How well do you really know your contact centre operation?
It's often said that "You don't know what you don't know". This is especially true in the modern contact centre, where a range of different customer interactions are taking place on a near-constant basis, across a growing range of different channels. It might be tempting for managers to assume that if they aren't having any problems presented to them, everything is running perfectly.
However, when the team at Exponential-e conducts assessments of contact centre environments, we often find that the initial picture we were presented with does not always reflect the reality of the customer experience.
This has become such a trend in recent years that we got in touch with ContactBabel, who publish the annual UK Customer Experience Decision Maker's Guide – an essential annual report that we use regularly at Exponential-e and is based on detailed surveys of contact centre professionals. (The full report can be found here.)
We suggested two new questions in this year's survey, related to the challenges that we were seeing in the field, throughout our ongoing work with contact centres across a range of sectors. One asked the respondents whether they had a detailed understanding of customer demand (i.e. the reasons that customers were getting in contact and the methods used). The other asked respondents if they had a detailed view of failure demand and process issues.
The answers to the question around customer demand reflected a surprising level of confidence amongst respondents: 71% agreed that they were on top of this situation. In terms of the second question around failure demand and process failures, the results were less confident: 44% agreed, but 37% were "neutral".
When it comes to contact demand, perhaps that old adage may need a slight tweak… "You don't know what you think you know!"
This is where conversation analytics can play a vital role in gaining a deep understanding of what is being said throughout contact centres' day-to-day interactions, getting to the heart of where customer issues are arising. Most contact centres rely on IVR choices, drop down menus, and data manually entered by advisors to glean intelligence on what is going on. Moreover, there are often areas of communication that occur without any tracking or monitoring whatsoever, such as email or internal conversations.
This isn't nearly as rich as mining actual conversations themselves – be they verbal, or text based – but according to ContactBabel, only 25% of contact centres are currently using the interaction analytics tools required to do this, and so miss out on a rich vein of insights that could potentially transform their operations.
As organisations begin to embrace AI's transformative potential in the contact centre and increase their levels of automation, this sort of false confidence can prove dangerous, leading to technologies being poorly implemented and thus limiting the potential benefits to customers and agents alike. However, as unbelievable as it may sound, using AI to establish this degree of understanding is a practical first step to a wider adoption of AI technologies!
To explain this further, we have recently written a whitepaper that offers a practical guide to the successful implementation of AI, outlining the four essential steps that must be followed, the first of which sets out a proven methodology for understanding your existing customer journey. It's ready to read here: AI in the Contact Centre - A Practical Guide - Download the Whitepaper | Exponential-e.
If you're ready to take the next step of your own AI journey – or any other challenges around the customer experience – after reading it, please reach out to us.
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