The way companies approach customer experience is being influenced significantly by the rise of technology, and the digital transformation of the contact centre.
Just a few years ago, company after company started praising automation as an all-around solution for improving customer experience. But is it exactly the case? The pandemic has revealed various flaws of automation in places where it entirely replaces the human workforce.
While automation does have its perks, businesses should carefully reconsider their CX goals before implementing automation and ultimately, make sure it benefits the customer. With that in mind, CX Today welcomes Andrew White, CEO of Contexta360, to uncover the common misconceptions about automation and how to turn it round so it aligns with your company’s vision of CX.
Contexta360 is a provider of an easy-to-use suite of AI-fuelled speech analytics and quality management solutions. They use machine learning and artificial intelligence to uncover insights in voice calls and turn them into a source of knowledge and actionable insight. Contexta360 API lets companies detect trends, track most important customer topics and the impact on the revenue.
Keeping business strategy in tune with automation goals
In an era of unprecedented speed of digital transformation, companies often dive headfirst into the unknown, so as to keep up with the competitors. The unknown, in this case, is the automation of everything possible to serve customers and keep additional expenses at bay. As to why companies sometimes make mistakes with automation due to ill judgement, White explains: “There’s good automation and there’s bad automation. A lot of companies think that all automation is good which is not the case. Companies think it works and that a lot of customers love it but quite often we hear the opposite.”
“Another misconception is that people think automation can solve all problems, when actually it should be put in place to solve one part of a very big puzzle.”
Implementing automation the right way has a lot to do with a company’s business strategy. The first question that should pop into senior executives’ minds should be the reason for automation.
White begins: “Recognising that all problems don’t go away with automation is fundamental. Reasons for automation can range from post pressure demands in your business strategy to customer convenience. The reason for automation can also be driving CSAT or achieving brand objectives but it’s crucial to identify which is the main one.”
White emphasises the importance of tracking the stages of the customer life cycle. Whether it’s new customer acquisition, onboarding, pre-sales, post-sales, or service support, the automation strategy should be aligned with a particular stage of the customer life cycle.
Automation gone wrong or common customer pain points
It’s not rare that customers get frustrated or annoyed while using some kind of automated service in an attempt to interact with a company. Quite often the interaction customers have with a brand can mean more than the product or service they are offering.
White says: “Automation and impact of self-service is in a lot of cases the shop window of your brand and your culture. There are rare cases in which companies don’t have to worry about automation, for example, if they have a unique product or their business does not include serving in any form. Although I do believe companies should really measure, react and make sure that automation does what it’s meant to do for the customer.”
Nevertheless, automated services like IVRs, IVAs, and chatbots offer a data perspective into interactions with customers. Analytics that agents get from these services are a precursor to gathering information before the customer reaches the human being on the other end.
Leveraging conversational insights to improve CX
By tapping into data that automated services are able to provide, companies can improve not only internal automation but also human-to-human interaction. Utilising conversational analytics can also drive things like auto CSAT scores, auto CX scores or auto CES scores. White adds: “With conversational analytics, you can liberate much more time to do customer service type of work and transformation work rather than administration. A lot of automation in internal processes is really going to help you in defining your automation strategy for external customer automation.”
Before starting with internal and external automation, it’s key that companies build out the service automation plan, advises White. Companies need to consider how customers are gaining access to all of their services and predict where frustration may occur when options aren’t available.
White continues: “You are going to use this kind of analytics to act as your policeman. As soon as companies start automating things, they lose a lot of visibility because they haven’t got humans giving them feedback. That is where they need to use automation and analytics platforms to look at chatbots, IVRs, IVAs, and CMS to make sure they’re getting intelligence on what the customer is seeing. More often than not, automation providers are not really motivated to inform of all of the findings, so it’s important to keep track.”
Companies might need to track the percentage of automation fails where customers end up with a human agent to point out where exactly are the common pain points.
“If you’re dealing with millions of interactions, it’s very difficult to mine those conversations and link them back to the records which, in many cases comes from automation”, adds White.
Looking to the future, automation will probably not completely replace everything as the majority of interactions today are still human-based. Natural language science and AI are still developing to reach the level of human-based interactions. “I see a significant convergence happening between different language processing capabilities and complex data models. I also see a very marked change in the way that we deliver automation capabilities that will we believe transform the automation market”, says White.
“From an analytics perspective, our next chapter is to really help companies with the automation technologies, whether they be voice-based or text-based.”
Find out more about Contexta360 portfolio of solutions here.
