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Small changes can deliver major improvement

Customer experience is the new battleground for success in today’s highly competitive markets. Technology vendors will often tell you that winning that battle requires an expensive overhaul of technology in your contact centre, including your on-prem technology. However, we’ve found that a longer-term strategy of zooming in on a series of small improvements can help you improve your customers’ experience and stay ahead of competitors.

This can be achieved by adopting a mindset of marginal gains that can deliver transformational results when all combined, Successful customer experience is the sum of the small interactions a customer has with a business. It’s the little things like sending a timely appointment reminder, having sight of purchase history automatically routing your high-value customers to the front of the queue. Great technology enables these marginal gains.

The world’s most innovative businesses already use marginal gains to improve their services. Back in 2014, Google discovered that lightening the shade of clue on advertising links in Gmail and Google Search increased the number of click-throughs. The business tested 41 shades of blue to see which performed best, and ultimately, this marginal change earned Google an extra $200m in advertising revenue.

Where customer expectation meets customer experience

Delivering on customers’ demands has always been important, but in today’s multi-channel, always-on world, getting customer service right is business-critical. A negative experience can result in a customer jumping ship to a competitor at the click of a button, as well as receiving a negative review within seconds.

Making a customer feel special and wanted doesn’t have to be difficult, marginal improvements across your contact centre operation can add up to major improvements in customer service and customer experience, staff productivity and satisfaction, workforce agility and business growth. Using an approach called Innovation Layering, businesses can easily add contact centre capabilities that improve the customer experience and deliver a competitive advantage. When dynamically implemented, these cloud-based solutions are flexible, secure and easy to integrate with existing CRM or WFM systems.

Here are some key areas where you can immediately drive incremental transformation in your business:

  • Analytics: Get a better understanding of what’s happening in your contact centre by capturing and analysing customer interactions across all channels.
  • Unified Systems: Using simple integration tools to unify popular but disparate systems, such as CRM and telephony, can be transformational by enabling businesses to deliver a high-value customer experience.
  • PCI Compliance: Payment processing is more than just a compliance issue. Using add-on technology to improve how people pay for your goods or services improves trust, reduces time and enables the agent to focus on adding value to the customer.
  • Artificial Intelligence: Third-party AI systems become a light version of an agent, enabling you to focus on producing specialists within your organisation.
  • Inbound Call Management: Routing calls to the right agent with the right skills at the right time can have a major impact on the customer experience, all while reducing costs.
  • Social Costs: The immediacy of these channels helps resolve potential issues quickly before they become real problems.
  • Intelligent Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Intelligent IVR drives an improved customer experience by providing fast resolutions to common challenges and quickly routing customers through to the most appropriate agent.

All these small changes can be deployed in the cloud without swapping out your core platform. However, the key to a successful marginal gains strategy is best delivered with a cloud-based contact centre strategy. Here’s why:

  • Continuous Innovation: A cloud-based platform continually evolves at no additional cost, while helping your business build a roadmap to CX success.
  • Ease of Integration: Delivering a great customer experience will always require integrating different tools, as no single tool can deliver everything your customers need.
  • Configuration Options: Cloud-based platforms are typically rich in configuration options, offering you a wide range of customisable choice based on business needs.

Prepare to benefit from marginal gains

Keeping up with the speed of change is a major challenge for many businesses; but it doesn’t have to be. The marginal gains described in this article reduce that risk by helping you assess where you can make small tweaks to your contact centre strategy, rather than changing your entire infrastructure.