The struggle is over.
For at least a decade, service organizations have been forced to make tough choices: either find ways to become more cost-efficient or concentrate on improving the quality of the customer experience. It’s the Cost vs. Quality dichotomy.
Of course, neither strategy feels right if it means sacrificing the other.
But now, you don’t have to choose.
At first glance, creating a cost-efficient customer experience seems almost too good to be true, especially considering the exponential complexity of serving today’s ever more demanding digital-first customers. It feels 10x harder to both cut costs and improve CX when your organization is juggling all the different channels companies are now forced to manage.
Consider the following: Not so long ago, there were only two ways for customers to interact with companies–either walk into a physical location or call on the phone. Ahhh, life seemed simple then (not really, but in retrospect…)
Now, there are 10 interaction types:
- Walk into a location
- Phone call with a human
- Phone call with a human that transitions to an OnScreen interaction
- Phone call with an interactive bot
- Bot-guided online interaction
- Interactive chat with a bot
- Message with a human (via chat, SMS, secure conversation, email or social media)
- OnScreen Voice with a human
- OnScreen Video with a human
- CoBrowsing
The harsh reality is that in today’s digital-first world, you need to be excellent at executing each of these 10 kinds of interactions. Yes, they each have tremendous utility when used correctly. But how are you supposed to know which interaction type is best with any given customer? And how are your frontline people supposed to decide which interaction type to use at any given moment?
Cost-Efficient Customer Experience: What’s the Holdup?
The research clearly indicates that certain customer issues can be very easily resolved by interacting with a bot. Other issues require support from a human. Some customer issues are best handled through messaging, while others require a voice or video conversation.
Here’s the problem: There’s never been a way to individually “match” the right interaction type (messaging vs. voice, human vs. bot) to each customer issue. Instead, we leave the choice up to each individual customer. Unfortunately, customers don’t always know which interaction type is best suited to their specific need—and this presents real consequences for everyone.
For example, when a customer makes a phone call to your company instead of quickly resolving their issue by interacting with a bot, your cost goes up—as does customer effort. The same holds true when a customer begins a chat session only to realize their issue can’t be fully resolved in chat. Now, they’ve already wasted a frustrating few minutes and their “effort meter” is on high.
Both these cases challenge conventional wisdom: the customer is not always right.
The Most Overrated Consideration in CX: Customer Channel Preferences
For your first step in creating a cost-efficient customer experience, lets say you want to better understand how your customers prefer to interact with your company. You could easily gather data about the number of incoming phone calls you’re getting, as well as the number of digital interactions you’re facilitating. That seems like a logical way to assess the channel preferences of your customers.
Another way is to do surveys. You can ask your customers flat out, “How do you want to interact with us?” Some companies have put a lot of effort into Voice of the Customer (VoC) surveying, and they take the answers they hear quite literally.
The problem is that neither method of assessing VoC recognizes that customers generally care about ONE thing much more than which channels they use:
“Just solve my problem.”
Most customers simply want the fastest and most effortless resolution to their issue. They aren’t contacting you because it’s a fun thing they get to do, it’s a task they have to take care of. And the faster they do, the faster they can get on to whatever else they want to do.
No matter how wide-ranging and diverse your customer base may be, all have one thing in common: a specific need that is driving them to interact with you at any given moment.
How Can You Tell Exactly What Each Customer Needs?
If a customer calls on the phone, how can you tell what they need? The answer is simple: Just ask them (or have your IVR do it for you).
But what about the vast majority of your customers who now come to you first online? How can you tell what they need? There are three ways:
- You can present them with a menu that asks, “How can we help you today?”
- You can observe their digital body language, including where they navigate to and where they linger, and offer assistance at specific points in their click-journey
- You can invite them to chat with a bot, and then quickly diagnose their need
It’s interesting to think that it’s actually easier to understand customer needs in the on-screen environment than through the legacy phone system.
Once you know what a customer needs, you can now automatically diagnose and execute the right interaction at the right time—every time. It’s called Unified Interaction Management (UIM) and if you’re not already familiar with this emerging practice, it lets you seamlessly transition a customer to the optimal interaction type for their need via ChannelLess® architecture. With UIM, you are not restricted to the channel in which a customer reaches out to you. Instead, you can easily guide them to the right channel for their need.
Boost Efficiency and CSAT with UIM
The practice of UIM creates a significantly better experience for the customer, since each interaction is personalized to their need—the reason they’re interacting with you in the first place. And it’s way more efficient too, because through Responsible AI, you can increase the percentage of customers who are able to serve themselves or interact with virtual assistants, which then frees up your people to do what they do best—create human relationships.
It’s a process (both a thought process and a contact center strategy) that is repeatable over and over again—to the great benefit of all. And it starts with unifying the way you manage your interactions.
If you haven’t seen UIM in action, let’s talk. Because you no longer have to struggle between reaching efficiency goals and also trying to boost CSAT and customer loyalty.
What if you didn’t have to choose? Request a demo to find out how now.
