4 pieces of advice for effective, human digitisation of customer relations
The relationship between companies and their customers is constantly evolving.
With development of communication channels and the consequent emergence of new usages, customers now have greater and more specific expectations.
The acceleration of companies’ digital transformation has intensified this issue, and they must make every effort to keep up with the pace of innovation, avoiding obsolescence of tools and skills while making customer relations a top priority in their digital strategies.
To this end, a good many digital solutions provide them with support in reducing the most problematic pain points.
They optimise the company’s customer service quality, fostering first call resolution of requests.
How do you source the right technologies and implement the strategies required for the customer ecosystem’s performance?
1- Prioritise data analysis
Optimisation of customer relations is achieved by the magic of data.
Close analysis of customer and company data is essential to improvement of the customer experience as a whole.
In order to optimise multichannel interactions, speech analytics, for example, enables assessment of data emanating from all interactions, so enabling better understanding of the Voice of the Customer.
This solution provides contact centres with an opportunity to explore, analyse and monitor the bulk of interactions and so identify, measure and analyse the impact of subjects of solicitation.
It also makes it possible to automatically detect and categorise recurring subjects broached during calls, and generate actionable reports on them.
This facilitates identification of irritants and consequent implementation of measures designed to improve their services and increase customer relations performances.
Companies can also complement this approach by drawing on external or internal advice in order to produce highly detailed diagnoses of the relevance and performance of interactions – real added value in terms of customer satisfaction and employee support.
Such diagnoses are essential to the development of a company’s customer relations strategy and definition of the means and tools required to implement it.
2- Support employees during the digital transformation
Providing teams with tailor-made support is vital to the success of any digital or technological strategy.
Deployment of new digital tools must therefore be accompanied by clear communication on the part of companies’ senior management, who must promote their strategies in their employees’ eyes, with three key points in mind:
- explanation of the role of digital technology and solutions in everyday activity
- the ways in which operational teams will be involved in their integration
- and, above all, the ways in which such tools will benefit each and every employee.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this: adopting and applying technologies must be done in differentiated fashion from one sector to another, through analysis of best practices enabling employees to make them their weapon of choice.
Customer consideration cannot do without interaction with advisors in a digital world – they must therefore be equipped with tools and provided with coaching to match expectations.
3- Prioritise an integrated, unified ecosystem
Whether you’re a big company or a startup/scaleup, stable customer relations are essential.
A unified technological ecosystem, natively aggregating the modules necessary to processing and monitoring conversations in a coherent whole, greatly facilitates implementation of the strategy delineated.
In this context, an omnichannel solution is required for management of interactions alongside the existing CRM, so providing a unified vision of customer interactions and enabling advisors to obtain a single-source view of them without having to juggle between tools, and avoiding repetitions. Such complementarity enables unification of platforms and channels, with a view to optimising communication and visibility between them.
Rollout and continuous improvement of these platforms must be coordinated by all stakeholder functions: operational staff, the CIO, and digital technology specialists, along with consulting functions, whose analyses and feedback are essential to optimisation of the system in itself.
4- Make more use of Artificial Intelligence and automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proved to be a timely technology for customer relations.
The many solutions relating to it can be used to manage all requests, especially those that are easily processable and do not require special personalisation.
Automation technologies (including RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, for example) are of particular use as they relieve advisors of less important and more time-consuming tasks while improving customer knowledge.
AI solutions can also be adapted to calls so enabling advisors to assist customers more proactively.
In addition, collection of users’ data enables better understanding of their habits and consequent anticipation of their needs, so limiting contact rates.
AI-based solutions play a key role in advisors’ performance, as they enable them to develop a faster, more personalised approach focusing on their core business – with digital technology ultimately acting as their assistant, not as their replacement.
Article published by IT Social on February 3, 2022.