There’ve been plenty of reasons for businesses to feel pessimistic about their ability to successfully engage with customers in recent years. There’s the digital shift in consumer habits. Companies struggling to hire and retain talented staff. Moving to remote working models hasn’t been easy.
Not to mention economic worries hitting budgets and increasing pressure to reduce costs. It’s safe to say there’s been some major disruption.
Despite these significant changes, Verint’s global customer engagement research has found many CX leaders are feeling very positive about providing exceptional experiences. Two-thirds to be exact. Sixty-seven percent of respondents rated themselves as highly confident, with 33% less so.
What’s Contributed to Their High Confidence?
85% of the highly confident CX leaders’ companies interact with customers on digital channels
77% effectively expanded the use of AI and automation in their contact centers
72% implemented chatbots before or during 2022.
A pattern that emerged in Verint’s Engagement Capacity Gap (ECG) report was that a higher percentage of the highly confident CX leaders had implemented cloud contact center solutions before or during 2022.
There’s a disparity between the two groups—highly confident and less confident—when it comes implementing next generation contact center solutions. For example, a larger proportion of the highly confident group implemented knowledge management (78% vs 61%), as well as solutions such as experience management (79% vs 64%) and private messaging and social channels (85% vs 71%).
The investment and implementation of these tools helps to create self-assuredness in the face of disruptions on multiple fronts and contributes to higher-quality CX. Over a two-year period, there’s a huge gap between the two groups in perceived effectiveness in several areas of customer engagement that are at the heart of Open CCaaS (contact center as a service).
CX Automation: The highly confident business leaders have AI and automation front and center in their customer engagement strategies. Compared to the less confident group, they have been extremely effective at using knowledge management solutions for self-service (79% vs 29%) and providing employees with contextual information for customer interactions (81% vs 28%). Companies that have rolled out bots on live chat and messaging channels are also seeing more effective customer engagement.
Engagement Data Analytics: The majority of highly confident CX executives’ companies have implemented experience management solutions. It’s contributed to more than 80% thinking their efforts to capture, analyze and act on customer feedback have been extremely effective.
Armed with a deeper knowledge of how customers feel about their most recent interactions, companies have a much better base from which to make strategic decisions.
Omnichannel Engagement: Embracing omnichannel engagement is how contact centers become customer-centric, enabling the whole workforce to work across digital customer touchpoints. This approach has enabled the highly confident respondents to effectively engage customers on their channel of choice (82%) and connect those interactions even if consumers switch mid-conversation (80%).
An open approach to engagement channels helps companies to scale interactions through bots and automation and create an integrated agent experience.
These three areas are integral to future-proofing your contact center with an open approach to CCaaS. Being telephony-led doesn’t make sense in the era of digital engagement—phone calls are now one of many customer touchpoints.
Integrating more digital channels offers the flexibility that comes with cloud solutions. It also means companies can embed AI into their contact center operations, bringing with it more automation and elevated CX.
5 Verint Solutions for a Confident CX Strategy
1. Real-time Coaching
AI-powered tools equip agents in the moment to help ensure efficient, accurate and compliant customer interactions. Verint Real-Time Coaching uses a bot to analyze calls in real time and offer guidance to agents that helps ensure a positive outcome.
Agents are advised on remaining empathetic or compliant with industry regulations, as well as offering relevant knowledge based on the context of the conversation. The solution is an integral part of a total quality approach and helps maintain standards when operating with a remote workforce.
2. The Containment Bot
This year’s ECG research revealed 54% of CX leaders are highly concerned of the negative impact of staffing shortages, which will have influenced the increased spending on chatbots and IVAs (intelligent virtual assistants).
Tools such as Verint IVA reduce the burden on contact center agents by enabling customers to self-serve, meaning they can resolve issues effortlessly in a single interaction. It’s a CCaaS solution which can reduce the volume of interactions escalated to a human agent, lowering cost-to-serve, improving CSAT and often leading to first-contact resolution.
3. Workforce Management
As CX leaders’ concerns increase over growing interaction volumes and operating with a remote workforce, organizations need to maximize operational efficiency across their contact centers, back-office teams, and branch or retail locations.
Verint’s workforce management (WFM) solutions include an AI-powered forecasting bot, which accurately projects workload across all engagement channels. Its access to historical data builds staff scheduling models which ensure no team is overwhelmed (or overstaffed) while still providing the level of service expected by customers.
These tools deploy the right employee across the right channels at the right time to improve CX through reducing time to answer, handling time and improving first contact resolution.
4. Speech and Text Analytics
Understanding any shifts in customer behavior or spotting emerging issues before they become a major problem is crucial for CX decision-makers.
With the growing number of engagement channels, it’s not enough to only monitor a small proportion of phone calls – tools that record and analyze every customer interaction should be integral to a modern contact center.
Speech and text analytics solutions create insights into customer sentiments in real time, ensuring in-the-moment decisions can be made to make swift changes to strategies based on the most accurate and up-to-date information.
5. Knowledge Management
Building confidence in your contact center’s ability to provide exceptional experiences requires consistency. Verint Knowledge Management is powered by Verint Da Vinci AI and Analytics and offers a single source of truth—for both employees and customers.
It provides a collective knowledge base for an organization, offering up-to-date information for remote and on premises workers, as well as anticipating customer needs and providing contextual knowledge. Verint Knowledge Management can even predict what a customer will ask and direct them to the most relevant information.
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These solutions alone aren’t a magic formula to perfect customer engagement and unbreakable confidence in your customer engagement capabilities. They do, however, help build a data-led approach powered by an open ecosystem, which can elevate customer experience without significantly increasing labor costs.
Learn more about building your CX confidence through Verint’s Open CCaaS platform.
Source: Verint
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