It’s Time to Embrace Digital Channels and Build Smart Help

By Patrick Gallagher, Managing Director ANZ & North Asia

In my over 30 years of involvement in contact centres, IVR and customer experience applications, I’ve experienced companies investing millions in their contact centres to provide support to customers calling to purchase, enquire, complain, apply or seek assistance. Traditionally this has been the ‘tried-and-tested’ option as companies continued to invest in their contact centre in order to build their customer support capability. But, as customers have moved to digital channels, this approach is no longer enabling organisations to meet their customers’ expectations.

I drew on this experience in my recent Executive Interview with CRMXchange to discuss the growing popularity of online self-service and ensuring customers can resolve issues with minimal effort. It’s key for organisations to recognise that it’s more than just support today’s online customers want. They expect to purchase, enquire, complain, apply and get help effortlessly online. This means companies need to embrace the digital channels and build smart help online, not force customers to use a traditional search tool that returns pages and pages of results or give customers answers that say ‘To find out about this product, please call the contact centre’. There’s nothing smart about that, and it really creates a poor online experience for customers.

CRMXchange also asked me about using a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology for improving the customer support experience. AI is certainly a hot topic around the world in the customer experience industry, and so I thought it important to share a word of caution about the ‘pure’ AI solutions on the market that are being promoted as virtual agents. While these technologies have a place in driving quantitative analysis of large volumes of data, they are not ready to be deployed for customer service and support. Organisations should look for virtual agents that employ self-learning capabilities, but in a way that still gives them control over the reliability of the responses.

Please check out my full interview for more on these topics as well as delivering personalised experiences to customers, making intelligent virtual agents available across all contact channels and using these solutions to complement the knowledge of live agents. You can also learn more about Creative Virtual’s technology and see our smart help tools in action by requesting a live demo.

My thanks to CRMXchange for the opportunity to participate in their Executive Interview series!