The customer journey can be a frightful one, filled with a gauntlet of ghastly experiences.
Neverending wait times.
Phone tree trapdoors.
Dead-eyed agents repeating the same questions.
Oh, my…
It’s downright chilling. If you don’t want to be the industry boogieman, you need a customer experience that’s less hair-raising and more pleasant. The goal is to be terrifyingly good, not dreadfully daunting.
In our latest eBook Tales From The Contact Center Crypt, we look at three bone-chilling real-life case studies that show how a tailored, unified desktop empowers contact center agents to do their jobs to the best of their ability without getting tangled in technology cobwebs.
The AX(E) Nightmare
An online and storefront consumer lender that makes credit accessible to people who are typically excluded from mainstream financial channels set out to remove the fright-factor from their agent experience.
As a tech-driven organization in the banking industry, the company prided itself on delivering innovative solutions to its customers. Yet the systems used to power its own operations looked like something you’d find in a mad scientist’s lab.
The most frightening aspect of it all was their sticky spider web of internal complex workflows. To get their jobs done, each agent had resorted to cobbling together their own personal monster of different applications, then toggling between them in various windows and tabs. They had to manually dial each of the 10-digits of the desired customer phone number, which was pulled from—brace yourself—an Excel spreadsheet!
One of the company’s biggest challenges was having minimal resources available for technology adoption. An out-of-the-box contact center portal with a dedicated implementation team facilitated immediate use, while the ability to quickly “turn on” additional channels without extensive integrations made it easy to phase in the new support channels the customer base desired over time.
In all, the organization was able to increase agent productivity by an estimated 800%, cut call volumes in half, and decrease staffing expenses by 20%, amounting to an annual savings of nearly $7 million in staffing costs.
The CX House of Horrors
In this harrowing tale, a routine call into a retail customer support line quickly turned into the customer’s own personal torture chamber where they were stuck in a never-ending IVR maze and routed from department to department with no resolution.
Without digital channels or AI-enabled self-service, they were left with only a dial tone, crushed dreams, and no other option but to re-enter the twisted 800-number funhouse.
A single pane of glass approach to service channels brought together data from several different sources, like the company’s website, CRM, 3rd-party applications, and digital support channels, and presented it to agents in a consolidated view. The data was standardized so all applications spoke the same language, with none of the funhouse-mirror distortions we touched on earlier. Now, customers don’t have to repeat their order number or tell agents which products they’re calling about multiple times, and agents aren’t forced to go on a never-ending quest searching for the details they need.
With convenient self-service options, this retail brand’s customers never even need to go past the initial phone tree—which, since we’re in the business of customer satisfaction, was replaced with smart AI Virtual Agents.
The Technology Graveyard
When it comes to outdated tech, this teleservices contact center had seen it all. Nonexistent digital channel offerings, systems that crash multiple times per shift (or customer call), hold times stretching on for hours, customer escalations. Company leaders struggled to understand where their lead generation efforts were falling short. It seemed like they were taking all the right steps: creating useful onsite content, posting to LinkedIn, running ads to targeted user groups, and so on but they always seemed to end up in the same place: exactly where they started. The company’s lackluster conversion numbers made it clear something was off.
Implementing a modern-day communications platform turned things around. Now, convenient SMS reminders nudge customers to get in touch via a medium that’s not only easy but non-invasive. Virtual agent support options via voice and mobile devices allow prospects to get answers in under a minute. The result? More successful conversions and a meaningful uptick in revenue. Their balance sheet is no longer a place accounts go to die.
Surviving The CX Zombie Apocalypse
No matter the industry, inadequate resources don’t just make it hard for agents to do their jobs; they leave customers so angry they’re seemingly possessed by the devil, which only adds to agent exasperation and sadness. A unified cloud approach takes the uneasiness out of adopting a new platform, alleviating the scary up-front infrastructure investment and wowing agents and customers alike with its usefulness.
