When you talk about delivering a great customer experience (CX), which comes first – the technology or the people? For David Lover, the answer is clearly the customer. “As soon as you start talking about technology, you become a contact center professional,” said Lover, vice president of strategy and technology for C1. “That’s not a bad thing, but it’s different from a CX perspective.”
In an Avaya ENGAGE session, “Putting the Customer’s Experience Back into CX,” Lover said you need to start with your organization’s customer, patient or member and work backwards. “That’s the best strategy for truly personalizing your CX,” he added.
Six CX buckets
Lover said there are six “buckets’ of customer expectations to consider:
• Identity. “You will know who I am and respect my privacy, while still being helpful.”
• Any-channel experience. “Let me engage with you using the media that is convenient and accessible to me.”
• Contextual awareness. “You will know what I’ve been doing on my media, and my experience should be personalized for me.” Lover added that everyone tries to be as anonymous as possible online or until they need something. Then, we want that organization to know about us.
• Self-service. “You will give me the option to self-serve without having to repeat myself.” As Lover said, there is nothing worse than talking to a bot and then having start over when connected with a human.
• Automation. “Your efforts and actions will be accurate and timely.”
• Analytics and feedback. “I want to be able to provide you with feedback so you will earn my needs and meet my expectations.”
Supportive technologies
IT professionals have a wide range of technologies to support theses demanding customer expectations, which can shift over time. “No one vendor does it all, so it makes sense for Avaya to have a partnership approach,” Lover said. “With new tools coming out, you should be willing to rethink your technology, as well.”
To personalize customer interactions, you need to collect data and make it actionable, Lover added. “Once you identify the appropriate information, how do you deliver it to the agent and customer? So, think determining your end outcome and build a framework to achieve that goal.”
While digital channels are on the rise, voice is not going away, Lover said. However, generative AI has made it easy to create voice deepfakes. That means using up-to-date applications for customer identity and for authentication.
“Anticipating a caller’s intention is the holy grail of CX,” said Lover. “If you can predict what someone is calling about, you could give your agent everything necessary to meet that customer’s need.”
To keep moving forward, Lover recommends taking “baby steps,” rather than trying to solve 100 percent of a problem and not doing anything. “Don’t let good get in the way of great,” he added. “It is a journey to orchestrate the connected CX experience.”
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