Using Technology to Maximize the Human Touch
Now more than ever before, people are the most important asset in your contact center. It’s true that technology has advanced to the point where most simple issues can be resolved digitally without an employee’s involvement. However, this means that when a customer does need to speak or chat with an agent, issues are highly complex—and customers are often more frustrated than ever.
Turning these negative interactions into positive ones requires relying on the soft skills and deep knowledge of an excellent service representative to provide a meaningful, personalized experience. However, good hiring practices are not all you need to make these employees successful. Empowering your agents with the right set of tools can make a dramatic impact in their ability to provide the quality of service customers expect.
Because service issues have become so complex, it is now literally impossible to train an agent with all of the product knowledge needed to answer customer questions. Instead, as questions come in, agents need a way to quickly search for answers in real time. Contextual knowledge management provides just such a resource.
By leveraging the context of the customer—their products, location and other variables—agents can quickly access knowledge that is personalized for the current customer. A robust workflow helps ensure answers are up to date and accurate, so the agent can be confident of the response.
Another source of struggle for even the savviest of employees is the sheer number of disparate applications that must be used to complete a service call. Through mergers and acquisitions, or merely the course of time, many customer service departments have taken on dozens of different systems, spanning CRM, ERP, billing, inventory, claims, sales, content management, and many more.
To properly serve a customer, your employees must be focused on listening to the customer’s issue, rather than navigating a maze of applications. A unified agent desktop is an approach that presents your employee with a single screen, personalized to the context of the current interaction. Data from multiple systems is presented together, guiding the agent through each step to complete a process. By simplifying these systems into one screen, fewer mistakes are likely made, and less time is spent navigating applications.
With tools such as contextual knowledge management and a unified agent desktop, your employees can focus on what they do best—helping customers.
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