Over the years, there has been a steady decline in telephonic communication, even as interactions via digital channels like instant messaging, video calling, and VoIP have grown. This makes it imperative to prepare for a digital customer experience or digital CX, where omnichannel, telephonic support, is a thing of the past.
What is Digital CX?
Digital CX doesn’t only mean that interactions take place via digital technology, replacing traditional channels like the telephone or SMS. It marks a shift in the customer experience, service, and support paradigm altogether, enabling greater flexibility for the customer and a seamless journey across channels, powered by robust technology at the backend.
Some of the key traits of digital customer experiences are:
- Data continuity – There is a unified customer data platform informing the experience across various touch points so that the customer does not have to repeat themselves
- Channel presence – The brand is present across the widest possible variety of channels, with a good response time on every channel
- e-commerce – The ability to sell through different channels goes hand in hand with digital CX. The customer should be able to purchase products and not just receive support on a channel of their choice
- Cloud technology – Contact centre software for digital CX is typically hosted on the cloud for ease of integration, connecting with various data sources, and scaling to new channels
- Multichannel agents – The contact centre workforce is equipped to support customers across various channels, informed by the customer journey map
Note that digital CX isn’t just a contact centre function.
The responsibility spreads across your marketing, sales, customer support, and customer success (if you have one) teams, incorporating digital enablers throughout the CX ecosystem.
How to Optimise Agents for Digital CX
Traditional call centre agents may not be equipped to deliver and support the expectations of digital customer experiences. That is why you need to take the following proactive measures:
- Offer multichannel training: This is the first step towards preparing agents for a digital CX environment. Familiarise them with non-telephony channels, starting with SMS and email and gradually expanding into social media, webchats, mobile app chat, and app-based VoIP
- Reconfigure your WFO/WFM systems: A simple call routing system or call dialler isn’t enough for digital CX. You need omnichannel routing technology, omnichannel business intelligence, omnichannel scheduling, and other tools that can help to maximise your available contact centre talent
- Assign a channel supervisor: When agents are catering to customers across such a vast digital footprint, it can be difficult to maintain quality standards for individual interactions taking place on a channel. A channel supervisor will “own” agent performance for a specific channel in the digital ecosystem, ensuring CX quality
- Use customer segmentation for optimised routing: Customer segmentation technology breaks down your CX audience as per demographics, past behaviour, product preferences, general online behaviour, etc., creating a largely accurate customer profile. This helps you route the interaction to an agent whose skills precisely match the customer’s needs, optimising the agent’s efforts and improving the experience
