Trimming agent workloads is not a new objective for a contact center leader. Yet, many still struggle to achieve this aim in a way that’s complementary to customer experience.
Joël Viotti, Business Owner at Swisscom, and his team got this balance spot on.
Indeed, they decreased agent workloads by 50 percent after completing two major digital contact center transformation projects.
Meanwhile, mission-critical CX metrics – including customer satisfaction - reached new highs.
The two projects? Developing a customized social customer service filter and automating specific parts of customer interactions in private messages.
Project 1 - The Social Customer Service Filter
Swisscom sees it as their job to meet clients where they are. Yet, after hopping on an increasing number of social media platforms to connect with various generations, the workload has increased over the past years.
Recognizing this, Swisscom teamed up with Khoros to develop a filter that triages posts and directs messages from across these channels to the agent desktop.
In doing so, the mechanism prioritizes them considering various dimensions that suggest a level of urgency.
"Of course, that allows us to handle Big Data in a smart way by being able to respond quickly to critical customer contacts first," added Viotti."But, it also filters out communications the team doesn’t need to respond to immediately or at all, making space for the agents to fully focus on delivering nothing but excellent service for our customers."
For instance, it removes comments on posts like the example below.
Yet, still, there is a chance that someone does post an urgent message on such a post.
As such, Swisscom also established a monitoring wall, which collates different channels on a single screen that supervisors keep their eyes on. That keeps a fallback mechanism in place.
Project 2 – The Expansion of Automation
Swisscom had already implemented a virtual assistant that automates defined, transactional customer journeys.
Yet, the company realized an opportunity to maximize its usage. That involved automating parts of specific conversations where live agents always ask the same questions to find a resolution.
To achieve this, Swisscom has the virtual agent gather information from customers that is relevant to their intent as they wait in the queue. That information then passes through to the live agent, who takes over the conversation with everything they need to resolve the query quickly.
"We developed the bot with our agents, and – in doing so – we set up a series of core beliefs first," noted Viotti. "One of those beliefs was that everything the bot triggers must be relevant to the customer and their intent.
Together, we were building out journeys, developing bot flows, and cutting out additional steps that didn’t make sense for the customer.
Yet, Swisscom didn’t stop there. The team monitored the virtual agent via a bespoke analytics dashboard – again provided by Khoros.