With Covid-19 the need for businesses to sort out their digital offerings has gone from an ‘in progress’ to ‘it has to happen now’. And by next year, it will be ‘why haven’t you automated yet?’.
By Dave Williams, chief operating officer of DigiBlu
The go-to pandemic response from companies has been to drive self-service, but these channels are imperfect. Take an Unnamed Airline, for example. It offers a WhatsApp channel it guides customers to, saying ‘don’t call us, there’s a two-hour wait, use this channel instead’.
The WhatsApp chatbots can only handle queries that are predictable or in process, however. This means people get into the loop of doom going around dumb self-service channels or chatbots that are unable to handle a query that is slightly out of the ordinary or not according to the chatbot’s programmed process.
For example, if a passenger wants to rebook one big trip as two small ones and the request is out of process, the passenger ends up in loop hell until she can speak to a human agent, which is very frustrating.
Some of the problems are caused by internal company policies (like an airline policy not allowing passengers to exchange a single trip ticket for two tickets).
However, a major cause is that standard chatbots can’t deal with any kind of complexity, and usually can’t interface with legacy systems to get data. (This isn’t just a problem with dumb chatbots; it also results in dumb human agents because they can’t get out of the loop of doom either.)
Three-pronged solution
The way to resolve the loop of doom is to deal with these three pieces of the puzzle.
First, add smarter chatbots, like those you can build using digital expert technologies like CLEVVA. These digital experts, like human experts, can deal with complexity and move beyond a monolith chatbot that can’t do anything that is not standard.
Secondly, draw data and information from core systems by integrating APIs or robots so that your chatbots have the information needed by customers to allow them to self-serve.
Thirdly, review your company policies – which often drive the craziness – and ask “do we want to treat people this way?”. Some policies are non-negotiable, but tend to be very complex, so it’s worthwhile introducing a digital expert to assist the human agent or drive the self-service experience in a contextual way.
That not only solves this year’s problems, but also sets you right for next year’s concerns.
What to expect in 2022
There has been a fundamental shift in customer expectations. However well (or badly) companies have digitally transformed, consumers have been exposed to digital communications and channels and I don’t see that trend reversing.
For contact centres the focus turns to being more efficient and getting better completion rates in their channels. While many have added more channels, they now need to move from digital channel transformation to digital experience transformation. This will also help them retain staff amid the great resignation.
In call centres, the cognitive load is huge. Agents have to deal with five different systems on a desktop and talk to the customer at the same time. Automation will help companies retain staff because it means human agents need less training, benefit from reduced cognitive load and gain added assistance when they need it.
RPA robots or digital workers allow businesses to drive customer service levels up by focussing on improving the employee experience for human workers.
My advice is for businesses to focus on customer experience and specifically on end-to-end journeys. Are they completing? Most people don’t want to talk to a call centre more than once, so do you have one-touch resolution? And does your one-touch service extend to all digital channels? These areas will deliver efficiency and customer retention for businesses.
Finally, remember that successful companies have great self-service journeys. Think of Amazon, which gives you all you need at the right moment and if you do have a query they enable you to self-serve so it gets resolved quickly and automatically.
Now apply this level of self-service to banks, insurers and telcos – regulated companies that have to offer hyper-personalised and compliant query resolution across multiple digital channels. That’s what businesses need to achieve in 2022.