Contact centers have undergone a sea change thanks to the evolution of intelligent analytics and desktop automation. From monotonous script-based calls to omnichannel conversational AI, contact centers have come a long way in equipping agents with the tools necessary to understand customers, personalize their interactions and improve customer experience journey.
As digital self-serve channels increasingly absorb routine customer queries, contact center agents are inundated with a constant stream of complex and emotional customer interactions. In this climate, inefficient agent systems and platforms have been identified as the number-one challenge in driving customer engagement. Furthermore, while 70% of customer service employees would want to continue working from home post the pandemic, they identified the availability of SMEs, system support, and lack of supervision as the major roadblocks.
HCLTech’s ‘ACE Framework’ is designed to solve this very conundrum and enable the ‘super agents’ of the modern-day contact center workplace:
- Agent Effectiveness:
- Decision Workflows: Custom guided-workflows for step-by-step ticket management and complex interactions
- Intelligent Agent Assists: Intelligent chat bots can act as on-demand SMEs to assist agents and HCLTech’s digitalCOLLEAGUE automated reusable runbooks
- Collaboration Anywhere:
- Collaborative Quality: Centralized quality console which provides agents a view of their performance including self-evaluations
- Remote Performance: Transparent dashboards with real-time views, NLP-based coaching and performance calibrations
- Engagement Intelligence:
- Unified Desktop: An intelligent agent desktop with an uncluttered view of support tools
- Personalization Analytics: Uncoding customer lifetime value and agent persona mapping for support suitability
When one of our customers – a global publishing and assessment services leader – saw a spike in enrolment and customer onboarding volumes during the pandemic, they realized that they needed more customer support agents for faster and efficient management of complex queries and queues.
Besides the volume surge, process and technology gaps were hindering the agents’ agility and performance. For example,
- Knowledgebase was not responsive to the changing content, the addition of new courses, and the new pandemic-related onboarding policies.
- Call compliance was not tracked, considering regulations such as PCI were in place.
- Multiple non-integrated systems lead to high average handle time (AHT) and manual errors.
HCLTech created a new desktop interface for the agents, driven by three key digital enablers:
- Customized workflows for multiple customer segments, service asks, and products. The system prompts the agents for current and subsequent steps while simultaneously customizing their scripts. This also allows the system to track and record compliance.
- Agent Assist FAQs powered by NLP and SEO enables agents to ask and receive responses to conversational questions.
- After Call Work (ACW) desktop automation ensured auto-filling of call notes using machine learning, thereby reducing ACW time.
The dashboard is based on contact analysis and measurement of key indicators, including and not limited to sentiment analytics across segments, repeat call analysis, contact transfer/hold analysis, and time spent on accessing knowledgebase documentation.
Following the launch of the ACE Framework, our client witnessed significant improvements in the customer experience journey, process efficiency, and operating costs:
- CSAT increased by 11% with a boost of 7% and 6% in NPS and CES, respectively, due to better contact handling, customer connect, and personalization
- AHT reduced by 8% and FCR increased by 14%, owing to the removal of non-value-added efforts such as toggling between screens
- Annual savings of $2 million, owing to better agent productivity, reduced transfers to escalation, and better workforce management.
As organizations continue to reimagine their customer experience journey, empowering customer support agents – who represent the brand and are drivers of loyalty and retention – has become mission-critical. The confluence of new-age tools and platforms to power agent ability and remove subjectivity from their resolution skills will become a catalyst for customer loyalty.
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