Guided Help - A Path to Greater Customer Experience

According to the 2017 Dimension Data Global CX Report, organisations remain far back from their aspirational dreams in becoming fully optimised – interactions are up overall, consumers are still failing to find what they need online and are jumping to the telephone. When they do ring the contact centre, they aren’t always getting what they need in that first call, and with agents faced with more complex calls than ever agents themselves are becoming increasingly disengaged, resulting in increased attrition rates and increased operational costs. How can all this be fixed?

Let’s look at the first failure point in the journey, the first ‘Moment of Truth’. The majority of customer interactions start on your company’s website and so by allowing your customers to access your knowledge base through a standard web browser they can simply type in their questions. Using a natural language processing engine these questions are understood and a simple step by step conversational process will the guide your customer through to solution. For example, I have a problem with my vacuum cleaner. Its lost its ‘suck’. There are cat hairs all over the sofa and the in laws are arriving tomorrow, I need to get this sorted or I face being branded a failure as a daughter-in law. I cant wait for an engineer. I go onto the Elecrolux website and simply follow the online step by step guide; I select ‘Vacuum Cleaner’, I then see a picture of where I might find the product code, I then enter the product code and follow the process – the same process an engineer would in fact. Five mins later the source of the problem was located. The lego batman was duly removed from the machine and my sofa was cleaned – victory for me, at no cost.

Enabling your customers to consistently find the right answers by utilising a knowledge base that pools together technical rates, product support libraries, and other support related documents significantly enhances the customer journey.

The impact of this simple process is two-fold; firstly, customer effort is minimalised – I can either pay for an engineer to come out, wait for him/her to actually arrive and then await the diagnosis, OR I can go online and work it out myself (following the same process said engineer would have to follow) – totally self-serve. This saves me times, money and gives me a feeling of self achievement.

The 2nd impact is around operation; the more self service via your company website, the less volume of calls into your contact centre. Meaning less operational cost. Agents can shift to complex interactions….these complex queries demand the need for Guided Help even more to ensure that your agents have the most accurate, up to date information.

1.    Consistency - agents (and branch staff too) all need to give the same information. Inconsistency not only makes your company look weak but creates confusion internally and externally. Product information, policies etc can quickly become outdated and so it is critical that employees have the correct and current information.

2.    Increased First Contact Resolution – with your customers self-serving via your website, there is no reluctant and forced channel hop into voice and into the contact centre. For those customers that do contact you and speak to an agent or branch representative, the information will be more accurate, the call will be quicker, and by using Guided Help, the employee can also predict what the customer might need next - predictive customer experience.

3.    Lowered call handing time – employees will have the correct answers readily available to them. No more placing calls on hold (which only irritates the customer) or awkward silences while the employee tries to find the answer...which leads to....

4.    Less managerial escalations – agents will no longer need to place calls on hold and ask their Manager or Team Leaders for help, which helps agent motivation (as they are empowered), and gives more time back to the team leaders.

5.    Lower training costs - employees are trained far faster, meaning its cheaper for the company, and employees are more likely to complete the full training (rather than drop out) and stay engaged.

Some Stats:

·      Global bank gets to #1 in NPS and cuts training time by 50%, while enabling any agent to handle any call with AI-based knowledge

·      Leading telco reduces unwarranted handset exchanges by 38% through knowledge-enabled problem resolution in the contact centre

·      Global content and legal services company reduces need for agent-assisted service by 70% with next-gen, intelligent self-service

·      Multinational retailer reduces the need for agent intervention by 51% with knowledge-guided self-service

·      Telco giant speeds up agent time to competency by 100%, First-Contact Resolution by 37%, NPS by 20, while reducing advisor training time by 43%

·      Global bank reduces training time by 60%, and improves FCR by 36% and NPS by 10

Get in touch for a deep-dive into how Guided Help can help your organisations across all channels. Also get in touch if your vacuum cleaner is on the blink – I charge £50 for a guided walk though of the problem…

Kathryn Simons

CX Specialist and part time vacuum cleaner engineer