Happy Employees, Happy Customers: Leveraging Technology for Effortless Customer Service Journeys

Want to improve the customer experience (CX) and create loyal customers?

Pay more attention to customer service. Make it fast, easy and convenient for customers to interact with your brand. When customers are forced to work too hard to get the support they need, they are more likely to switch to a competitor. According to the PwC Customer Loyalty Survey, 32% of respondents who left a brand did so because of bad customer service.

Technology can help facilitate a better experience for both customers and agents, building loyalty along the way. Customer journey management simplifies customer service journeys, making it easier for customer service agents to give customers the answers they need.

Happy Employees, Happy Customers

Employee experience (EX) directly impacts CX.  A Gartner report found that “74% of high-tech organizations have proven a link between customer satisfaction and business impact, with employee satisfaction ranking as a top 3 metric for measuring CX.”

Happy employees tend to provide better customer service, leading to greater satisfaction for both parties. According to Gartner, organizations with mainly satisfied employees are 48% more likely to achieve customer satisfaction goals.

Exchanges between employees and customers are two-way streets, with customer behaviors influencing EX. More than one in five consumers admit they’ve yelled at (32%) or even cussed at (24%) a customer service agent. Even the most patient, empathetic and well-trained agent can quickly become fatigued from handling a steady stream of difficult calls and negative attitudes.

Bottom line: Ineffective customer service interactions take their toll on both parties.

The Cost of Complex Customer Service Journeys

Customer service journeys are often complicated, with up to 74% spanning across two or even three communication channels. Agents may find themselves on the receiving end of an impatient call when a customer must take extra steps to find a simple answer. By the time the customer dials into your contact center after checking the FAQ web page and sending an unanswered email, they’re more than eager to resolve the issue.

Using more channels costs your business more money. Expenses rise and customer retention rates fall with each channel added to service interactions.

Customer Service Agents Need More Support

When agents aren’t adequately supported, neither are customers.

Contact center agents often lack the tools and information they need to assist customers quickly and accurately. Customer satisfaction declines significantly when it takes longer than 10 minutes to resolve an issue. When contact center agents don’t have the relevant information at their fingertips, they waste time searching for it. When customers must repeat themselves because agents don’t know what was shared with the chatbot, frustration ensues. Neither side of the service interaction walks away happy when agents aren’t well-equipped to assist callers.

Use Technology to Add a Human Touch

No, that isn’t an oxymoron. When used effectively, technology feeds agents the information they need to help customers feel heard.

Even the friendliest employees can’t create customer satisfaction unless they’re set up for success. Bringing in technology that understands customer needs and offers relevant information frees up customer service agents to prioritize the human touch and forge real connections.

The right technology—that understands customer needs and provides relevant information—supports customer service agents, enabling them to anticipate and meet those needs.

Agent Desktop Solutions: Powerful Tools for Better Customer Service

Contact center agents need to have the right information in front of them to deliver exceptional CX. An agent desktop is a software application that provides contact center agents with the details they need to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently. An agent desktop includes a customer database, product/bundle/service information, contact management tools and agent support tools. Communication service providers need a telecom-specific agent desktop to accommodate diverse product catalogs, complex billing scenarios and multifaceted customer journeys.

Elevate Customer Service and CX With Customer Journey Management

CX teams commonly try moment-in-time journey mapping to support service journeys. But this approach often fails to significantly improve CX. Why?

It is:

• Static—and cannot guide interactions as they occur in real time
• Based on assumptions instead of analyses of actual customer journey interactions
• Reactive—not proactive or even preemptive

Instead, customer service leaders should employ customer journey management to enhance CX.

Customer journey management helps customers quickly achieve their goals, whether that’s paying a bill, renewing a contract or applying for a loan. It combines digital communication with customer journey analytics and a decisioning engine to determine context and intent, then deliver the next best action in real time, helping customers achieve their goal (e.g., pay a bill, renew a contract or apply for a loan).

Customer journey management simplifies customer service journeys and improves EX and CX in the following ways:

Reduced contact center calls—and therefore the number of channels needed to resolve an issue. Decreasing call center volumes also reduces:

• Hold times for customers who do call
• Agent workloads and stress
• Operational costs

Lower call volumes give agents more time for deeper conversations, uncovering customer needs that guide tailored recommendations to cross-sell or upsell relevant products and services.

Proactive call deflection. The journey orchestration system anticipates customer needs and provides the right information to solve the problem, eliminating the need to call the contact center. For example, when the system detects that a customer is viewing the billing FAQ web page, the system activates a bill explanation solution or AI-powered chatbot. The system can even personalize the solution. For instance, it might send customers at high risk for delinquency a reminder text message with a link to the online billing portal.

Automated self-service. Natural language processing analyzes customer responses to interactive voice response (IVR) prompts, identifying intent and needs. The decisioning system determines the most appropriate response or action based on customer information (intent, account information and behavioral patterns) and business rules or logic. Better self-service options mean fewer calls to live agents.

Intent-based call routing. When customers call, the system determines their intent by analyzing their responses using natural language processing, then directs their call to the right agent group, reducing call transfers—and dissatisfaction. Customer satisfaction declines from 79 when an issue is resolved by the first agent (First Agent Resolution) to 45 when it takes three or more agents to resolve the problem. The journey orchestration tool provides a call transcript describing the problem to the agent during handoff, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.

Proactive agent guidance. The journey orchestration system gives agents the context and support they need to resolve problems quickly and accurately:

• Real-time call transcript (from previous conversations with other agents or the IVR)
• Critical customer information (e.g., billing/payment history, previous customer service interactions)
• Recommendations for how to help the customer based on intent, customer account information and business rules

Digital bill explanation tool. Bill confusion is a leading cause of contact center calls. Providing customers with a personalized summary of charges—and reasons for month-to-month changes in recurring bills—reduces that confusion, encouraging prompt payment. Agents can access the customer’s summary to quickly answer their questions.