Is your customer service really customer-centric?

New technologies have changed customer behavior significantly. We, as customers, have come to expect fast and personalized answers, we want 24-hour service availability and services that allow us to solve our problems ourselves. We are looking for a seamless but memorable experience between all points of contact. We have entered the era of the customer.

To meet these new requirements, companies are working to implement a customer-centric approach by changing their culture, organization, tools and procedures to put the customer at the heart of their concerns, starting with their customer service.

The key elements of a customer-centric approach

Being customer-centric means making decisions while systematically assessing their impact on the customer experience (CX). The customer experience can be defined as the set of emotions and feelings felt by a customer during various interactions with a brand.

Develop customer knowledge

The implementation of a customer-centric approach shows first and foremost that a brand knows its customers, through opinions, expectations and feelings (positive or negative) throughout the customer journey. This is the foundation of any effective customer-centric approach.

Thus, to develop 360° customer vision, it is first necessary to collect and aggregate all the data from the various conversations with your customers: e-mail, chat, telephone conversation, social networks, etc. The objective is then to identify the customer’s points of friction and sources of delight, and then adapt the customer paths accordingly.

Your customers’ conversations are a valuable source of data. Semantic analysis solutions on the market process large volumes of unstructured data from written or voice conversations with your customers. These tools allow you to decipher the content of the exchanges, or even to analyze the emotions felt by the customer. This will enable you to identify key indicators that will then allow you to improve your customer experience.

Personalize your customer relations

Personalization, a key axis of a customer-centric approach, can be achieved through: the adaptation of routes according to profiles; the relevance of the discourse regardless of the contact channel; offers designed specifically for the customer; or exclusive promotions to create an engaging relationship with your customer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers powerful tools to assist in customization, making it possible to qualify customer requests in natural language, to optimize customer paths, to select the most appropriate advisor to meet customer demand (intelligent routing). It also makes it possible to assist the advisor, transforming him or her into an augmented agent capable of answering customers queries more effectively, to deliver a message adapted to the client’s profile, previous interactions or mood.

Automate low value-added tasks

With the development of digital technology and the multiplication of contact points, agents are dealing with more and more complex requests. Conversational agents (chatbots, voicebots, callbots) allow advisors to be freed of simple and low value-added tasks and the client can receive an immediate response 24 hours a day.

Although bots offer a great many potential benefits, the right approach is needed. To ensure a quality customer experience, they must:

• Be perfectly integrated into the customer journey,
• Respond to simple use cases,
• Quickly escalate to a human agent when the customer does not find his answer.

In the near future contact center supervisors will manage both human agents and conversational agents. They will therefore need to have appropriate tools at their disposal to supervise, but also to optimize the work of agents and bots.

Growing into a customer-centric culture

Finally, a customer-centric approach can only work with buy-in from all employees. Its adoption then implies a double challenge: improving the customer experience, but also the employee experience. This requires, not only instilling a client-centered culture, but also providing agents with the appropriate training, autonomy and tools to satisfy the client.

How to start the digital transformation of your customer service?

It is essential to first carry out an inventory of the current state of customer relations. To do this, it is necessary to take into consideration the available customer data, the CRM tool, contact center management tools, customer journey and associated procedures, not to mention key metrics.

To properly define your customer-centric strategy, it is necessary to have tools adapted to your specific business needs. In this area, Odigo experts can help you acquire tools to analyze conversations (speech analytics), to automate or even to qualify customer requests in natural language. Would you like to manage the customer experience operationally with a 360° view of your customers? Would you like to discover Odigo’s Contact Center as a Service solution for yourself?