Every business aims to create a superior customer experience. Customers that have had a positive customer experience will go out of their way to tell their friends and family about their positive experience with your business. Providing a great customer experience requires staying updated with industry trends in order to have a clear handle on what is happening in the market, with competitors, and with what customers’ desire.

Contact Center Employees Are Ambassadors

Employees in contact centres play a constantly changing and evolving role. Even with all of the self-help and AI tools accessible to customers, customer-to-contact centre interactions remain a critical part of the customer journey. Employees in contact centres are crucial issue solvers, customer relationship managers, sales executives, expert advisers, business consultants, and transformation experts, in addition to being brand ambassadors.

Because employees must deal with more complex, emotionally demanding interactions, and one of the biggest challenges they face is finding accurate, available, and accessible information quickly, especially when impatient customers are waiting, this employee evolution has made contact centre jobs even more difficult.

Giving employees a desktop that works for them can make it easier for them to give the experience that customers want. By personalising employee experiences with a composable employee workspace that easily brings customer insights from different applications (CRM and third-party systems) into a single pane of glass, you can eliminate screen switching and keep employees motivated and focused on delivering that amazing customer experience.

Customer Experience Backed By Cloud

Customers are being served in ways that go far beyond contact centre staff delivering customer support. Organisations must embrace a customer-centric culture by empowering every employee, regardless of job title or location, to contribute to the customer experience in order to thrive in today's experience economy.

Organisations can embrace this customer-centric culture by making every employee, not just the customer service team, responsible for the customer experience, thanks to seamless cloud-based unified communications and contact centre apps. Consider the customer experience benefits that can be achieved by allowing contact centre personnel to immediately connect subject matter experts situated in the back office, warehouse, a branch office, or an employee working from home, when it matters the most. Alternatively, allowing call centre personnel, sales reps, and back-office employees to communicate (through audio, video, text, and file sharing) on critical customer or business projects with a single click.

AI is No Longer ‘A Nice to Have’

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are no longer 'nice to have' technologies in the journey of consumer experience. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are now essential components of any successful customer experience endeavour. 

How far along are you in the process? Here are three suggestions for providing the experience that both staff and customers’ desire:

• Adopt AI-enabled virtual agents to deliver conversational, round-the-clock customer assistance and, when necessary, connect customers with a live human. When a client contact requires human assistance, the virtual agent intelligently directs the customer to the most competent staff member based on data obtained throughout the self-service experience. Employees are given conversation information, suggestions, and step-by-step directions for resolving customer problems, enabling them to create a better and more personalised customer experience.
• To support the most demanding in-call apps, using Conversational Intelligence is vital. Consider the gains in productivity and customer satisfaction that organisations are achieving by populating employee desktop screens with relevant information such as sales scripts, compliance statements, upsell offers, FAQs, or knowledge management content based on customer words, phrases, and sentiment. This AI solution can automatically insert call transcriptions into CRM customer records, minimising staff after-call work and allowing employees to focus on creating customer connections rather than taking call notes, because every word of every discussion is recorded and transcribed in real-time.
• Customers seek genuine connections with the companies with which they do business. Intelligent routing uses criteria to match consumer (interactions, behaviour, transaction history), situational (location, weather, time, day), and staff (skills, experience, performance, location, language, gender) data with the appropriate resource to meet the customer's individual needs. Customers can be routed depending on their personality, previous enquiries, or even the last employee they spoke with.

Having an always-on team that can quickly adjust to continuously changing consumer and market expectations is critical to success. Cloud applications, which can be combined to create interesting experiences for a growing number of use cases, will fuel the future.