Repeating the customer’s name, grouping customers into segments, tinkering with on-hold messages… that’s about as far as contact centers have historically taken personalization.
Yet, with much more data and advanced technology at their fingertips, service operations can now go much further to tailor contact center experiences to the individual.
Essentially, that’s hyper-personalization, and – although most consider it a term for marketing and sales teams - service leaders can embrace the concept to transform their contact center journeys.
To do so, they must first consider: what does a hyper-personalized contact center experience look like?
1. It’s Proactive. Better Still: Pre-Emptive
Many vendors herald conversation automation as the future of contact centers, citing its ability to give customers quick, efficient answers to their questions.
However, the old principle ultimately rings true: the best service is no service.
To achieve this, a contact center has to perpetually be in the customer’s future before they get there.
As such, they must orientate the business to support the future implications of today’s customer choices.
That's quite the endeavor. But, with a quality management tool, a brand can start investigating the problems customers regularly face after purchasing a particular item or utilizing a specific service.
Next, they may consider how to remove those issues altogether. When that's not possible, consider: What are the signs that they may face that problem before contacting the company?
An excellent example of how brands do this is via remote asset monitoring technologies. These track the performance of digital devices and, when there's an issue, they inform the contact center via APIs that leverage Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity.
After receiving that signal, the contact center can initiate a workflow to either solve the problem on the customer’s behalf or inform the customer— on their preferred channel — and give them the tools to solve it autonomously.
Ultimately, this strategy requires data integrity and appreciation of customer lifetime value. However, it’s an approach that hyper-personalizes the customer journey, removing unnecessary touchpoints.
2. It's AI Agent Led
It's not possible to pre-empt all customer problems. But, thanks to intent tracking, contact centers can plan for most and – at least – partially automate them.
That process starts with an AI Agent greeting customers across channels and gauging their contact reasons.
With this information, the AI Agent can either try to autonomously resolve the query – using internal knowledge sources – or pass the customer through to a rule-based self-service experience.
The self-service experience doesn't have to be on the same channel the customer contacted. Instead, an omnichannel contact center should be able to redirect the customer to the channel that offers the best experience, per the intent.
Alternatively, suppose the query is impossible to fully automate. In that case, the AI Agent can gather pertinent information in the contact queue and feed that through to a live agent so they can personalize the experience from the beginning of the interaction.
Finally, as that AI Agent hands over to a live agent, it can utilize a predictive engine to interpret the best possible agent to resolve the customer's query, sieving through various customer data points.
Another routing technique gaining traction is to spot – via a WEM solution – which agents handle particular queries best and set the algorithm so they get more of those contacts. The result: better customer, employee, and business outcomes.
3. It’s Orchestrated
Consider those contacts that are too tricky or offer too much value to automate. What does the resolution process typically look like?
AI can help here, scanning customer conversation transcripts, finding the best path to follow, and sharing that knowledge via agent assist solutions.
