In recent years, brands have invested in innovative new technologies, self-service strategies, and insightful analytics to drive a new era of customer service.
Today, it’s not just the demand for excellent experiences that is pushing businesses to evolve. An unpredictable economy, impending recessions, and changing customer behaviors mean companies must build the right CX strategies to survive.
After all, during the last crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic – brands that pushed the CX innovation envelope typically adapted best.
Of course, doing so again is likely a daunting prospect in the face of budget cuts and financial strains. Yet, many consider excellent CX the best way to recession-proof any business.
Moreover, CX enhancement projects can present opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce operational costs. Personalization programs are often an excellent example.
For instance, each of the following initiatives can unlock several benefits:
- Custom and relevant advertising
- Pre-populating customer forms
- Personalizing pricing and discounts
- Sending proactive customer alerts
- Tailoring online recommendations
Nevertheless, there are many more examples, many of which start in the contact center.
Recognizing this, Intuit – the finance software provider – aimed to deliver resilient, personalized experiences at scale during its cloud contact center transformation with AWS.
In achieving this aim, it adopted three personalization use cases, which Sam Watson, a Senior Software Engineer at Inuit, discussed during his 2022 presentation at AWS re:Invent.
Below is a whistlestop tour of Watson’s story.
Quick-Fire Facts About Intuit’s CCaaS Migration
Intuit chose to migrate to AWS for many reasons. First was the scalability of its Amazon Connect platform and agile pricing model – as contact volumes surge during tax season.
Indeed, Intuit’s contact centers must deal with seven million unique customers during peak periods.
Other objectives that Intuit aspired to accomplish with AWS included:
- A highly reliable service with 99.99 percent availability
- Configurability for different product offerings
- Observability when measuring call quality and completion
- Transcriptions with custom vocabulary modeling
- Analytics for real-time and historical reporting
Intuit aspired to build an omnichannel, collaborative contact center platform to achieve these aims. As Watson puts it, the goal was:
Ensuring customers are connected to the right expert on the best channels, with the most knowledge on a customer’s problem.
In hurtling towards this overarching objective, the business enabled service personalization at scale in the following three ways.
1. Creating a Customer Pre-Contact Portal
Inuit aims to gather customer information before the live agent conversation through a custom portal on its website – which holds onto details they may have previously entered.
As such, the customer doesn’t repeat themselves, and the business can store more relevant information to improve their future experiences.
Intuit devised these prompts to gather customer context and streamline the subsequent interaction. Indeed, they aim to:
- Understand the customer
- Understand their intent
- Present the customer with contact options relevant to the intent
Through prior intent-based research, Intuit discovered which channels offered the best agent, customer, and operations outcomes for each intent.
As such, they give every customer interaction the best chance of success.
Moreover, by spoon-feeding customer context back through to the agent, they may get straight to the crux of the customer’s issue.
As a result, the contact center personalizes the conversation, cuts down on handling times, and designs the experience for the modern, impatient customer.
2. AI-Driven Customer Routing
In the customer portal, NLP and machine learning break down the customer’s stated contact reason – into natural language – to understand customer intent.
Dissected into specific keywords, the intent then influences the routing process. As Watson stated:
AI matchmaking pairs the customer with the best possible expert to resolve their problem.
Intuit uses Amazon Connect Queues to define the domain and skills of its experts to support this experience.
Meanwhile, AWS has provided Intuit with additional APIs to customize the queues further and remove agents from routing profiles.
Yet, the required input decreases as the machine learning increases in its sophistication.
Meanwhile, the opportunities for new routing strategies rise. For instance, in the future, Intuit may take data from Amazon Connect’s native quality management (QM) solutions.
As these tools monitor 100 percent of all contact center interactions, the QM tool can spot the leading agents – across various intents – and communicate that with the routing system.
As such, the customer talks to the best-placed agent for their case: personalization at its finest.
3. A Central Hub for Agents In Amazon Connect
With the Amazon Connect Streams library, Intuit built a custom telephony widget, which combines the information customers enter into their portal with Salesforce data.
As a result, all this information and interaction data lives in a single place, filtering into the individual customer profiles.
The profile pops up for agents at the beginning of an interaction, which they can use to personalize and improve customer service.
Moreover, the widget integrates with Intuit’s “omnichannel hub for experts.” This is where agents communicate with customers across voice and digital channels while perhaps moving the conversation between channels.
With the integration, agents maintain customer context, despite the channel change, so the experience remains fluid and personal.
In addition, as Watson said:
The custom telephony tool also allowed us to publish customized call metrics. These let us know: how is the current call quality, and how did the call end?
With this information, Intuit can evolve its quality management program, allowing supervisors to spot the best opportunities to jump in, support the agent, and save the service experience.
Learn More About Intuit’s CCaaS Migration Experience
After completing its CCaaS transformation with Amazon Connect, Intuit took its customer satisfaction rates to “an all-time high”, according to Watson.
Moreover, thanks to its heightened scalability and deployment of its pre-contact portal – which cut handling times –
As a result, Intuit gave customers vital last-minute answers, increased its retention rates, and boosted those all-important satisfaction scores.
Learn more about how Watson and his team did so by watching his presentation: Deliver resilient, personalized experience at scale w/Amazon Connect
Alternatively, to find out more about the solutions they deployed, visit: aws.amazon.com/connect/
