Pump Up Your Customer Experience with These 5 Methods

https://activatecx.arroyo360.com/5CXMethods
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Discover the 5 Critical CX Methods that run through your contact center ai solutions to revolutionize your customer experience (CX) strategy forever in this insightful video. Learn how contact center AI solutions can enhance your customer service, the benefits of using AI in contact centers, and how AI agent assistants can streamline operations. Dive deep into the world of omnichannel, chatbot's, voice bots, generative AI, NLP, and automation to stay ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of customer sales and service. 

Watch now to unlock the potential of growing your business to compete in a modern world!

Chapters
00:22The Case for Better CX
06:08 CX Method #1
10:36 CX Method #2
15:08 CX Method #3
22:25 CX Method #4
29:30 CX Method #5

Chapters

• 0:22 The Case for Better CX
• 6:08 CX Method #1 Omnichannel
• 10:36 CX Method #2 Agent Assist
• 15:08 CX Method #3 Self Service
• 22:25 CX Method #4 Personalization
• 29:30 CX Method #5 Integration Synergy

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to this very special edition of the activate CX podcast. Today, we unpack five critical CX methods you can use inside your business. If you want to listen to an audio only version of this podcast, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, and of course, I heart radio folks, if you want to get better, let's go get it. So we talk about CX as being critical. In fact, five CX methods that we want to impart today. And it's really a lot to kind of take in, but I think that it's going to be something very powerful for you. We use the word critical and not important because we see these as critical events. And there's some reasons why. A big reason has to do with the fact that, as we all know, our world has changed and there's an incredible level of downforce that we're getting that's creating compression. And this compression is leading to disruption and maybe a certain level of opportunity as well. Thank you. It has impacted the consumer in an interesting way, and the consumer is changing their behavior as to how they buy and how they interact with brands. If you look right here, you can see that people are losing trust. In fact, 27 percent of Americans report a lack of effectiveness as their number one frustration with customer service. And they have kind of a see you later kind of attitude. After a bad customer experience, 39 percent of customers will avoid a company for two years. And then no second chances. People are just leaving. They're stopping doing business with people that maybe they've worked with for some time because of just one bad experience. And that 91 percent of those customers who are unhappy with the brand will just leave without complaining. So they won't even necessarily go on and complain from a social perspective. So you don't get that second chance for a first impression. Now, this is compounded even further, I believe by the fact that what we've experienced in the last year in particular around generative AI is signaling a paradigm shift. In technology. If you combine that with low code and no code technologies, which means people are putting new tech out to the market at a much faster pace. And then they're combining this with the integration of blockchain. And we know that that has tremendous impact to the financial services world. We know there's a higher level of complexity that comes from it, a lot of engineering, but there's also more security and flexibility, and all of is being amplified. By this radical change. Not only that, from the standpoint of crazy choices, you have the ability now to look out into an enterprise stack, which is actually somewhat of a clutter across marketing, operations, sales, customer service. Knowing how to acquire technology and make sure that you're not creating technical debt is even more of a problem now than ever before. Financial services in particular, I think. Is very unique in the fact that it's so regulatory. And if you look at the combination of upstarts in the FinTech and insure tech against traditional financial services, there's a lot of friction. And if you look at privacy and fraud concerns, that is amplifying the need for better experience and better workflow and local, regional, national, all the competition, everybody's competing with each other. In fact, it's much more of a democratized playing field, which. Increases the challenge even more and customers expect more. We all know this security offerings, availability, and even more than that. So what does this mean? Well, we have a response to this, which is fully with inside. Of our control. And there are a lot of things that we just talked about that are outside of our control, but what's inside of our control. Well, customer experience is inside of our control and we should have a mandate first and foremost, that says, let's keep our customers. And there's a reason why, because it costs more to acquire a customer than it does to keep a customer. So why wouldn't you invest in that? Understanding your customer more than ever is really important. And it's not just understanding them allegorically, but it's understanding them via data. And also focusing on optimizing your costs, that is really huge. And when I say optimizing, I don't mean cutting costs, I mean optimizing it. So knowing where to spend wisely to generate ROI, and then moving people towards revenue generating position. That is very important. We need to move people into a position where we're able to move that top line inside the organization. And finally, building a practice of continuous improvement. It's pretty huge because CX, as we all know, is somewhat fragmented in terms of who owns that particular role inside the business. And so, now that we know that CX is somewhat the answer, we know that it's going to improve competitiveness, sustainability, and profitability. Those are the big outcomes that are important for the business. In fact, McKinsey says, A strategy focused on improving the experience of existing customers It can deliver breakthrough growth for incumbent companies. But if you look at it, it's literally double that of the industry peers, those people that invest into customer experience. That is another driver for a business to look at this as maybe being critical point for success. So here we are, we want to talk about these five CX methods. And the reason is we want to get these measurables. If you look off on the side here, we, we want to get conversion. We want to get engagement. We want to get better data insights and all of this leads to success. So here we go. Number one, you want to expand channels. What are channels? Channels are communication channels over the business. These are not marketing channels like paid search or something along those lines, but you want to add additional channels and they're really things that you add to your unified communications in your contact center and most companies really only use two or three channels. Which is kind of crazy because there's over 25 channels that customers communicate on and not being on those channels means that you're not where your customers are. Now what's really cool is that some channels allow a company representative to manage 4 to 5 conversational threads at the same time. But it's kind of crazy because there are 25 channels and I bet your business is just really on voice and email and potentially chat. That's really cool. So, what are the modern channels? And these are some that are just distilled down. Really, you want to look at human moderated channels. Those that use email, live chat, SMS, and phone. You probably have some of those in some particular means, but not necessarily to the degree that they're clearly discoverable across all the touch points. Messaging, WhatsApp and WeChat, Facebook messaging. In fact, Facebook is commonly used social media platform interacting with companies with 60 percent of consumers stating that they use Facebook for customer service issues. So you really want to make sure that you're on these channels. And this is also called social listening. And then also going across the social channels of Instagram and Facebook. This is very, very important in terms of rounding out a complete strategy because perhaps some of those people don't complain to you directly will be complaining on a social channel and you want to hear about it and engage with them directly. And the last item is really going fully digital. That's around voicebots, chatbots, and knowledge based articles. These are channels that are clearly changing how people are expanding their resources and communicating and engaging with their clients. Now, there are big benefits here. Being available to customers on a channel of their choice, that's probably the number one. Managing multiple customer interaction threads, that's huge now, especially if you have people involved and they're managing four or five chat threads. The ability to route customers because we're in a contact center environment. You can route people based upon what we know about that individual. We can route people based upon who they spoke with last time. There's a lot of different things that we can do intelligently to get people to a good voice inside the business on the channel that they need, because we're using what's called agent skills. And then we can elevate the channel. If they come in on chat, but that's not working and we need to get them into a phone call, we can do channel elevation. That is really important. And then there's tons of built in KPIs and metrics that come for the supervisor, for the manager, for people that are looking at what's going on inside of their business, the data that we can. Get from all these channels is absolutely phenomenal. Now, this does an awful lot to get lift because we say, well, what's in it for us? Why should we be doing this? Why should we invest in these other channels? Customer satisfaction scores just go up and 10 percent may not seem like a lot, but I want you to think about the cumulative effect of all of these particular areas. You decrease average handle time. You improve first contact resolution. All these things are compounding. And people who have a strong on the channel engagement strategy really outperform those people that don't. So this is something that needs to be part and parcel of your CX strategy going forward. It's going to help you win. We've got some professional tips for you. You don't need to be a contact center to use contact center technology. So if you see contact center technology and you say to yourself, we're not a contact center, that's okay. You can still use that technology to move the ball forward with your clients. You can also add this to your mobile apps. So if you have web apps, mobile apps, using channel support across all of these platforms and modalities gets you re and then you can leverage all these digital touch points to drive conversion and amplify engagement. Remember, that's kind of what we're trying to do from the get go. Now, this leads into CX method number two. So first of all, on the channel, number two. Agent Assist, and I want to say sometimes you don't get a second chance for a first impression. And so everything is about being on that call. So what is Agent Assist? It's software. It's a software platform or tool. It plugs into your unified communications and your contact center. It functions real time. So this is not something that is analyzing the conversation after it happened. It's happening right in the conversation. And it's highly configurable. It leverages AI, natural language processing, large language models, all of that to provide information and guidance at the fingertips of your agent. And it generates gobs of data. It is unbelievable how much you will learn from the conversation, how people are adjusting to the guidance that being provided, but as well as what the trends are inside the business. So you will not have a lack of information from this tool. So you can imagine. Your agent having that conversation and then being provided, this is what you need to be asking in terms of questions, maybe providing information about you should be listening more, or maybe slow down in your delivery. All of this is happening real time to cultivate a better employee experience, but also a much better customer experience. So. This will do a lot of things. So just think about what it costs to train an agent and bring an agent to life. Whether that's a salesperson or a customer service person, this is going to move a lot faster and it's going to keep your agents on track with the right conversation flow all the time. And it actually even adapts to it. So if you're a more experienced user, we may detune some of it automagically in the application and then automating note taking. So all the after call. Kind of notes that you need in the summarizations, what happened and what do I think I need to do next? All of that is updated and put into your CRM and then it just measures everything and it scales the best practices across the organization. Whatever is working is gonna get disseminated. People are gonna get up to date and on the same page for consistency. And it really triggers those coachable moments because it's listening actively and tying in to the knowledge base that you're providing for it. All of this is really important because now we're able to identify and quantify and provide scorecards to people that are really based upon the conversations and not just the opinion maybe of a supervisor. Well, results come pretty fast. So RAM type for agents decreases by 75%. And if you just take that to dollars, you know, that's a big number. Especially if you have 10 agents, 50 agents, 300 agents, 1000 agents, the multiplier effect is staggering. Okay. Average handle time decreased by 42 seconds on average. Doesn't sound like a lot, but if your average call is four minutes, you just decrease that by 17 percent and that's across your business. 25 percent improvement in CSAT scores, increase in conversions, upsell, cross sell. Now we're getting into making sure that while we're on that call, we're talking about that special or that offer. Really, really important, especially in financial services, where you don't want to have to call somebody back. You want to make sure that that time is well worth spent. The ROI is huge. And so this is kind of our no brainer, really, honestly, you know, I can't, it should not be a word we can trim off that T on the end if you want to dig into this more, but this just becomes something where you're looking at what you're spending right now. That's a sunk cost. If you were spending a small incremental amount more on top of that, but get radically better results. I think you would want to do that all day long. Our pro tip. If you have a significant investment of people challenge yourself about an incremental investment. And think about what if you weren't able to emulate your top 10 salespeople, emulate your top 10 customer service people, and then that made it into a consistent delivery across your business. What would that do for you in terms of lift? Think compliance and cost and consistency inside of the financial services industry, having the right conversation and saying the right thing from a client's perspective can be paramount. And just think about leveraging an AI based agent assist platform. It's something that's in the cards for you. Okay, we talked about Omnichannel. We talked about agent assist. Number three, self service. It also is a platform or a tool. And it works with your unified communications or your contact center. Plugs directly in to your voice system if you want to have a conversational experience with your customer with AI. Which, the modern AI's. provide a brilliant personalized conversation. It can plug directly into your website or a mobile app to provide chatbot support. And if you think about that website, it could be a searchable web portal that provides knowledge based articles based upon a Google search. And it typically removes the need for human interaction. So now you can actually elevate people inside your organization to deal with the most complex issues. So your chat bot, hey, that can simply be on a phone as well. So this doesn't have to be on a website and it is all harnessing the large language models of AI and also your knowledge base that you create. So you're not searching the web to find an answer for your customer. You're searching your information, your knowledge based article. You're curating the experience for your end user. And so if you have a customer portal and you want people to access that, wouldn't you want that to be based upon knowledge based articles that you create that are searchable on the web? That means that you can invest in search engine optimization. When people search for something about your company, they're going to find the customer portal. They're going to find that in a public sense, they're going to give you an opportunity to provide a private portal to your customers. And then the ability to integrate into it things like chat. And so now this chat is utilizing all the data that's behind the scenes in this customer portal to cultivate a better experience. And remember the term channel elevation? We need to elevate it to a phone call. We can't. But we want to contain it, if we can, because perhaps what 5 cost to serve that customer might turn into 0. 40. I think you'd want to trade for that. At the same time, the conversational AI calling in on a 1 800 number based upon a choice, actually having a conversation with the AI and what is this AI using? It's using the knowledge base articles that you've curated and it's using that large language model and that natural language processing to create a good experience and that could be across multiple languages. It can understand and provide empathy based upon the sentiment that's being picked up. It has a lot of great capable features that you can use. Now, When you think about self service, you have to have a starting point. Where do you stop, drop, and roll? You do it around journey and you do it really around story. So you have to think about the customer journey. You have to take what is maybe a high volume, low complexity requirement. Where customers are calling in and you're going to utilize that with a story and you're going to make sure that the access for a self service option is available on different touchpoint. You really start small. That's really what you do. You start small, then you measure, then you refine, then you scale. Now, this has tremendous benefits in the organization. You can redirect your labor force. Remember, one of our core points was how can we move people forward into revenue generating positions? Well, this is how you can do it without having to hire more people. So you can actually put people in a position to have more outbound calls and to take on more customer service with inside of using a self service solution. Scalability. In fact, more importantly, elasticity. Most organizations are inelastic. What does that mean? It means that when there's a downturn, they've got to fire people because they're not optimized. Well, in a scenario where you have a self service blend, a hybrid approach, so to speak, to self service and to customer service in its entirety, you can scale up and you can scale down, and you can do that more as a variable cost versus a fixed cost, and you can optimize your labor force. It makes perfect sense. And you have the ability to deliver 24 7. You have reduced IVR complexity. Because all of these things have a level of interpolation that's coming from the generative AI. You don't have to hit a certain button. You can just say a particular phrase, or you can write a particular phrase, and the interpolation that comes from generative AI figures it out. And you can generate personalized experiences, because we're tying this in the back end, smartly, into customer data, so we can drive personalization. And this enhanced automation drives across the business. So once a conversation has occurred, we know what is next and we can drive the automation of it without a human being in the background. And maybe part of that automation might be to have somebody from the organization call out and talk to that person. So it doesn't mean that you're not involving human beings, but it means that the process of getting the next step automated and activated is possible. So what do we look at right now? If you look across the businesses and based upon a McKinsey study, is that the state of CX is at 65 percent of tasks and 50 to 70 percent of interactions in AI powered ecosystem can be automated. And this creates the omnichannel. We tie this back in with sending a text, with sending an email, all automated. Now the results from self service. Overall improvements, of course, as you would imagine in first contact resolution, average handle time, all the table stakes that we would think would improve. But there's a big decrease in cost per contact. That's huge. And there's a lift, a 15 to 25 percent improvement in revenue and sales conversion and an expected increase in customer lifetime value. That's something we're looking for, especially if your organization is to be sustainable. 10 to 20 percent due to repeat purchases and customer retention. And employee productivity increases. Why? Because those people are focused on high value activities. HVA. That is part of the self service phenomena. HVA is another acronym. Add it to the list. Our pro tip, start now. You really don't want to be a laggard in terms of AI. But of course we know there's a smart way to start. Go for high volume, low complexity user stories. Don't try to build an AI model yourself. You may have an IT team. You may have some architects and some engineers. That's great. But unless you're already building your own car or growing your own food, I would recommend against it. Those tools are readily available. Leverage those tools. Start small. Optimize. Learn. Learn. And scale. All right. So we talked about omni channel, we built on agent assist, and then we looked at self service. Number four, personalize everything. This could not be more important. And this isn't really a technological thing. It's more of a method, but it does involve technology greatly. So. First and foremost, you have to figure out inside your business where is the source of truth around our customer, how we identify and apply customer preferences, where do we do that? And if you do that, it ensures that every customer is respectfully called by name across all channels as if we're tying it in across our tech stack. And it drives the outbound messaging on channels that the customers prefer and also with the right messages. So we know that somebody is not interested in something, why would we offer it to them? It just almost would seem like noise and cause that individual to not really want to look at anything that comes across the board from us. And it understands the experience a customer has encountered and moderates the conversation, right? So this is part, if you think about the fact that somebody might have a bad experience once before and they call back in. If we have information around the experience for that customer, then perhaps that agent that's speaking to them might be a little bit more considerate, have more empathy, understand that there's sensitivity afoot. One of my great stories is I love TireRack. com. If you've ever gone to TireRack. com, it's something that I would certainly always advocate for. They do a great job of personalization. What do they do? They make sure that they know what car you have. They make sure that they know what conditions you typically drive in. They start to understand what it is for you to own this car and drive this car, and then they just don't send you tons of information or engage with you around anything different than exactly what you need. They don't waste your time, they get to the point, and they're always helpful. Their recommendations are spot on. A great example of personalization. So personalization is about capture. This is what I want to really get across to you right now. If inside of your organization you're not capturing this information, then you're going to be a little bit behind the eight ball in terms of bringing personalization to life. Not that you can't do it pretty quickly, but you're going to have to wait to gain more information to get better at it. So what I mean is, if you're not capturing the information that's coming in on all sorts of forms, whether it's a registration form, an application form, but anything else, if you're not capturing it in a really smart way that's a source of truth for the customer, you're missing out. If you're not looking at the transactions to see trends and what people are buying, what they're ordering, how they're transacting inside of your business, if you can't tell really what they're doing from the standpoint of using their credit card or what kind of experience they have in insurance and what policies they have and experience they're having around those policies, if you're not looking at the transactions to tease out an understanding of that person's journey and how you personalize, you're missing out. Attribution, how did they get here? Was it from a Facebook ad? Was it from direct mail? Were they referred? What, how did they respond to an offer that you gave them recently? How are you attributing what they're doing inside of your system? And then what does it look like from the communications? Did they speak to somebody in sales? Did they speak to somebody in member services? What are those communications look like? And do they give us any clue as to how we can personalize their experience? Capture. Capture is the word. Then optimize communications and offers. What is this going to do? Well, everything that we talk about here is really about building trust and rapport. And if you think about in the financial services world, building trust is the number one challenge that you have. It's the one thing that when you lose trust, you will lose that customer. So by clearly demonstrating to customers that they have value, you will keep those customers. You will have greater customer insights from acquiring as to preference or just purely monitoring experience and activity, like I stated before, and you're going to be able to drive the effectiveness of customer service operations. That's really all about optimizing and refining. You're going to talk about all those things that matter most and really, if you're taking care of the problems for people quickly. You can take a little less shine off of all of the blue sky that you might be mentioning to them because it's going to be clearly evidenced that you have their interests at mind and you know what they need. This is going to differentiate you from competitors right off the bat because not everybody is as bought in to CX as you might think. And reinforcement of customer loyalty programs. This is big, right? Because, you know, people do look back at what you're offering them and they're asking themselves. You told me that you would do this and they know if you did or didn't. So this is all about evidencing your customer experience and your trust. Reasons to consider it. Well, if we go back and we're bringing in the CFO or we're saying to the CEO, we're thinking about earnings per share, we're thinking about what we owe to our stockholders, to our stakeholders. Well, you're going to get increases in revenue and better CSAT. You're going to grow faster. In fact, 40 percent more revenue from personalization than their slower growing counterpart. So if you're driving personalization, you should drive 40 percent more revenue than personalization. Your competition, roughly 75 percent of consumers tried a new shopping behavior in the last 18 months. People are open to change and more than 80 percent of those intend to continue with new behaviors. So saying that somebody has done this for the last five years is not a very good argument anymore. And 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn't happen. So all of this really speaks to the need for personalization. Over three quarters of consumers, that's 76%, said that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in prompting their consideration of a brand. And 78 percent said that such content made them more likely to repurchase. There's never been a reason more to make how you deal with people more simple, more accessible, and more personal. Our pro tip. Understand the customer story. You can kind of ditch customer journey maps. I'm not a fan. I might be the only one, but I think there's a growing number of people that say that it feels good when you're doing it, but nobody activates it afterwards. A story is important. Know your customer story, and in fact, write your customer story. Look at all forms of communication and engagement. That's really important. Identify the sources of truth in your tech stack, and account for preferences and choices in profile. Integrate with websites. Do all the things you need to do to make sure that this is working in your business. All right, here we are. Method number five, the last one in a drum roll. Software Synergy, short for integration. You have to get a 360 degree view of understanding preferences, behaviors, and needs. You have to deliver a seamless customer experience. That only happens when you have the data. So all these things about personalization really come about by getting data. It's going to help you avoid blind spots. You're not going to send out a silly communication to a customer after they've had a bad experience talking to customer service. You're not going to do that because you accounted for it. You routed that data to your marketing automation. You pulled them from the cadence just in time. Achieving data driven decision making, that's the way to go. You need to get away from your gut. You need to have a consolidated view of what that customer behavior is and act accordingly. And this is going to optimize your target marketing. This is what it looks like, folks. This is behind the scenes. The master Venn diagram, customer experience, everything is interrelated. Customer is replicated everywhere through here. We have different items being accounted for. And typically in most organizations, they're siloed by business owner. They're siloed by application. They're not looked at as being something that is part of a synergy, and that is how you heal the data in your organization, is fixing this, building your customer data platforms, visualizing it correctly, and understanding how this works across the customer journey. Integration goals are simple. Enhance customer experience. Customer retention, operational efficiency, all the table stakes we've talked about before, and the results of integration are silly. Improved customer lifetime value, paring down cost savings, higher CSAT, revenue growth, faster issue resolution, better conversion rates. All of this is by going through and building out your data smartly. So here's what you need to do. If you don't have a customer data lake, build one. Acquire one, but you need to have one. You need to have one that will help you combining and creating this source of truth for the customer, not just from a profile perspective, but from an understanding of journey, you need to apply methods of attribution, cause and effect, and you need to use a customer data platform, pretty new. This is changing everything, a CDP. That's what they call it. And they use it to ID resolution. Hey, Frank Rogers came in under five different email addresses, but I know it's that one person. I know what this individual is doing. So important. It's not happening anywhere else in the stack. And you can now route data across the tech stack, updating everybody with the pertinent information they need to have. And so you visualizations based upon the conversions and the engagement and the personalization because now you have this new found resource that you didn't have before. Let's go get it. So here we are five CX methods, all great outcomes, all things that you can apply. It's technology, it's methods. It's also frameworks, all of these things together, omni channel, agent assist, self service. Personalization and integration. We hope you really enjoyed this special edition of the activate CX podcast. Please like, and subscribe down below. And if you want to continue this conversation with us directly, there's a link in the description, reach out.