For full functionality of this publication it is necessary to enable Javascript.

THE LATEST INNOVATIONS ADD A SENSE OF IMMEDIACY TO CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS • BY LEONARD KLIE

 

 

 

At some point in the not-too-distant past, the job of customer service became the customer’s responsibility. Want product information? Scour the Web to find it on your own. Need to pay a bill? Go to a Web site, verify your identity, enter your information, and click the submit button. Want to book a flight or make a reservation at a restaurant? It can all be done via the Web. You don’t need a human to help, and you shouldn’t expect one. 

But there are still plenty of instances when self-service is impossible or impractical and another human—likely a contact center agent—will have to step in. 

In the past, these agents were likely to be less informed than the customers calling in, and their motivation to provide a good experience was rather low. 

But this will no longer do. Today’s contact center needs to leave traditional approaches behind and transition itself into a real-time customer engagement center. 

Luckily, new tools and approaches to customer care are reshaping the customer service dynamic, empowering agents in brand-new ways that are also putting the service back in customer service.

1. Real-Time Analytics

As we look specifically at the contact center space, the challenge is to provide data when it’s needed, and the need today is immediate.

Real-time analytics, though still in its infancy, is quickly becoming a necessity in customer service, according to Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting. “Post-call analytics are fully mature, and now the goal is to help the agent while she’s still on the call,” she says.

According to Fluss, recent innovations have started to give companies a practical way to use real-time input from customers and enterprise business intelligence solutions to optimize the service experience. These innovations, she says, will be “game changers” for companies and their customers. 

Real-time speech analytics takes traditional speech analytics to the next level, looking at interactions while they are happening and generating actionable insight that can be used to positively impact their outcome.. As it monitors a call, the software can flag a customer at risk of churning or identify a hidden sales opportunity. 

It can also trigger supervisor alerts during emotionally charged or highly complex interactions. “Supervisors can instantly identify calls at risk of going in the wrong direction and barge in to correct the situation in real time,” says Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9, a provider of cloud-based contact center solutions.

To show how hot real-time analytics has become, in just the past two years, Forrester Research has identified a 66 percent increase in firms’ use of the technology.

And Frost & Sullivan’s Stratecast practice noted in its “2014 Big Data and Analytics Survey” report that 75 percent of firms have either deployed or plan to deploy a real-time analytics solution in their organizations. The company expects real-time analytics to become a standard requirement of all data management systems in 2015.

One of the pioneers in the area of real-time analytics, NICE Systems, in July announced the NICE Engage Platform, its next-generation customer interaction capture platform. The platform enables customer-facing organizations to incorporate real-time interaction data and analytics into all of their service processes.

“The NICE Engage Platform is the result of collaboration with our customers who are challenged to meet the demands of their ‘now’ customers,” says Miki Migdal, president of the NICE Enterprise Product Group. 

Verint Systems has also launched a real-time analytics solution, called Verint Engagement Analytics.

Verint Engagement Analytics is a cloud-based software and services package that captures data from multiple interaction channels, including Web and mobile activity, phone conversations, email, chat sessions, social media posts, desktop activity, employee performance, and survey responses. Once the data is collected, the tool uses algorithms to generate relevant metrics (such as a customer satisfaction score), map the rest of the customer journey, and engage the Actionable Intelligence tool, which works to interpret customer behavior and predict further actions. 

Companies can also segment and target journey maps to zero in on key interactions and better understand why common issues arise. 

Real-time and predictive analytics, Fluss adds, are as much a strategy as they are a technology. “For the first time, organizations are able to obtain insight into the full customer journey,” she says. “You can put together information about your customer and use it to better help her.”

2. Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping, the process of plotting the complete sum of experiences that customers go through with businesses, is “an emerging category in 2014 that I think will take off in 2015,” says Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics.

Forrester earlier this year called customer journey mapping “the cornerstone to operationalizing your organization’s [customer experience] strategy.”

And Bruce Temkin, managing partner of The Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, calls customer journey mapping “one of the most effective tools for customer experience professionals.” 

A customer journey map is a straightforward document that looks at more than just single transactions. It is a timeline that shows the stages customers pass through in all of their interactions with businesses, including product research, ordering, and post-sales support. For each stage, the customer journey map lists the actions taken by the customer. This includes any touch points with the company, such as calling a customer care number or visiting a Web site. Alongside each of these actions, the journey map should show the questions customers have at each stage.

Unfortunately, there is no standard for building a customer journey map. It can follow high-quality design principles or use Post-it notes and smiley faces. It can be a work of art or something that might have been scrawled on a napkin. It should, however, at a minimum, include the following elements, according to most experts:

• Actions: After you lay out the stages of your customer’s journey map, ask yourself what the customer is doing at each one of the stages.
• Motivations: What will encourage your customers (or discourage them) from moving to the next stage? What kinds of emotions do they feel at each stage?
• Questions: Where do customers get hung up? Do they have questions and find it difficult to get the answers? Could you proactively address questions or concerns customers might have as they move through stages?
• Obstacles: What kinds of obstacles do customers confront at each stage? Are there roadblocks that might cause them to give up and not complete a particular stage while moving through the customer journey?

“Customers have long expected companies to have a handle on what other steps have been taken before the call to the agent, but tying together information from multiple sources to make this happen” has been too complex and expensive to execute, McGee-Smith says.

That’s one of the reasons that, until now, customer journey maps have been widely underutilized, according to Forrester Research. Organizations, the firm concluded, are not doing enough to leverage their maps, or perhaps not using true end-to-end maps.  

McGee-Smith sees new cloud-based applications making customer journey mapping more affordable.

In this area, NICE has again taken the lead, according to many analysts. In June, the company launched the NICE Customer Journey Optimization solution, which uses predictive and real-time analytics and machine learning technologies to identify customer behavior patterns and help determine customers’ next moves, likeliness to churn, or interest in particular products or offers.

The cloud-based Customer Journey Optimization solution is based on NICE’s Customer Engagement Analytics platform. Organizations can use it to personalize the customer experience in real time by deciding which offers or messages to present to customers while interactions are taking place.

“Organizations must be able to connect all the dots in order to see the big picture of how customers interact with them across channels and touch points,” said Yochai Rozenblat, president of the NICE Enterprise Group, in a statement. “Customer Journey Optimization helps organizations know where customers have been, what they’re trying to achieve, and why specific issues led them down a particular channel.

“Understanding the customer journey is instrumental to improving customer experience and driving brand loyalty,” Rozenblat added.

3. Cognitive Computing 

While the nation watched as IBM’s Watson beat several champions on TV’s Jeopardy!, the real potential of IBM’s supercomputer is with high-end customer engagement applications in markets such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and retail. 

As evidence of that, IBM last year unveiled its Watson Engagement Advisor for customer interactions. A key element of this solution is Ask Watson, which lets customers speak directly to the technology through instant message, text message, email, Web chat, or a dedicated app on their mobile phones. IBM’s Watson Engagement Advisor provides answers to questions that would otherwise have been fielded by a human operator.

Analysts so far have been very impressed with the Watson Engagement Advisor. Frost & Sullivan awarded IBM its 2013 North American Award for New Product Innovation. Gartnercited Watson in its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014, and predicts that by 2017, 10 percent of all computers will be able to learn from past interactions as Watson does.

Deborah Dahl, principal at Conversational Technologies, a speech and language consulting firm, says that Watson, augmented with speech recognition, conversational skills, and application integration capabilities, “will become a central technology in future customer engagement applications.”

And Forrester expects Watson and similar systems to become ubiquitous in mainstream business scenarios within the next five years.

Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, expects to see a sharp increase in “adaptable, self-learning knowledge to contextually inform agents and users for effortless service.”

While IBM has garnered much of the attention so far, there’s still room for other technology innovations in this burgeoning intelligent virtual agent category, which is expected to grow from $352 million in 2012 to $2.1 billion in 2019, according to Transparency Market Research.

On a smartphone, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistants have clear customer service implications as they answer simple questions on an ever-growing variety of topics. 

Another company, IPsoft, is taking cognitive computing to a higher level. The company in late September introduced Amelia, an artificial intelligence platform. Amelia can quickly apply her knowledge to solve queries in a wide range of business processes. She understands the full meaning of what she reads, grasping context, applying logic, and inferring implications. Like any smart worker, she learns from her colleagues, and by observing their work, she continually builds her knowledge.

Amelia speaks more than 20 languages. Her core knowledge needs only to be learned once for her to be able to communicate with customers in any of those languages.

Amelia’s technology is already being piloted within a number of Fortune 1000 companies in technology help desks, procurement processing, financial trading operations support, and as an expert advisor for field engineers. 

In a help-desk environment, for example, Amelia can understand what a caller is looking for, ask questions to clarify the issue, find and access needed information, and determine which steps to follow to solve the problem. 

4. Proactive Engagement

Just a few years ago, contact centers existed primarily as reactive entities, waiting for customers to call with their problems before fixing them. However, progressive companies are taking a more proactive approach by reaching out to customers before problems develop. Many customers look favorably on firms that do this. In fact, 75 percent of consumers want the companies with which they do business to proactively engage them, according to research from Nuance Communications.

Proactive engagement is considered the ultimate in customer care, addressing even the unexpressed wishes and needs of customers. It’s through this kind of interaction that customers become truly committed to the brand and the company.

Through anticipatory customer service, an organization can send a service reminder via email, the phone, text, or regular mail. If a flight is going to be delayed, an airline now has multiple touch points through which it can reach a customer and even rebook him on a new flight, with very little input directly from the customer.

This new type of customer service relies heavily on predictive analytics and journey mapping, according to Leggett. 

Other business applications that can further a company’s ability to proactively engage with its customers include analytics, voice-of-the-customer solutions, surveys, social media monitoring, and enterprise feedback management. All of these applications can help a business to understand customers’ interests and preferences, the issues that are important to them, how and when they want to be reached, and what they think of the company and its brands. Companies can then turn that information into an experience that goes far beyond just closing out trouble tickets and more toward fulfilling broader customer needs and desires.

Of course, whenever multiple methods of communication are used, there is a fine line between effectively communicating and badgering the customer, so businesses need to ensure that customers have a way to inform them of their preferences. Simple opt-out links on email and text messages can provide that outlet.

5. Gamification

Just two years ago, Gartner predicted that by 2014, 80 percent of organizations will have gamified at least one area of their business. While this year fell far short of these expectations, Gartner is now saying that by 2016, gamification will be vital for brands, and that by 2020, it will have a significant impact on all customer engagement platforms. 

Fluss agrees, predicting that within the next two years, substantial research and development efforts will be devoted to gamification.

“A growing number of contact center requests for proposals for workforce optimization (WFO) solutions are asking vendors if they offer gamification functionality,” DMG concluded in its “2014-2015 Contact Center Gamification Product and Market” report. “These capabilities are a logical fit for WFO suites, and many of the leading and contending WFO suite providers have already incorporated, or are planning to incorporate, gamification modules into their solutions.”

John Wolf, chief marketing officer at Intradiem, a provider of intraday management solutions for contact centers, states that many contact center managers have shied away from adopting gamification techniques because of the manual upkeep involved in updating employee statuses as they earn rewards. But solutions are maturing, and gamification can now be seamlessly integrated into the contact center environment, he says. With the latest solutions, “business rules can automatically update agent scores and even update agent profile and queue assignments as agents complete specified activities,” he says. 

Experts further predict that gamification will soon find its way into other contact center systems, including performance management, quality assurance, and surveying, to name a few. 

To further show the upward trajectory of gamification, RnRMarketResearch.com recently projected that gamification would grow at a 67.1 percent compound annual growth rate through 2018. 

“It’s now a practical tool that’s easy to implement and gives the potential for real, significant benefits,” Fluss maintains.

At the very least, “it will make working in a contact center a little bit more fun,” she adds.

The nice thing about all of these tools is that they are available now. Though still fairly new by contact center timelines, they are already being deployed at some forward-thinking organizations, where they are bearing fruit. In most cases, because of their availability as cloud deployments, they are not as expensive as one might think.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. “We’re seeing major changes in the world of customer service,” Fluss concludes. “The cloud is driving a new wave of innovation in the marketplace. In a number of areas, we’re seeing new ideas enter the marketplace at an alarming pace.”  

News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.