COVID-19 has categorically changed not only the contact centre but also the manner in which agents – live and augmented – deliver customer experience (CX). Longer waiting times, a shift in first-time resolution and staffing issues have made consumers far more demanding as a result, businesses have had a serious battle on their hands in not only staying afloat during the pandemic, but also keeping up with the needs of their customer base. In doing so, many organisations have adopted the omni-channel approach in offering up an array of channels for customers to reach out for enquiries, such as social media, webchat, email, video chat and messenger to aid the good old-fashioned telephone.
In this month’s bustling round table discussion, CX Today welcomes:
- Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer, Sabio
- Scott Kolman, Five9 SVP of Corporate Marketing
- Celine Maher, Vice President, UKI & EMG Markets Comms Sales, Zendesk
- Andrew Robinson, Head of Hosted Sales Specialists at Gamma
- Annie Weinberger, Head of Product Marketing for Business Applications, AWS
- Jonathan Allan, Chief Marketing Officer, Puzzel
In this article, we pick the brains of top industry experts to share their insights on the future of unifying voice and digital interactions and what the impact of omni-channel will be in 2021 while the globe continues to battle the global coronavirus pandemic.
Here’s what they had to say.
Has omni-channel become a table-stakes feature for contact centre providers in 2021?
Omni-channel customer experience (CX) means streamlining all the customer interactions across multiple touchpoints in a unified way to deliver a consistent brand experience. This avoids every interaction your customer has with your business being siloed or repetitive. This has been hugely prominent in recent years, but what does it hold in 2021? Here are our experts’ answers:
Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer, Sabio: “Yes, but probably not in the way that everyone expects. While the omni-channel debate has continued to rumble over recent years, consumers have taken the initiative – particularly over the last year as we have all turned to video communication services such as Teams and Zoom in such a big way.
“Because we have all got used to communicating with our family, friends and work colleagues through our screens, we’ve been able to experience first-hand the benefits of using them to share digital content while in conference. Instead of seeing omni-channel as just engaging via different channels, the challenge now for contact centres is how to collaborative tools in real-time to manage and share information and help resolve issues during a single interaction.”
Scott Kolman, Five9 SVP of Corporate Marketing:
“The new digital-first approach for consumers and businesses is here to stay and businesses thinking about how to serve customers will benefit from starting with digital and thinking about other methods of customer interaction as a second step whether that second step is an in-person pickup (retail, food, etc) or a call into the contact centre”
“Omni-channel is offered by most cloud contact center providers, but not every provider ensures the customization that makes the omni-channel contact center impactful. Omni-channel is meant to empower businesses to engage with customers through their channel of choice – a capability that consumers have grown to expect. While the contact center providers of 2021 may offer omni-channel ability through a variety of channels, this is not as powerful as a contact center that proactively creates personalized interactions for customers. What sets an omni-channel contact centre apart is the ability to provide extraordinary customer service through a customer’s preferred channel utilizing their unique customer history.”
Celine Maher, Vice President, UKI & EMG Markets Comm Sales, Zendesk: “In 2020, 64% of customers used a new support channel, and 73% of them stated an intention to keep on using it. Messaging channels – SMS, WhatsApp, social, and on-site embedded chats – saw a huge surge last year too, with WhatsApp based support requests up more than 100% worldwide – and nearly 200% in EMEA. It’s a sign of the times. In this connected world, customers want more control over their experiences, and expect support on their platform of choice.”
Andrew Robinson, Head of Hosted Sales Specialists at Gamma: From a CX perspective, it’s undeniable that customers are demanding businesses to meet them on all the communication channels of their choice. Research shows that on average, more than half of customers use three or more channels to interact with a brand. This means that any business lacking those channels risks losing customers. On top of that, it’s not enough to simply provide multiple channels of communication, these also need to interconnect and cooperate.”
Jonathan Allan, Chief Marketing Officer, Puzzel: “In the last six months we’ve seen a change in customer’s preferred channels – with SMS, web-chat and survey increasing on average by 37%. However, that does not mean the disappearance of voice – in fact, quite the opposite. While we’ve seen pretty much everyone hoist the ‘digital first’ flag and reinvent key journeys, voice still dominated – especially when customers needed trust and reassurance during conversations about finances, cancelled holidays or equally emotionally draining topics.
“Whether online or over the phone, consumers still expect a best-in-class customer experience. Technology, and more importantly data, will play a huge part in this, offering practically unlimited capabilities by assessing customer conversations to improve service levels, predict channel preferences and anticipate customer needs”
Annie Weinberger, Head of Product Marketing for Business Applications, AWS: “Consider early in the pandemic, when travel companies, hospitals, and even government institutions saw call volume spikes, shifting public needs, and the move to work from home, they needed to quickly change their call flows to react to the most urgent questions in the queue, add chatbots to handle increased call volumes, or even set up a new virtual call centre in days. Omni-channel, ML, and automation were all tools our customers used to better support their customers and citizens, while improving agent productivity — and the flexibility and scalability of the cloud makes it easier to respond to any situation and provide a superior customer experience.”
What is the future of voice for delivering great CX?
Voice is still the most popular way for customers to interact with businesses and brands and this is all down to simplicity and wanting to be directed to the right agent. It remained particularly prominent in 2020 when customers feeling isolated due to the COVID-19 pandemic reached out for more interaction, but will it be the case in 2021? Our panel’s said this:
Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer, Sabio: “Over the last year we have seen a resurgence in voice, perhaps reflecting how in times of uncertainty people need the re-assurance of human contact. We’ve also seen the contact centre assume even greater significance as the new frontline for brands.
“As a result, we’re now seeing the contact centre moving beyond its legacy customer service definition to a position where it now sits firmly on the executive agenda, actively representing the voice of the customer.”
Scott Kolman, Five9 SVP of Corporate Marketing: “AI is now intimately linked to voice. Machine learning has effectively solved the machine to human communication problem. Applications for automating customer interactions via voice are now affordable and quick to deploy. In addition, AI is being used at the customer agent level to give these agents the ability to automate note-taking and coaching, which means that they can focus entirely on the customer and solving their problems effectively.”
Celine Maher, Vice President, UKI & EMG Markets Comm Sales, Zendesk: “Sharing voice notes in messaging apps offers the connection of a phone call with the pick-up-and-carry-on convenience of messaging, and is commonplace among millennials. Even Twitter last year tested support for voice tweets, so it’s clearly still an engaging area, and this behaviour could make its way to the interaction between customer and agent in much the same way messaging apps have.”
Andrew Robinson, Head of Hosted Sales Specialists at Gamma:
“Although we’ve seen a rise in popularity for digital channels, voice is still the preferred channel of communication for the majority of customers”
“The reasons behind this trend are varied: from the customer point of view, phone calls are usually a simpler option, especially for older generations, and they provide the ‘human touch’ many customers are still looking for in a business. From a business point of view, and this is true of smaller businesses especially, too often agents are not trained or don’t have the time and resources to quickly and efficiently respond on digital channels.
“Research by Zendesk shows that long hold times are still the most frustrating aspect of a bad customer service experience. In light of this, the future of voice for delivering great CX will see features such as call back and advanced queue management become a must-have for businesses. The first allows businesses to offer a call back at a time that suits them, fully respecting their time and schedule. The second gives agents the ability to recognise VIP customers in order to prioritise them and reduce their waiting time.”
Jonathan Allan, Chief Marketing Officer, Puzzel: “Voice is excellent for detailed, complex, real-time support, but perhaps its greatest strength is its human connection. In an increasingly digitised and automated world, nailing your voice offering can set you aside from the competition and help build strong, long-lasting relationships with your customers, especially as consumers continue to seek out human interaction during lockdown. Voice is going to play a fundamental role in the future of CX and what has been touted as one of the top technology trends of 2021 – total Experience.”
Annie Weinberger, Head of Product Marketing for Business Applications, AWS: “The future of voice is all about developing stronger relationships between organisations and their customers, and oftentimes that means a more personalised and relevant experience. ML provides a deeper understanding of customers in real-time.
“AI can even alert a supervisor when a specific term is used in a call, helping agents rapidly escalate before a negative experience occurs. For customers, AI can be used to provide a more seamless experience through automatic voice authentication or accurately answer simple questions like ‘What’s the balance of my account?’ with natural-language voicebots. Companies like Bank of New Zealand are even creating company-branded voicebots that can support customers with a differentiated voice persona and experience. Customers often call contact centres to answer complicated questions, but with new advancements leveraging ML, businesses are answering questions faster, providing a personalised experience and improving productivity for agents.”
What are the major drivers behind the unification of voice and digital channels in 2021?
Are businesses leading the way in unification of voice and digital channels with the acquisition of AI solutions or is the customer base driving out channel silos sparking change? There are an array of factors to consider here. Our experts had their say below:
Stuart Dorman, Chief Innovation Officer, Sabio:
“Contact centres can learn a lot from the UC world where collaboration and screen sharing tools have been critical to the way we communicate with customers and with colleagues in the back-office. AI has a key role to play here in enabling two key drivers – the use of conversational AI, and in supercharging the agent experience”
“We can apply conversational AI in front of every contact centre to automate certain interactions and make sure we’re engaging the right expertise to solve problems. We also need to quip agents with smart tools underpinned by AI that will enable them engage confidently with customers, not just via voice but also across digital channels.”
Scott Kolman, Five9 SVP of Corporate Marketing: “The ability to engage customers across multiple channels during the course of a single interaction is vital to ensuring that the customer experience exceeds expectations in 2021. Unifying an omni-channel contact centre enables agents to problem solve more efficiently and provide customer service tailored to the specific needs of the customer. This enhances the customer journey as customers are able to interact with brands not only over the medium they choose but also in the way that solves the problem most effectively. A seamless experience isn’t readily available without unified voice and digital channels, which will drive businesses to integrate in 2021 to properly navigate the changed customer service landscape.”
Celine Maher, Vice President, UKI & EMG Markets Comm Sales, Zendesk:
“As companies seek new ways to reach customers and connect distributed teams, the time to invest is now, or risk playing catch up later. Flexible working doesn’t only refer to the way more of us work from home now – we’re also learning to operate more flexibly in our roles to alleviate bottlenecks so that nobody feels like they are struggling alone”
“One of Zendesk’s customers, Fortnum & Mason, found that when CX staff began remote working, they also saw a spike in chat and email enquiries. They needed to be able to quickly bring in other staff to help manage these enquiries, which involved training the staff and investing in a system that catered to this flexibility. That’s why unification is so important in 2021 and beyond – it’s part of a bigger paradigm shift that values agility and flexibility.”
Andrew Robinson, Head of Hosted Sales Specialists at Gamma: “Ultimately, customers are dictating the way businesses interact with them and their requirements will always be the biggest driver behind any contact centre trend, including the unification of voice and digital channels.
“We all know how frustrating it is to have to repeat ourselves to multiple customer service agents, and research shows that it’s a shared frustration amongst all customers. To provide a seamless experience, one that customers are demanding, businesses will have to unify their channels of communications and ensure these are interconnected. Unified channels also mean better efficiency for the contact centre: while agents can only handle one call at a time, it’s much easier to handle different chats or emails at the same time – increasing agents’ productivity and helping more customers in a shorter period of time.
Jonathan Allan, Chief of Marketing, Puzzel: “The unification of voice and digital channels is all about providing a frictionless customer experience which enables the customer to choose what’s right for them. In 2021, ‘single-channel outcomes’ need to be the focus. Ensuring paths are optimised for their outcomes involves explicit design, testing, and monitoring for improvement opportunities to avoid omni-channel adding complexity and confusion for customers.”
Annie Weinberger, Head of Product Marketing for Business Applications, AWS:
“People don’t communicate in silos and they don’t want to repeat their problem multiple times to service agents across social, chat, or the contact centre. Companies that are obsessed with their customers want to break down these silos so they have the same high-quality experience everywhere”
Cloud contact centres provide the flexibility and agility to connect these channels as well as embedded advanced technologies like automation and ML to make sure customers receive the best experience possible. We’ve seen organisations also unify purchasing data, CRM customer data, and contact centre contact information so the agent has a single customer profile as the customer calls in, leading to a more informed customer conversation. Cloud technology empowers customers to easily and cost-effectively use new technologies to unify channels and drive better experiences.”
