Modernizing Customer Experience (CX) for a Mobile-First World

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is hard under any condition. With the world moving increasingly online, consumer expectations are higher than ever, putting contact centers to a huge stress test. Anand Janefalkar, Founder & CEO, UJET says that the pandemic has hastened the growth of digital everything, and customer service needs to respond with frictionless, embedded experiences to deliver the right services at the right time. See how AI and automation can simplify the delivery of CX. 

The second quarter of 2020 became the largest yet for mobile app downloads, usage and consumer spending indicates data from app store intelligence firm App Annie. Mobile app usage grew 40% year-over-year in the quarter, hitting an all-time high of over 200 billion hours during April.

Contact center‘s have also shifted online—and may not go back. Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) not only allows businesses to create more efficient and automated workstreams for agents, it allows organizations to communicate with customers using modern tools and devices. And for businesses looking to streamline their operational spending, CCaaS solutions mean no more expenses on large on-premise offices, hardware, or tools. In fact, even prior to the pandemic, Gartner predicted that by 2022, cloud contact centers would be the preferred adoption model in 50% of contact centers. Up from around 10% in 2019.

When a shelter in place orders spread to battle the virus, contact centers were forced to move workforces remote almost overnight. Now, 86% of customer service organizations plan to implement permanent work-from-home models even after the pandemic passes, a J.D. PowerOpens a new window survey indicates. 

Learn More: Rise of “Efficiency Tech”: Build a Winning WFA Strategy With Automation

A New Normal, Post Pandemic

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is hard under any conditions. With more contact center workers remote and consumer expectations for mobile service higher than ever, contact centers face a huge stress test. The J.D. Power survey noted that customer satisfaction remained strong with remote customer service, but that it may have been boosted by two factors. Many consumers were seeking and being granted payment deferrals, which would make them happy, and agents may have spent more extra time conversing with consumers to battle isolation created by social distancing.

To truly deliver an exceptional customer experience in a mobile-first world, companies need to address long-standing flaws and conventional thinking and begin delivering customer service via mobile apps and digital channels that meet the demands of modern human interaction.

• Frictionless, Embedded Experiences. Whether online or in a brick and mortar store, consumers want frictionless experiences. They want their needs met, quickly and easily. They want the same experience, through the same mode, across the brand, seamless via mobile and the web. While app usage has soared, many consumers are still forced out of the app to a phone or an email to get extended customer support. That means consumers leave the app—and maybe the connection with the brand and agents lose all the rich contextual customer information that can help them expedite an interaction, such as support history, product lines, location, preferred language, and more. 

To reduce the cognitive distance between agent and consumer, companies should offer one connected journey—all contained on a single device. When consumers don’t jump from device to device, there’s less chance of information getting lost and them having to repeat information to one agent after another. Almost six in 10 consumers say they have to repeat themselves to customer service agents, the Northridge Group surveyOpens a new window indicates. 

Learn More: Want to Elevate CX? Eliminate Background Noise in Contact Centers

With a frictionless, embedded experience, agents also have full contextual awareness of the customer’s journey and how best to resolve their issues.

• Hyper-elasticity. Customer service tanks when there aren’t enough agents to handle the call volume. Yet profits shrink when contact centers have too many agents on staff. The industry is skilled at scaling up during the holidays and then down again without compromising reliability, security, and customer experience. But the pandemic has underscored one big thing: not everything is predictable. Nobody could’ve predicted the scope of stay at home orders, or the time needed to reopen offices, restaurants, and other venues. Hyper-elasticity is not only the idea of scaling up or down but also of scaling out and in. By this, I mean customer service agents need to be able to work from anywhere—under any conditions—for any length of time. The cloud makes this possible. With contact center technology in the cloud, agents can reliably work from anywhere
• Intelligence and Automation. By 2021, 15% of customer service interactions will be completely handled by artificial intelligence (AI), market researcher Gartner predicts. With AI assessing vast amounts of data, issues get targeted and resolved faster. Also, agents become more efficient because they have insight into consumer patterns. As AI and machine learning capabilities resolve more mundane inquiries, live agents are more available for high-touch, complicated cases. With greater AI and automation, consumer issues will be resolved faster while agents spend less time gathering and recording information.

Thriving Post-Crisis

Every crisis creates challenges and opportunities. The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation efforts across all kinds of industries, from retail to entertainment to healthcare. Companies that keep the customer experience front and center will be best positioned to not only survive the crisis but thrive once it.

Let us know if you liked this article on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!