages.
Empowering employees
How?
- Through training and skills development
An agent who is always learning feels engaged, knowledgeable and confident, making it easier to solve customer problems or queries on the spot. Which is better for everyone. That said, there are some skills that are more complex. Skills where it’s not as simple as taking a course, like empathy – essential for a positive human CX. Which brings us back around to recruiting the right people.
Keeping employees engaged
How?
- Through a community mentality, everyone’s in, and supported, wherever they work.
It’s all about building a positive company culture and enjoyable work environment, where employees are treated well, and feel happy and appreciated. Human-centric values are important and should be embedded in everything you do. Regular communication and company activities (online or offline) really work here. Learning and development is important for engagement too, with clear opportunities for career progression, or trying something new.
Choosing the right operating hours
HOW?
- By ensuring they fit with your customers needs and requirements.
While we’re not necessarily advocating 24/7 (although increasingly that is what some customers expect), extended hours and weekend hours mean that customers can call outside of their own work day. Look at your data to check when you get the most requests, and of which type. Is there a particular day of the week, or time of day, when there tends to be more complex or challenging enquiries? How many routine requests can be automated for customer convenience, and to free up agents for the complex ones?
Setting the right KPIs
HOW?
- By considering if your current KPIs truly reflect your brand and your customers’ happiness, rather than your own business needs.
It goes without saying that customer satisfaction is an important measure. But do most of your KPIs centre around efficiency, eg, AHTs? Instead, think about balancing them with more people-focused KPIs, for example, first call resolution or call experience ratings. While agent attrition and absenteeism offer important insights into the employee experience.
Making contact channel choice easy for customers
HOW?
- Take a look at your website.
Are all your channels promoted equally? If you really want to put the human into your CX, make your customer phone number as prominent as your other channels. Don’t be one of those businesses that hides telephone numbers deep in the website, or heavily pushes towards a chatbot. Some people need to speak to a human. You should be enabling that.
Ensuring you have the capacity to meet demand
HOW?
- Through effective resource planning.
Make sure you have the right number of agents with the right skill sets, available at the right time. There are lots of resource planning tools, or resource management software, to help you plan and allocate resources to prevent agents being overwhelmed. Many businesses also outsource to meet demand, either short-term or long-term.
HOW?
There are all kinds of tools and channels available that are 24/7 and incredibly useful for self service and for resolving simple queries and tasks. They free up agents’ valuable time for those customers that need to call. There’s also so much valuable data that can be used to refine processes and provide real time information and updates so agents are armed with everything they need. You just need the right tools to use that data to its full advantage.
Here are just a few examples of tech that is improving CX:
- Multi-channel and omnichannel – customers can contact via the means they want (email/phone/social etc), pick up where they left or switch channel, with seamless connections throughout their journey. No repeating themselves and the ultimate in convenience.
- Real time analytics – these can help agents on the phone in real time, providing prompts for the steps to take next, giving guidance, or providing information about common customer issues. They can also capture and interpret data so team leaders get live insights into call types, agent performance, customer satisfaction, and any emerging issues.
- Auto wrap-up – a feature that automatically sets the agent state to After Call Work after an agent completes a call.
- AI – there are so many uses of AI in CX that go beyond the chatbot, including predictive call routing, interactive voice response (IVR) and emotional intelligence AI… all to help improve the customer journey and to help agents be more productive.
Introducing Sigma Connected
We’re customer experience experts, delivering outsourced customer contact solutions for some of the largest and best-known brands. Clients come to us for help in solving their CX challenges and we can deliver you a full contact centre solution, part of it, or just help you out of a temporary situation. We’re flexible and able to mobilise quickly, with highly trained teams and industry experts.
But we’re not just any business process outsourcing provider and we always practice what we preach. We strive every day to embody everything we’ve talked about above. Whether it’s within our own business, or helping our clients achieve it in theirs.
We’re a people company, built on the power of human connections. We have the people, processes and technology to help you find the right balance between human and digital connections – a balance that will benefit you and your customers.