If you think Iron Man, Captain America, and Spider-Man have had it tough, imagine what it’s like for contact center leaders. The rapid adoption of digital channels by customers have most leaders asking, “What will become of our contact center?” And, for a period, this was a difficult question to answer.
Today, the uncertainty around this question has settled somewhat as most customer care leaders now understand that the role of the contact center should be to handle higher-complexity or escalation queries that customers find too difficult to resolve on their own.
And there’s more good news. Your contact center is going to be able to live up to the demands of its new role, because Super Agents are among us! And they bring superpowers to improve your customer engagement and satisfaction.
Your agents play the central role in the fate of your contact center. They’ll simply have to, because they’ll be called upon to deliver ever- higher levels of guidance, support, and problem- solving to digitally skilled customers with high standards for speed, convenience, and accuracy.
Many of your agents’ interactions will be with customers who are switching channels, having already attempted to solve their questions online or via the IVR. This means your agents will be meeting customers mid-journey and will have to deal with the range of emotions and weariness that accompanies a multi-step support journey.
To do this, they’ll need to know where the customer has been in their journey prior to the call, what they did while there, where they want to go next, how to get them there as fast as possible, and how to solve potential future problems, even before the customer is aware of them.
Take a look at your contact center technology and ask yourself, “Do our agents have the tools and superpowers they need to do all of these things today?”
The required tool set blends digital customer interactions across chatbots, chat, messaging and more with intelligence, leveraging prediction and analytics, focusing on customer intent.
Fortunately, the integrated technologies and intelligence required to support their new role now exist and have already been put to use at global organizations with great success.
These technologies, combined with the advanced digital skill set of today’s agent combine to create a kind of “Super Agent” which, as the name suggests, can now perform the kind of feats that traditional agents never could.
When it’s time to spring into action, superheroes don’t delay, and neither should you. If you want to save your contact center, now is the time get a crystal-clear picture of the very technologies you’ll need in order to create a contact center where Super Agents thrive.
This kind of platform tracks customer activity in digital channels and informs contact center agents of steps customers have already taken in advance. This provides the context to the agent to the exact point in the journey where the customer is, and provides full context of their journey.
Similar to Virtual Agents used by customers today, a Virtual Agent (a.k.a. chatbot) on your agent desktops allows agents to enter questions in natural language and get the single approved answer instantly. No more wasting valuable time navigating through multiple knowledge base systems in the hunt for answers and information. It also features a recommendation engine that provides agents with recommended next steps, saving time, and reducing guesswork and margin of error.
Voice, chat, and messaging agents need technology that allows them to interact with customers in ways that take advantage of the media capabilities of smartphones. This allows agents to truly guide customers to resolution faster and more easily by sharing web pages, pictures, videos and interactive forms, and viewing the customer’s activity in real time.
As live agents handle more calls of higher complexity and escalation, they’ll be expected to save the day for customers like never before. Don’t let old technologies or business processes be the kryptonite of your call center. It’s time to upgrade your contact center with technologies that help agents become the customer service heroes that you need them to be.
The first step? Deploy chatbots that automate low-complexity self-service conversations and do most of the heavy lifting before your agents need to get involved. It’s surprisingly easy to integrate chatbots into your digital channels, and you can be up and running in a matter of three weeks or less.
What should you look for when deploying on a chatbot?
Choose a chatbot designed for solving your customer service issues, not a general solution.
A chatbot that already has a deep knowledge of your industry saves you time and money because it already has domain understanding. It only needs to augment this understanding with your company’s special dialog.
You need the ability to combine data from the entire customer lifecycle— before acquisition through customer engagement.
Your chatbot needs to predict customer intent based on observing customer behaviors over millions of interactions.
Your chatbot should enable you to personalize content and orchestrate experiences that continue the conversation across channels and devices. You need the ability to view the conversation as part of a journey, using contextual information from what happened before to improve the current interaction.
Combine agent chat and other interactions with chatbot interactions to improve learning for your chatbot. Tag and label conversations and use them to train chatbots.
You need the ability to escalate or redirect to an agent. The transition must be seamless. Agents need to see the customer’s interaction with the chatbot to speed up the resolution and reduce customer frustration. Having context creates a seamless customer experience.
You should be able to mine customer interactions for assisted or guided learning for building chatbot intelligence and to gain further customer insights.
Learn how you can Unleash the Power of AI and Super Agents to Transform Customer Experience. Or Contact [24]7.ai to learn more about AI-powered conversational IVR.
