Another frantic festive period is upon us, and no sector will be hit as hard as retail.
Indeed, many customers, stretched by the cost-of-living crisis, have deferred their spending until now, waiting for special, holiday deals.
Not only will this likely bring intensified peaks in contact volumes, but heightened customer vulnerability. As a result, retail customer service centres are preparing to face a slew of complex, emotive calls.
In addition, these problems will impact employees, many of whom are in the same boat.
There are other challenges as well, such as working with courier services, under increasing scrutiny from Ofcom. Royal Mail strikes in the UK this festive season may further exasperate the issue.
As such, queries such as: "Where's my order?" or “What’s the status of my return?” may crank up the pressure on contact and customer service centres alongside the transport and distribution infrastructure.
“It’s all coming together as the perfect storm,” notes Nick Rowe, Customer Success Director at CallMiner. “And, in the world of social media, if something goes wrong, people are going to know about it.”
Don’t Give Up on Customer Service
Many will consider the golden age of customer service to be over, with staff shortages, long hold times, and significant complexity.
Yet, the statistics still underline the significance of good service experiences. Indeed, 90 percent of Americans factor in customer service when deciding whether to do business with a company.
Unfortunately, following the conventional, reactive approach – especially around festive periods – no longer cuts the mustard.
As many businesses will likely find out this festive season, it is not enough to draft in seasonal employees, get managers to hop on the phone, and stretch the hours of already overloaded agents. Organisations must pivot their approach.
Placing customer journeys under the microscope, and understanding expectations and needs is the ideal starting point. Yet, mapping them out is just the beginning. As Rowe states:
“Organisations must wrap context around those journeys to spot and prioritise improvement and automation opportunities.”
Indeed, automation is rising as the knight in shining armour, mechanising many more customer contacts, easing the strain on front line agents and improving contact centre effectiveness.
Yet, as Rowe alludes, context steers the knight to the battlefield, pinpointing where it adds value. Solutions such as conversation analytics delivers this context, orientating organisations (including retailers), supporting the future implications of today's customer choices, and enabling better customer outcomes and experiences
Think: Discover, Remove, Improve
When alleviating the burden on the contact and customer service centres with automation, Wayne Butterfield, Global Lead for Augmented Intelligence at ISG, puts forward a simple three-step approach:
- Discover why customers are contacting you
- Remove transactional contacts by fixing upstream issues and implementing self-service
- Improve more complex contacts by automating repetitive processes agents follow
Conversation analytics is the thread that holds this three-step process together.
Solutions – such as CallMiner – accurately identify trends, patterns, and intent for every customer conversation across all channels.
As such, operations teams can discover their most prominent demand drivers and estimate the associated costs. The latter will help to create a compelling business case for automation.