Effortless Customer Experience: Key insights from IPscape
In October, the ipSCAPE team headed to Melbourne to participate in the 2nd Annual Contact Centre Summit, organised by Akolade. We joined as a sponsor this year, and our involvement included not only a physical presence, but also a couple of speaking slots: we hosted a round table on the value of Speech Analytics and appeared on a panel discussion about the evolution of customer experience management. Here are some of the insights from the conference.
Speech Analytics
ipSCAPE’s Sales & Marketing Director, Simon Daniels, facilitated the round table discussion on Artificial Intelligence. Simon, stepped through the implementation process and the practical value of how the emerging AI tools can augment the contact centre capabilities, using Quality Assurance (QA) management and the insights gained.
ipSCAPE has been working closely with our partner Daisee to build and test a QA tool for our clients. Currently, in the vast majority of contact centres, the QA team will listen to a sample (usually 5-10%) of calls and manually score these calls for quality and compliance. The Daisee speech analytics technology transcribes voice calls into text and then uses a set of AI tools to assess the call based on adherence to pre-defined, quality measures. In practice this system enables clients to ‘listen’ to 100% of all calls whilst flagging issues as they arise. This allows the human Quality Assurance team to focus their efforts on the problematic calls.
There was a great deal of interest in the Daisee capability (particularly within the financial services sector), but a noticeable wariness about jumping in early before there was enough evidence to support the return on investment.
In truth, the cost of implementing AI tools has fallen dramatically over the last 3 years. The democratisation of AI has begun in earnest – with Amazon and IBM Watson making their tools available for product developers to play with.
The true limiting factor for organisations seeking to implement AI is the skill required to build and operate these tools. Therefore, organisations are looking to third parties to construct products which can be purchased, customised and implemented in a cost-effective manner.
Customer Experience
A repeated message throughout the summit was how customer experience expectations were evolving and how that would impact the contact centre industry.
A key question asked: Does the personalisation of the customer experience improve customer satisfaction?
The panel’s consensus response: Yes, but its context dependant.
One of the speakers from the event pointed out that meeting customer expectations has a much greater impact on customer satisfaction than ‘going above and beyond’.
A week later, at the Gartner Symposium, Simon saw that exact point backed up. Gartner’s research showed that there is negligible improvement in overall customer satisfaction between meeting and exceeding customer expectations, and yet ‘delighting’ the customer increased operating costs by 10 – 20%.
The questions then became: How have customers’ expectations changed over time? What are customers now looking for
The answer, according to the research, is quite straightforward: BE EASY
That’s it. This was the core message we left with.
Just be easy to deal with. That’s enough. Regardless of channel, irrespective of platform –
Don’t Delight: Be Effortless
To be effortless with your customers, call ipSCAPE on 1300 477 227 or contact us.
