In recent years, brands have invested in innovative new technologies, self-service strategies, and insightful analytics to drive a new era of customer service.
Today, it’s not just the demand for excellent experiences that is pushing businesses to evolve. An unpredictable economy, impending recessions, and changing customer behaviors mean companies must build the right CX strategies to survive.
After all, during the last crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic – brands that pushed the CX innovation envelope typically adapted best.
Of course, doing so again is likely a daunting prospect in the face of budget cuts and financial strains. Yet, many consider excellent CX the best way to recession-proof any business.
Moreover, CX enhancement projects can present opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce operational costs. Personalization programs are often an excellent example.
For instance, each of the following initiatives can unlock several benefits:
- Custom and relevant advertising
- Pre-populating customer forms
- Personalizing pricing and discounts
- Sending proactive customer alerts
- Tailoring online recommendations
Nevertheless, there are many more examples, many of which start in the contact center.
Recognizing this, Intuit - the finance software provider – aimed to deliver resilient, personalized experiences at scale during its cloud contact center transformation with AWS.
In achieving this aim, it adopted three personalization use cases, which Sam Watson, a Senior Software Engineer at Inuit, discussed during his 2022 presentation at AWS re:Invent.
Below is a whistlestop tour of Watson’s story.
Quick-Fire Facts About Intuit's CCaaS Migration
Intuit chose to migrate to AWS for many reasons. First was the scalability of its Amazon Connect platform and agile pricing model – as contact volumes surge during tax season.
Indeed, Intuit’s contact centers must deal with seven million unique customers during peak periods.
Other objectives that Intuit aspired to accomplish with AWS included:
- A highly reliable service with 99.99 percent availability
- Configurability for different product offerings
- Observability when measuring call quality and completion
- Transcriptions with custom vocabulary modeling
- Analytics for real-time and historical reporting
Intuit aspired to build an omnichannel, collaborative contact center platform to achieve these aims. As Watson puts it, the goal was:
Ensuring customers are connected to the right expert on the best channels, with the most knowledge on a customer’s problem.
In hurtling towards this overarching objective, the business enabled service personalization at scale in the following three ways.
1. Creating a Customer Pre-Contact Portal
Inuit aims to gather customer information before the live agent conversation through a custom portal on its website – which holds onto details they may have previously entered.
As such, the customer doesn’t repeat themselves, and the business can store more relevant information to improve their future experiences.
Intuit devised these prompts to gather customer context and streamline the subsequent interaction. Indeed, they aim to:
- Understand the customer
- Understand their intent
- Present the customer with contact options relevant to the intent
Through prior intent-based research, Intuit discovered which channels offered the best agent, customer, and operations outcomes for each intent.
As such, they give every customer interaction the best chance of success.
Moreover, by spoon-feeding customer context back through to the agent, they may get straight to the crux of the customer’s issue.
As a result, the contact center personalizes the conversation, cuts down on handling times, and designs the experience for the modern, impatient customer.