Call centre customer engagements tend to follow a set path and process. This runs along the lines of a recommended workflow, opening, discovery, suggestions, summarisation and a customer satisfaction survey.

While some contact centres are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help them to unify their processes and assist in call handling, there are still many that are plodding along without AI.

Without AI, these contact centres can completely miss interactions of concern that affect an agent’s well-being. These are the types of interactions where the amount of negative sentiment and cross talk, and the number of cancellation risks, are above average.

If we consider that a medium-sized contact centre has potentially more than 3,000 unsatisfied engagements every month, that is more than 3,000 interactions that are difficult to deal with and more than 3,000 potential calls where agents will need to remain calm and communicate in a friendly and positive manner with highly irate customers. This is an extremely challenging situation for agents, who are having to empathise with and educate the customer while trying to elicit positive sentiment and a good resolution.

1. Empathy is the pathway to trustworthiness

Contact centres use escalation protocols that provide guidelines on managing dissatisfied customers. These are conversational guides to direct and steer agents to better understand the needs of the customer. They also provide handling guidance to help agents to identify needs, resolutions and mea culpa (whose fault).

So, what is missing? Many of these processes are essential and are focused on the annoyance level of customers’ complaints and escalations. Pressure is placed on the agent to recover difficult situations, and this often results in agents working outside of company protocol. These incidents can result in the customer taking to social media with a not-so-factually-accurate post, in a blatant attempt to shame the organisation into giving the customer what they want. Again, unpicking this situation takes human intervention to resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction and can be emotionally draining, particularly if the agent does not feel they are being assisted or protected by company protocol.

The importance of an agent’s holistic wellness is well-documented and impacts their overall health, their outlook and attitude, job satisfaction, motivation and enthusiasm. Therefore, emotional well-being levels should be measured regularly. Knowing and understanding the emotional state of your agents is critical to the health of your business and ensures that your customer-satisfaction levels remain above average. This will ensure your customers trust your organisation.

2. Onboarding is not an operational instruction manual

Taking care of agent’s emotional well-being really matters. Emotionally healthy agents are able to manage a good work-life balance. They can work within a range of emotions, without losing control, while they operate and interact with all customer types and engage in a positive, friendly and patient manner. This is essential to achieving a great customer experience and NLP Score.

Post lockdown, agents are dealing with customers who are vocalising more-intense negative emotions. This places agents under pressure to satisfy customers’ needs. To protect agents, organisations need to put measures in place to capture the emotional well-being of their agents more quickly. This will protect their human resource investment, keeping agents onside and raising their morale. Many organisations still prioritise the onboarding of new agents over the emotional well-being of incumbent agents. Such organisations have a high agent attrition rate and low NPS score. This practice is counterproductive as the cost of continuously recruiting and onboarding new employees far outweighs the cost of adding agent sentiment analysis to the mix and retaining more of their existing agents.

3. Engagement well-being is a two-way street

Demanding customer engagements leave negative footprints. Many organisations fall back on measuring sentiment, satisfaction and NPS surveys to rate experience and behaviour  rather than looking at product, processes and people. In many cases, friction or conversation control behaviour can be detected much earlier than post-call surveys. Automated well-being insights measure and monitor agent health via employee insights, fast talk, cross talk, sentiment and frustration. Every agent engagement can be analysed and flagged immediately, which helps agents who need support to deal with the most demanding customers and maintain control of the call.

With AI-driven insights, a customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) improvement culture, which focuses on proactively managing all customer and employee experiences, is possible. It efficiently links 100 per cent of customer contacts to service success. This assists leaders to rapidly and effectively anticipate the needs of the customers or agents who express dissatisfaction or experience excessive friction and effort. This, in turn, contributes to an organisation’s CX strategy and change management success programmes.

For more information, please contact contexta360.com

 

Many service centres believe they have adequate analytics that span performance, interaction and behaviour insights. Sadly, some of these businesses are not making full use of their analytical capabilities and are missing opportunities to alleviate CX friction and customer engagement issues. Indicators of customer engagement and effort give a business information that can help it to improve first-time contact resolution, handling times and outcomes, and the cost-per-engagement ratio.

Alleviating friction and improving customer engagement will improve customer satisfaction scores and heighten customer loyalty. Many contact centres attempt to gather customer satisfaction insights via the internal escalation process or a postal survey feedback route. Both approaches mainly result in responses at the extreme ends of the spectrum, from 5-star review one-liners such as “great service”, at one end, to the sharing of single engagement frustrations with comments such as “this company is bad” on all social channels, at the other.

Many contact centre leaders overlook emotional intelligence as an insight, or merely have a CX strategy driven by first-hand contentment analysis. However, a customer-centric culture and CX strategy benefits from a broader scope of AI-driven sentiment analysis to define the impact of behaviour and emotion, measuring degrees of emotion from all customer engagements. This involves tailoring experience programmes using comprehensive Customer Engagement Management (CEM) with AI emotional intelligence rather than just people, product and process feedback.

Are customer channels of choice delivering by expectation?

Looking after your customers does not stop with offering omnichannel engagement data that only measures a “first time right” success metric. The way forward is to create an Experience Management Analysis hub as an AI CX-centric insight overlay across channels. This will consistently measure customer success without the need for calibration across various platform data sources or the alignment of insight methodologies.

Many customer engagement platforms already have reporting and dashboard capabilities that measure performance figures, but they lack a complete customer-centric journey view. This restricts them to developing an all-channel CX-insight methodology to enable a consistent means of measuring of satisfaction and loyalty.

Using an AI CX-insight overlay model moves away from having several embedded platform reporting outlooks that feel a bit like marking your own homework. Autonomous AI data-driven insights that visualise journey data enable the CX transformation programme across all channels and vastly improves the customer’s experience.

Is risk mitigation part of your success strategy?

Customer experience management is a data-driven exercise that keeps a CX radar on measurable performance and satisfaction indicators. These are the things that you need to know about to identify if something needs your attention. Many of these insights are focused on a daily operation model and based upon experiences you expect to happen or have previously seen as part of your services and business procedures.

Operationally, this approach often lacks a more flexible satisfaction strategy to deal with customer service emergencies. Using AI-driven technology enables deeper layers of insights about upcoming events, rising discontentment, or campaign launch successes. Automatically finding these patterns will be an essential part of steering satisfaction results.

Creating a mechanism that can mitigate business risks as soon as they occur will have a significant impact on damage limitation. Creating awareness of upcoming or new patterns provides robust CEM with lasting impact, especially when the interaction is due to a negative customer experience. This is absolutely something you need to know about every time it occurs within your service centre operations.

With AI-driven insights, you can realise a CX improvement culture that focuses on proactively managing all customer experiences and linking them to the desired success output. By paying active and effective attention, anticipating more quickly which customers express dissatisfaction or experience unnecessary friction and effort, you will gain insights that will help your business to continuously monitor and improve its CX strategy.

For more information about how Contexta360 can help you improve your CX, please contact us.

 

The benefits of speech analytics in customer service are widely documented, but which elements of speech analytics make a difference to customer success?

From the outset, contact centre success needs to be measured correctly. This can be a bone of contention within an organisation when every stakeholder has their own view of what those measures are. While this may appear complex, there are several factors that can provide reliable customer satisfaction, friction and effort ratings. These insights strike a healthy balance between self-service and personal attention. Checks should always be made to ensure that there are no risks or unacceptable behaviours that jeopardise your brand’s reputation. It is important to understand what skills your teams need to build a plan that you can execute consistently and confidently.                                         

Remember that you should use AI analyses that are applicable immediately and that map customer success and contact efficiency to create a strategic CX program.

Here are the questions you need to ask to gain the insights that make your contact centre cost-effectiveness, customer satisfaction and risks manageable.

 

CX insight 1: identify and understand contact reasons

What questions do my customers have? Do customers contact me for reasons I expect? Which contact moments have different questions or interests, and how many of the contact moments do not belong within a (my) service point?

Understanding customer contact reasons will help you to monitor contact centre costs and emerging trends that drain your customer service. You should know precisely what call volumes to expect and be able to intervene fast when the service becomes overloaded or service levels are compromised.

 

CX insight 2: create a framework for efficient handling and resolution

Which of my customers experience resistance while handling their questions? Which customers indicate that they have already been in contact several times? How many of my customers say they want to leave? How many of my employees cannot convince the customer to continue to do business with the company?

By creating a framework for efficient customer handling and contact resolution, you can ensure a smooth customer satisfaction experience, reduce repeat traffic, monitor customer loss, and understand how service teams improve customer retention.

 

CX insight 3: ensure consistent handling within teams

Which interactions with my customers follow the correct procedures? In which interactions is the ID verification performed correctly? Which of my employees refer to the condition and acceptance requirement? How many of my customers do not receive the desired handling conditions for their contact?

Understanding the content of and monitoring every call will help to ensure quality and consistent handling for your customers, guarantee all necessary questions are asked, prevent complaints and procedural errors, and quickly identify where risks or handling procedures are not followed.

 

CX insight 4: monitor customer satisfaction, and act on the underlying causes

Which of your customers express some form of dissatisfaction? Which subjects or events are most often connected to this dissatisfaction? How often does an employee check satisfaction at the end of the call? Which aspects of handling determine a good NPS valuation? How many of my employees use a friendly approach with an active listening ear?

Understanding why dissatisfaction occurs will help you to improve customer satisfaction. Monitoring customer satisfaction will help you to recognise patterns that lead to the best possible balance between efficient trading and personal attention. You can also gain and use insights to take customer appreciation as an NPS to a higher level.

 

CX insight 5: eliminate all effort and friction from your touchpoints and procedures

Discover the causes of longer handling times. What is the underlying reason for (too) long silences during an interaction? How many of your customers indicate that promises made have not been fulfilled? Which customers indicate that a procedure request was unsuccessful or not accepted?

By eliminating effort and friction from your touchpoints, you can make customer service more efficient. You not only need to understand which handling aspects lead to longer talk times, but you should gain insights into which knowledge or application use influences smoother handling of customer questions and interests.

 

CX insight 6: create a culture of first contact resolution

Take a look at which questions are unclear on the website and end up in the service centre. How many customers wait for an expected promise and call back? Which customers report having called before? How many employees ask to be contacted another time or to call another department? How many customers did not get any further with the auto-bot handling and do not feel they have been helped immediately?

By monitoring every customer call and contact, you can see when promises are made and not followed and find ways to enable your employees/customer contact channels to resolve issues on first contact. By ensuring that more customers get the service they need on their first contact, you not only improve customer satisfaction, but you can also reduce the number of calls your contact centre receives, reducing work pressure for your employees.

 

CX insight 7: (auto) evaluate consistently and pay attention to talent coaching

How many of my employees need my direct attention? Which skills are decisive for creating success? Which employees indicate that they have problems with company applications or work-from-home set-ups? How is emotional intelligence used to aid customer retention and good NPS ratings? How can I spend my time more efficiently, and what is the impact of my coaching and education on the business results?

Consistent evaluation will allow you to coach your service talent in the right focus areas and help you to better understand what your top talent does differently. This will enable you to tailor your coaching plan based on a proven result.

 

CX insight 8: eliminate any business and reputation damage and monitor trends

Which risks to your business arise during customer contacts? Which topics do my customers say they find unacceptable? In which conversations do customers indicate that they do not trust the authenticity of the information? Which of the interactions can cause damage to the brand’s reputation?

By monitoring and following trends closely, you can protect your organisation and corporate culture from any form of mistrust, negative social media, or fraud attempts. It will enable you to recognise patterns and stay informed if your customers or employees indicate they do not trust something.

 

Conclusion

With AI-driven insights, you can achieve a CX improvement culture that focuses on managing all customer experiences and linking them to the desired success bandwidth. By paying attention, you can react more quickly and effectively to customers who express dissatisfaction or experience unnecessary friction and effort. These insights should help you continue to monitor and improve your CX strategy and achieve customer success.

If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch.

 

 

 

Rene Van Popering discusses the processes businesses need to consider when seeking to excel at customer contact success and deliver a streamlined service across all their channels.

Cutting to the chase, to attain and even exceed your customer service goals you need to become very familiar with your customer service levels and targeted objectives. You should also consider measuring how much time and effort are involved in maintaining your service levels and where the source of friction comes from. This may be knowledge, process, the journey, or ease of access to information, for example. Ultimately, you should set a minimum and maximum acceptable level; substantiate if these metrics are in-line with your agreed customer service levels and whether they may be confidently achieved and delivered; and evaluate any shortfalls. Consider if you can realistically provide a consistent service that meets all your known conditions and targets. You may find that the some of the objectives are just too unrealistic or out of your control.

The good news is that everything is possible if you measure the correct indicators and are willing to choose a transformative data-driven path. Your starting North Star vison and goal should be documented, for example: providing an excellent service-first experience, with a fast turnaround time and a first-rate assessment – aka the ideal process.

The ideal process is one where you contact the service centre, someone is available almost immediately, knows the current situation and history, has the information to answer your question, and you move on with your life and don’t need to make contact again.

Your next question should be, what can I do to achieve this? My advice would be to start with the basics of interaction analysis – the characteristics of customer contact – as they reveal a lot about the health of your contact centre performance and highlight which areas require your focus.

Ask yourself, how many of my customers experience some form of friction or extra effort before they get the right answers? Is this a people/knowledge issue, is it a broken process or policy, are we asking the right questions at the right time?

Knowing where friction and extra effort occurs across all interactions with your customers, together with understanding the scale of service effectiveness and friction, is directly linked to setting up data-driven insights that highlight what is going on every day and give you a complete picture of customer service dealings. They also underline how often multiple contacts are made and whether the expected turnaround time falls within the promised excellent service. Furthermore, these insights should be impartial and standardised. If you are relying on third-party surveys or agent-entered data, you only have 10 per cent of the picture and an emotional viewpoint.

Knowing these touchpoints gives you the opportunity to understand what decisive actions are possible and what can be done to improve the outcomes.

The use of AI data-driven and automated insights will help you achieve this as they are transformative and focus on improving service level management based on full and highly reliable insights into your service health. They can help organisations to propel their service level excellence.

If you like to know more, please contact us.

Rene van Popering looks at measures that can fast track your CX insights

In a previous blog I quoted baseball coach Yogi Berra, who said: “If you do not know where you are going you will end up some place else.” This touches on one of the challenges of developing your data-driven optimisation success strategies, that various disciplines, viewpoints and improvement themes can make it tricky to define where to start and how to measure.

Data-driven insights can be your holy grail of information, building a firm strategy of knowledge, perspectives and success factors. Measuring with a “360-degree eye” should not entail weeks of analysis but needs an automated learning decision-making process with a focus on points of success.

When it comes to customer success, we need to ask what do I need to know, what do I like to see, what needs my attention, and what are the expected and unexpected trends? Making solid business decisions requires these fundamental insights. Making decisions based on the answers to these questions as part of a daily routine improves your success strategies.

Your CX success programme can be tailored according to what you see, and it becomes a matter of selecting primary priorities and discipline views following a viewpoint model to measure if your quality and optimisation strategies are working.

Using viewpoints and strategic themes is where success starts, enabled by metrics and perspectives.

From a business operational point of view

• Cost/time: Fully monitoring and mapping customer contact (CC) service efficiency across all channels can indicate whether operational services are healthy. This is fully focused on the cost aspect such as having/maintaining control and having insight into workload, process frictions and effort related to customer satisfaction.
• Change management: You need to be able to determine and continue to monitor what is the right balance between self-service and personal contact. If employees are tasked with incorrect activities, you can also create “change management” decision processes based on the situation and solve the underlying challenges to improve them.
• Trends and standards: It is necessary to have complete insight into challenges, for example how often does something really happen or is this an emerging event that I can/should resolve soon but may need to continue to monitor? In this example, you have better control over the desired and expected bandwidth of service contact points and you can intervene faster when deviations arise in service patterns that you do not want to see or should avoid.
• Risk control/avoidance: Which aspects of your organisation or market procedures are linked to mandatory regulations and reputation? You must measure all events that entail risk to reputation, risk of fines or license loss, or risks such as phishing, fraud attempts and social hacking.

From a team operational point of view

• Consistency of service: It is important to automatically monitor CC teams based on whether they deliver a consistent and successful service. This view is more focused on success metrics such as customer satisfaction, NPS, or how to keep customers onboard or ensure that the offering of products and services is successful or improved.
• Talent coaching: You need to optimise the more important tasks of team managers, in this case using the detection technology to automatically measure employee performance and analyse the most important skills a team should have. This gives the team leader much more space to focus on personal coaching and allows them to monitor whether this has the desired effect over time. This can save significant time but it also offers personal coaching attention that results in better service handling and more-satisfied employees.
• Sales conversion: Another success KPI is sales success or customer retention. You can set a frame of reference based on your best employees, where you define which skills contribute to sales success and whether there are skills or sequences in conversation construction that have more impact on conversion or retention. You can also think of an insight model in which you focus more on a healthy balance between efficiency and personalised attention.
• NPS prediction: Success optimisation can also be found in a satisfaction analysis where you link a detection analysis insight model to NPS results. This insight can contribute to determining which approach, word use, attention and skills contribute to positive NPS results and what should be avoided to prevent or reduce complaints and negative sentiment.

From a business analyst’s point of view

• End-to-end insights: Here too you can create success factors with more business intelligence by making correlations with other data insights. In many cases, this is applied to analyses of the broader customer journeys, trends and interest profiles, and methods more tailored to the type of customer and campaign/marketing success.
• Business intelligence: An API data warehouse structure can be used to perform business intelligence analysis, where customer feedback can be an essential part of map trends, positioning, product feedback and brand reputation, for further determining business strategies and monitoring an organisation’s visions and missions.
• Root cause analysis: It is possible to perform analyses within the operational tool. This adds value as you can perform faster analysis of current situations and gain insights. You can also trace the underlying challenges or unexpected trends that you have encountered to understand what requires immediate attention. This allows you to play a more advisory role and to use data-driven insights to determine results-driven focus and priorities.
• Trending topics: Data-driven insights allow you to automatically monitor the so-called “trending topics” and enable you to keep a finger on the pulse of events that fall outside the normal operational course of business. This gives you the opportunity to react quickly to new situations and to be able to play an advisory role about customer loss, campaign effect or product or service issues and their underlying causes.

Contexta360 will help you to optimise your customer success strategies by uncovering insights from all of these measures.
If you like to know more, please contact us.

Today, throughout the contact centre landscape, mandatory agent after-call work (ACW) is the norm and is deployed to avoid asking customers to repeat their details, reduce call times, capture relevant conversational information and generally classify process.

Around 60 to 120 seconds is the typical time allocated to agents to make post-call notes and schedule follow-up tasks. Mathematically, for an average call centre of 200 agents, that’s an incredible amount time to take them away from customers. Not to mention the pressure it puts on agents to complete their ACW accurately within the timeframe.

In this blog, I will explore new options that promise to empower agent teams and positively raise corporate profiles.

1. Raising agent engagement and empowerment

On average, customer-facing employees use two to three applications during call engagements, mainly to register customer needs or actions. Conversely, using these various applications can negatively impact agent efficiency, motivation and morale. Therefore reducing, if not eliminating, post-call administrative work should be a priority for contact centre leaders. This will not only ease next-in-line queue pressure, but positively impact agent wellbeing, post-administrative workload, and call-handling quality.

Enabling agent workflow processes by utilising optimisation technology such as AI automated conversation summarisation and intelligent speech analytics, connected to the company Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, offloads administrative pressure and distractions by eliminating unnecessary post-conversational work. This will raise team spirit and improve performance.

2. Reduce your repetitive tasks by 10%

Using AI speech analytics technology has the benefit of surfacing 100 per cent data-driven insight, which provides detailed performance and business health views. It will help discover and render accurate and effective ways to understand customer friction, effort and satisfaction, as well as detail any inconsistencies.

Full conversation transcriptions provide the next level of conversational business insights, displaying why certain issues, such as dissatisfaction or success, occurred. Comprehensive, full transcription record insights are fundamental to improving the decision-making processes, together with workflows and staff knowledge. This is particularly true at the workflow level, where using AI automated summarisation reduces the average administrative time by 10 to 20 per cent.

3. Create active listeners

Removing the tedious tasks of ACW allows agents to focus and dive deeper into customer issues. Liberated from the pressure of remembering and summarising end-call customer comments, agents are able to be freethinking, are actively listening and are primed to provide an exceptional customer experience. AI auto summaries are devoid of writing style and time pressure constraints and consistently provide concise conversational call summaries.

Agents can confidently provide individual customer attention, safe in the knowledge that the latest and most accurate call summary information is immediately to hand.

4. Support contextual coaching

Emotional intelligence is paramount when it comes to working with customers. Adapting to the needs of the individual customer is an agent skill like no other. Being human is both a blessing and a curse, especially for leaders, when it comes identifying and navigating individual agent coaching needs, from streams of agent call data.

Contact centre coaching requires a broad spectrum of conversation monitoring, as business health and performance results identify which agents require personal coaching and which aspects need a team education approach. Using AI summarisation pinpoints the areas of immediate concern, while eliminating the need to work through the full conversation and transcript. Without doubt, AI auto call summarisation speeds up the coaching process so that agents are coached more effectively. This is something that will raise morale as agents will no longer need to endure blanket coaching, saving time and training costs.

Summary

Automatic Call Summary condenses large quantities of spoken words, phrases and complete sentences into short text summaries. It reduces workload, automates manual tasks, saves time and reduces team pressure. Auto conversational summaries can be added to your existing CRM, ERP or your chosen system of record, while ensuring the consistency and accuracy of agent notes and post-call wrap up.

If you like to know more about how Contexta360’s Automatic Call Summary can help your business, please contact us

Rene van Popering, Director of Solutions Architecture at Contexta360 looks at how businesses can take a more sophisticated and effective approach. 

How useful is the Net Promoter Score today?
Can it help me to manage my service centre employees?
Is NPS a good way to measure success?

I do not think it is and, to be honest, I would judge it as a legacy rating. I believe there are better ways today to identify satisfaction and loyalty.

Human behaviour is complex, and is affected by a person’s character, hormones, childhood patterns and many, many other variables. Some people always seem to be relaxed, whereas others always appear to be on edge, ready to explode at a moment’s notice.

In a business sense, contact centre staff will be exposed to this full range of emotion from customers every day. Your staff need to judge the request and the level of emotion in the first 30 seconds of a conversation to be able to respond appropriately as the empathic, friendly helping hand. Looking at the engagement types, the voice channel rather than chat is where you handle the more sophisticated conversations, and this is where you need to make sure that you deal with clients in a satisfactory way.

Generally, understanding of NPL loyalty and satisfaction insights are poor. A typical response to questioning is “we have a bit of an impression of who are promoters or detractors” as post-survey processes manage this in some form. The challenge is balancing this out as some customers are irritated if they receive surveys after every type of engagement, even simple tasks.

A post-survey process can often catch the very angry and very happy feedback at either end of the emotional spectrum. However, it often misses the middle-ground opinions where you have achieved the appropriate balance, being a friendly, trustworthy company with the proper level of attention.

Observing survey results from a different angle, I would rather see a promoter scoring results by looking at human engagement and emotion-handling skills.

A conversation analysis approach can be a more detailed and sophisticated way to monitor success and establish a customer-friendly corporate culture. By analysing all engagements and measuring the factors that impact loyalty and satisfaction, you can ensure your staff are able to deal with every customer effectively, whatever the emotional state of that customer during their contact. This is far more effective than relying on low-bandwidth, post-submitted responses.

If you would like to get in touch, please contact Contexta360

If you do not see it or hear it, it does not mean that whatever it is does not require immediate attention. Rene van Popering explains.

Would you wait for frustration feedback from your team before you interfere? Would you rely on a chat at the coffee machine to spot employee frustrations? Would you start acting only when clients start complaining, submitting negative surveys or social posts about their unhappiness? In general, we do not want to act in a too little too late fashion but this is still a prevalent blind-spot scenario found in many customer engagement satisfaction results.

Having a dynamic and hybrid task force of office and remote workers doesn’t make it easier to maintain business health and performance. It requires additional monitoring to ensure visibility of remote business operations’ personal and IT health. Your staff’s “remote factor”, with various home worker setups and equipment, connection, cams, microphones, headsets etc, is mind-blowing, especially with our ongoing video meeting culture. Recently, we have seen home workers’ creativity when it comes to ensuring business engagements run as smoothly as possible.

Remote office and engagement creativity needs to be dealt with properly. Maintaining proactive, remote, personalised assistance to your remote staff is, in many organisations, still wishful thinking. Instead we wait reactively for IT submitted tickets. One-to-one review meetings are often hijacked with discussions about tools and connection frustrations or to vent about the engagement problems remote staff faced last week.

Enabling your remote talent needs more than automated “health checks”. Being responsible for a hybrid CX task force often means you need to handle more interaction and desktop issues in order to deliver as excellent a service as you would expect from your office-managed contact centre. The remote team should preferably have the same level of quality support and tools, ensuring that remote staff feel part of the corporate crew, knowing they can rely on coaching assistance by team leads and your IT desk. This is one of the focused areas of optimisation attention that is a high-priority CTO/CIO management theme that assures business success. Equipped staff that feel supported by their company are critical to this success.

Having complete visibility of remote workers’ needs and IT health can be a very reactive and manual process. Even when there are processes to report issues or ask for assistance, you do not always instantly understand the scale of things, questioning if this is an individual challenge or does this need to be addressed as a corporate IT or process issue?

There is a lot to win by having better operational engagement insight, as your team will tell you via the engagement experience without submitting any support ticket. You can keep an “automated eye” on all team members regardless of where you or they are. You can monitor your business health by checking how often engagements with your clients are handled without any connection or remote desktop obstacles.

Enabling complete and automated detection for your voice and chat engagement data can keep your finger on the pulse with regard to possible friction in infrastructure, desktop tooling or co-workers’ handling assistance. Automatic review of all engagements allows you to detect needs more quickly and on the correct scale of magnitude. It allows you to initiate a trending analysis to define the proper measures to resolve or change to achieve better outcomes.

A lot has been said about working from home lately and experiences vary a lot according to the type of work, room facilities, family situation and many other ingredients that impact the performance and happiness of your remote staff. Having 100 per cent issue monitoring at hand, understanding needs proactively – from a tool and a personal perspective – supports wellbeing and expands what you want to know as soon as friction or unhappiness appears.

The fact that you can enable your CX talent with a personalised health and comfort approach using an AI conversational intelligence remote health check program can take away that blind-spot, ensuring that your staff feel appreciated and inspired not disconnected, positively impacts wellbeing and helps them to shine every day.

If you like to know more do get in touch, Contact – Contexta360

Good CX matters. Your primary mission is to engage with your clients in an effective and frictionless manner to deliver excellent service.

This sounds logical and, yes, it should help you to achieve brand loyalty and customer satisfaction to enable you to become the leading brand. About 70 per cent of businesses state that the buying experience is related to how customers feel they are treated. Adding the human touch and showing that you care facilitates trust and greatly influences business success.

From a data-driven perspective, we do want to know what is going on. Many businesses have insights into their operations by reviewing the journey, business processes, and employee handling performance. By looking at satisfaction scores, NPS ratings, and anything that displays a certain kind of friction metrics, you can ask yourself, are these sufficient insights to help you to achieve greater business success?

Human nature means we like to know what is going wrong or what is disconnected, and how we are going to improve some of our underperforming staff. These are essential things to know, but you can also ask whether these are my success criteria to improve my business? Or am I firefighting to ensure things will not get worse?

Having the correct level of understanding about business performance is something you can build by defining your success criteria. This can be a lot easier if you unlock your voice data to enable you to collect these valuable insights.

“How can we improve conversion rates? is my marketing campaign effective enough?”

What you really need to define is what you need to know to assist your CX mission and vision. What is your perception or point of view? What indicators are related? How can you translate that to a health or target status answer on your performance dashboard views?

Knowing what’s happening now is important. Preferably, it should be automated detection that can drive these operational insights as a daily refreshed view and not something you should start looking for. Enabling conversational intelligence can give you these answers about how you are doing.

The questions you should ask include:

• What is causing the average acceptable tech support handling time to increase?
• Do employee actions match and, at minimum, meet the correct level of information/actions requested?
• Are agreement conditions within our corporate policies always vocalised?
• What are the frequent reasons why our clients are dissatisfied?

Addressing questions such as these by using AI-driven conversational intelligence to identify obstacles and frictions is a good start. Broken processes and product challenges can also be uncovered to drive decision-making action and achieve operational success. Achieving frictionless channel engagement and taking personal care of your clients should be monitored and measurable at any given moment. This will help team leaders to pinpoint specific coaching programs that deliver personalised coaching, to enable your staff to excel  in service delivery.

Operational excellence is a mission-critical ingredient. You should have enterprise engagement understanding insights and use this data-driven view to define your “real-ask” CX mission goals and targets, such as boosting sales by 40 per cent, increasing conversation rates by 20 per cent or boosting the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

You should also ask:

• How can we increase upselling? What are my best performers doing so well?
• What are customers telling me they are considering buying? Or why are they still hesitant to purchase?
• What level of empathy is used and needed to deliver a balanced, personalised approach?
• How can we predict NPS scores? What kind of behaviour and client feedback impacts the satisfaction rating?

The result of good CX does matter, and operational performance is key to that success. The question is, is your  organisation ready for intelligent listening, that drives real business success? For some, this vital leap may be too much, with endless cycles of customer firefighting and general customer malaise being the awkward reality.