Consumers crave more personalisation in the contact centre

Expec­ta­tions around inter­ac­tions with brands have accel­er­at­ed in recent years, ampli­fied by the Covid-19 cri­sis. Though con­sumers expressed patience in the ini­tial phase of the pan­dem­ic, afford­ing con­tact cen­tres the time to adapt, they were unwill­ing to accept Covid-relat­ed excus­es months down the line. They now expect a clean, con­nect­ed cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in which agents, human or oth­er­wise, not only know who they are but are able to seam­less­ly pick up on pri­or con­ver­sa­tions with the brand, regard­less of the chan­nel these par­tic­u­lar con­ver­sa­tions ini­tial­ly took place on.

Such an expe­ri­ence may sound sim­ple to con­sumers, but it’s dif­fi­cult to achieve in an omnichan­nel envi­ron­ment, where the num­ber of com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels con­tin­ues to grow but data con­tin­ues to be siloed and dis­con­nect­ed. Covid-19 has shone a light on the frail­ties in the abil­i­ty of many brands to pro­vide a diverse ser­vice depend­ing on a cus­tomer seg­ment. Com­pa­nies are great at using cus­tomer and prospect data to pro­file con­sumers, cal­cu­late their val­ue and cre­ate upselling oppor­tu­ni­ties, but few use it to ben­e­fit the con­sumers them­selves.

Siloed, dis­con­nect­ed jour­neys are not only cost­ly to com­pa­nies, whose agents are repeat­ing the same con­ver­sa­tions with con­sumers on dif­fer­ent chan­nels, but incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing for the cus­tomers. What hap­pens in the con­tact cen­tre has a direct impact on an organisation’s brand, ampli­fied through word of mouth and social media. Sev­en in ten con­sumers have told some­one after a bad con­tact expe­ri­ence, accord­ing to a recent study by CCMA, com­mis­sioned by Odi­go, a lead­ing provider of cloud-based con­tact cen­tre solu­tions.

“What brands should be doing is max­imis­ing the data they have to make bet­ter deci­sions as to how con­sumers are treat­ed in the moment, by giv­ing use­ful con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion to the advis­er,” says Neil Tit­comb, man­ag­ing direc­tor for UK and Ire­land at Odi­go. “Where there’s been a pri­or con­ver­sa­tion or chat inter­ac­tion, too often that infor­ma­tion is still not avail­able to the advis­er so they can’t in any way cus­tomise the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Instead, they are scram­bling for rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion or, worse, hav­ing to ask the cus­tomer to repeat them­selves again.

“Brands need to lever­age all the infor­ma­tion pre­vi­ous­ly gath­ered and bring it fur­ther up the com­mu­ni­ca­tion line so that when some­one reach­es out to a con­tact cen­tre, via phone or chat, the infor­ma­tion and jour­ney is seam­less­ly trans­ferred. Every brand has lots of data at their dis­pos­al, but they don’t actu­al­ly use it to vis­i­bly good effect for the consumer’s ben­e­fit.”

Per­son­al­i­sa­tion is now the dif­fer­ence between good and great cus­tomer ser­vice, but most brands are a long way off achiev­ing it in their con­tact cen­tres. Many are now suc­cess­ful­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing with con­sumers across mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal and ana­logue chan­nels, and know which cus­tomer groups tend to use which chan­nel first, but the chan­nel inter­ac­tions don’t inter­lock. There’s lit­tle in the way of a cus­tomer jour­ney, and cer­tain­ly no per­son­al­i­sa­tion.

Though there is much hype around arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), the real­i­ty is that three-quar­ters of con­tact cen­tre inter­ac­tions still occur via the voice chan­nel, a sta­tis­tic not dis­sim­i­lar to a decade ago, accord­ing to the CCMA’s study. There is undoubt­ed­ly grow­ing demand for bots that can pro­vide imme­di­ate answers – con­sumers’ will­ing­ness to self-serve deliv­ery queries jump­ing six per­cent­age points in just six months ear­li­er this year – but voice is still king and a third of con­sumers expect to use their phone for cus­tomer ser­vice even more in the future.

Brands must also walk before they can run, and sim­ply elim­i­nat­ing dis­con­nect­ed data silos will go a long way to achiev­ing the more per­son­alised expe­ri­ence that con­sumers now crave. Equal­ly, their cus­tomers are unlike­ly to want to piv­ot to a total­ly auto­mat­ed world any­time soon. Only 12% of over-55s told the CCMA study they had recent­ly used a chat­bot, and while younger con­sumers are much more like­ly to grav­i­tate towards them, 70% of 18 to 34-year-olds sur­veyed admit­ted they hadn’t used one recent­ly either.

“Some peo­ple would have you believe voice is dead and every­body should be bring­ing in automa­tion to replace it. We don’t sub­scribe to that at all,” says Tit­comb. “There is lots of oppor­tu­ni­ty in AI, par­tic­u­lar­ly around nat­ur­al lan­guage, but we’re try­ing to strike a bal­ance of inno­va­tion around using tech­nol­o­gy to pro­vide a more intu­itive, real option to con­nect to a cus­tomer, while still con­nect­ing them with the tra­di­tion­al long-stand­ing human live agent.”

Odigo’s con­tact cen­tre tech­nol­o­gy facil­i­tates a seam­less and effi­cient omnichan­nel expe­ri­ence for brands and con­sumers, and a sat­is­fy­ing, engag­ing expe­ri­ence for ser­vice agents. The plat­form enables com­pa­nies to seg­ment cus­tomers, for instance, as per their age, prod­uct and length of ser­vice, and then per­son­alise their jour­ney accord­ing­ly. By con­nect­ing their data to the Odi­go estate, agents get a sin­gle view of the cus­tomer which con­nects across all com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, link­ing the whole jour­ney wher­ev­er pos­si­ble.

“We give organ­i­sa­tions access to the data to get clos­er to being able to achieve gen­uine per­son­al­i­sa­tion, but also give them options in terms of how they can exper­i­ment to under­stand which cus­tomers want to do one thing over anoth­er. That’s hard to pre­dict, espe­cial­ly when you have cus­tomers aged 16 to 90,” Tit­comb adds. “For such a long time, cus­tomer ser­vice was seg­ment­ed by prod­uct or ser­vice and there was much less look­ing into the actu­al pro­file and behav­iour of the cus­tomer or prospect. That needs to change.

“Con­sumers want a con­nect­ed expe­ri­ence through the cus­tomer jour­ney, and if they don’t get it they’ll go else­where. A strong con­tact cen­tre cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is only real­ly achieved when you can deliv­er it as a ser­vice on a con­sump­tion basis, and that’s not easy to do as they’re com­plex, tech­ni­cal ser­vices that have tra­di­tion­al­ly been built bespoke and took many months to deliv­er. Peo­ple want Net­flix-style con­sump­tion and we’re com­mit­ted to achiev­ing that so every­body can con­sume the ser­vices they want quick­ly and seam­less­ly.”

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it odigo.com

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