Building an Experience-driven Contact Center

All-inclusive vacations. Personalized tours. Packed sports arenas. These are the kinds of experiences that engage us, excite us, and leave us feeling satisfied. CXOs, CIOs, and others entrusted with and empowered to make CX decisions should want the experiences that flow in and out of their contact centers to be just as engaging. They should be pleasantly surprised by their communication options. Customers should be floored by how easy it is to get things done with self-service tools such as a virtual agent. They should be excited that they didn’t have to answer the same repetitive security questions. So excited, that they’re willing to engage more deeply with a business and tell their friends and family about it. 

Today’s contact centers are no longer transactional in nature. Customer experience leaders should be actively working to build an experience-driven contact center. Here’s what to consider…

Building an experience-driven contact center requires experience thinking. 

Experience thinking means placing experiences at the heart of all changes to operations by focusing on the core of human interaction. By doing this, companies can consistently give customers what they need, many times, before they think to ask for it. This is crucial in today’s age of the Everything Customer. Coined by Gartner, the Everything Customer represents a customer who wants every mode of engagement at their fingertips for getting the help or answers they need. Customers should be able to use whatever channel or touchpoint works best for them in the moment, which can change at any time depending on the need or circumstance. 

One day self-service might make sense. The next day, in-person at a physical location. Even in a physical store, there are many ways customers can engage, connect, and be serviced. Businesses can’t presume to know how a customer will reach out, but they should be prepared to deliver a seamless, effortless, and personalized experience every time and in line with their desired outcome. 

To compete on experience thinking, companies need an Experience Platform. 

Many companies try to do the right thing by using technology to meet customer demands only to move farther from them. That’s because they are using monolithic, generic apps that don’t enable them to deliver personalized experiences. What businesses need is an Experience Platform that is open, flexible, and composable in nature, allowing them to build their own experiences as well as leverage “pre-built” experiences that can be quickly tailored to fit their customer and business needs. In essence, the cloud becomes a toolkit for digital transformation instead of a destination to migrate to. 

Let’s say you work from home (cheers to remote work!) and need a latte from your local coffee shop to get through the day. You open a food delivery app on your phone to place your order, but notice the shop is out of your favorite drink. At this point you’re able to tap on an icon at the bottom of your screen and chat with a bot in real-time to confirm if it’s the topping that’s unavailable and, if so, what options you do have. You’re surprised by how easy it is to talk with the bot. The conversation is natural, seamless, and humanlike. You learn which toppings are available and finish placing your order. This is a simple example of experience thinking in contact center design. The customer is empowered with the information they need, with a fantastic experience, and the coffee shop doesn’t have to use costly in-person resources. 

The kinds of things an Experience Platform can do in minutes is more than a typical company could develop and enable in months. In the example above, in which the food delivery company offered a virtual agent through its mobile app, the company could build its own from scratch or deploy a cloud-based, pre-built virtual agent that can be customized and scaled to deliver seamless transactions in a matter of minutes. The Avaya OneCloud™ Experience Platform enables this kind of innovation and can also connect users with our Experience Builders community to provide access to all the technical expertise, skills, and resources they need to develop incredible experiences for their customers and employees. 

An Experience Platform also supports a vendor ecosystem, giving businesses instant access to a pool of innovative, readily available solutions from industry-leading vendors. Gartner predicts that by 2025, the average organization will be exploiting the benefits of this ecosystem approach to create better customer and employee experiences. 

Let’s say you’re a healthcare or financial organization that’s heavily reliant on identity and data security. Every time a customer reaches out to pay a bill, manage their account, or make an appointment, they must answer frustrating security questions often related to their personally identifiable information. Avaya OneCloud supports Identity-centered security and biometrics by Journey as part of its Experience Builder ecosystem. Patients and users can verify their identity through the use of biometrics to simplify the authentication process with higher veracity, reducing costs by as much as $3 per call while improving the customer experience. Avaya OneCloud enables effortless transfers across all physical and digital channels (ex: chatbot to agent), and Journey carries this authentication forward so the service experience continues without missing a beat. There’s no need for patients or users to reauthenticate themself every time they speak with someone new. This is a notable example of experience thinking in the contact center. 

An experience-driven contact center gives your customers what they want and what you want for your business.

An Experience Platform provides everything businesses need to create an experience-driven contact center that thrills and satisfies. Tools and building blocks to build their own experiences, pre-built apps to deliver value more immediately, a global community of experts for support as needed, and a growing Experience Builder ecosystem to further simplify, enhance, and differentiate experiences. It’s a powerful piece of technology that takes what’s complicated and makes it simple so that businesses can focus on experiences and outcomes. 

Learn more about Avaya OneCloud and Avaya Experience Builders. 

Artificial Intelligence