The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the mindset of companies on how to handle their customer service operations. Nobody anticipated the temporary changes done by the companies would become a long-term change. Businesses had to work harder to understand the challenges and difficulties their customers were facing and respond back with fluid changes in their ways of operations. Verticals such as finance, retail, travel, transportation, and healthcare have seen a major impact in their mode of operation
Most organizations have already taken the necessary steps to handle the current situation, but the open questions is “What do we do next?”. The customer service area and the working model of organizations have changed, cloud has taken on a bigger role. However, the following questions are still relevant:
- Should we only focus on CX?
- Does single technology suffice the needs for business?
- Do organizations only focus on IT operations management?
The approach must be in place and implemented across the organizations to cover the whole nine yards of the customer service area. HCLTech FluidCC framework is the solution framework to handle the new normal and covers the three service lines mentioned below:
Experience
The fundamental goal for every organization must be provided to their customers. Most of the organizations are still focused only on customer experience, but we believe agent and business experiences are equally important to handle the current situation. We call it “total experience” for our customers.
Agent experience: The focus of the organizations must be on how to make our agents more empowered, efficient, and effective for any customer interactions. HCLTech Agent.X offering focus on agent experience with solutions like Agent Assist, Agent Desktop Modernization, and remote workforce enablement.
Business experience: Pandemic has taken a big toll on businesses to optimize their cost across the service areas. Contact centers play a major role in it. Businesses are looking for initiatives to bring down their cost to serve and increase automation in their processes without hampering the customer experience. FluidCC Contact Center framework offerings such as Fluid.Plat, AI.1& Assure.x focus on business experience.
Customer experience: CX is the front runner for any organization irrespective of the customer region, gender and generation. Everyone prioritizes the brand’s commitment to delivery of a positive customer experience. FluidCC framework Predict.X and Sentiment.Quant focus on capturing customer sentiments and predicting next-best actions.
Technology
Experience is a core competence and key performance indicator today. Most of the organizations have shifted their strategy from ‘service level’ agreements for any product uptime to ‘experience level’ agreements. Technology is the key enabler for experience, and a fit-for-purpose technology product should be in place to provide the ‘total experience’.
CCaaS adoption is on the rise since the pandemic with more and more organizations adopting solutions such as Genesys, Nice InContact, Five9, and Amazon Connect. The scalability and flexibility provided by these providers to enable agents work from anywhere helps businesses to focus on delivering high quality of service. Businesses and IT are exploring the all-in-one platform to provide omnichannel experience to its customers, with inbuilt core functionalities (cloud telephony, WFO, analytics, self-service, omnichannel desktop) for smoother operations. FluidCC framework offering Fluid.Plat is focused on providing fit-for- purpose products for enterprise customers.
To operate a successful call center a right skill set of people with right numbers at the right time is required. WFM plays a key role in forecasting, scheduling and assigning agents to schedules based on business rules and preferences. In a contact center operation, the most expensive component is the staff and advanced WFM solution should utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation to remove the cumbersome steps in manual effort.
Analytics is another key technology trend which helps the businesses and IT to understand the voice of the customer. In today’s scenario business cannot totally rely on supervisor skills to manually track the performance of the agents and customer experience. Advanced analytics which include customer sentiments and live agent coaching features offered in real time, helps to take quick decisions and make the appropriate adjustments to regain customer confidence.
One of the major requirements for business is automation and how to automate their front and back-office tasks, so that the agents are focused on tasks which requires their intervention. RPA, AI, and ML for both employee and customer interactions are changing the face of customer service
People
Contact center operations have seen a significant change in the current pandemic-ridden world. We believe businesses should relook their IT operation strategy and have specific functions highlighted below:
Service operations: With adoption of cloud contact center solutions, organizations need not worry about underlying infrastructure layer and operations is limited to Move Add Changes & Delete (MACD), Service Request management, incident management, configuration management & troubleshooting. Lifecycle management services are owned by CCaaS providers. The approach for managing the contact centers must change from reactive to proactive. The right set of tools must be used to make sure the key functions like telco and IVR changes are monitored automatically. FluidCC framework Assure.X offering helps customers to manage the platforms efficiently and instead focus on CX monitoring.
Experience office: With shifting trends of doing business, there is a significant change in managing the environments also. Focus should not be limited to managing the platform and keeping the SLA reports green. Need of the hour is to focus on enhancing the experience of the customer. Organizations should think of setting up customer experience office with specific roles such as CX consultant and information architect focused on doing market/competitive analysis, map that with current business strategy, and come up with initiatives focused on ‘total experience’. FluidCC framework Dev.X offering is focused on experience transformations
To know more about the HCLTech Contact Center Suite, visit HCLTech’s Fluid Contact Center or write to us at Contact.FluidCC@hcl.com
