According to an article by Nancy Porte, 63% of consumers will gladly interact with chatbots as long as human agents can be available as a backup. What this shows is that artificial intelligence (AI) may not completely overtake human service agents, but it’s also not a fad that’s going away any time soon. Companies need to embrace self-service options in their customer experience, but this can be tricky to implement. Porte offers the following three guidelines for staying on track when implementing AI, chatbots, and virtual assistance in the customer experience.
- Create online customer communities as a self-service hub. This can be accomplished by creating company forums, message boards, and other outlets. This provides a casual environment for customers to comfortably ask for help or provide feedback.
- Instead of relying solely on first contact resolution (FCR), Porte recommends taking an approach not closing a ticket until the customer agrees their issue has been resolved. This is accomplished through surveys and feedback.
- Use analytics to help properly automate self-service and assisted-service tools.
Contact centers have a variety of metrics to determine ROI for their clients. Perhaps one of the most desired pieces of data is First Contact Resolution (FCR). Some contact centers consider a problem resolved simply by closing the ticket, but this completely ignores the most important aspect of FCR; the customer’s opinion. You may think you resolved your customer’s issue, but would they agree? The following are a few ways contact centers can determine their true FCR success.
- Monitor customer callbacks: Keep track of the CRM to see if customers ended up calling the company again after the initial call. If there are multiple calls related to the same issue, then the initial issue was most likely not resolved on the first call.
- Surveys: Whether the contact center initiates surveys via digital channels or in-person phone calls, surveys can be a great way to follow-up with customers to learn their satisfaction levels.
- On-call evaluation: Agents can gauge the moods of the customers who call them all day. If the contact center is indeed hiring empathetic individuals to provide their customer service, they’ll be able to pick up on whether or not the customers are happy with the calls. If the customer is in a good mood and the rapport between them and the agent, it could be a great opportunity to ask them a few additional questions regarding their experience. If you want to know whether or not your customers feel their issue has been resolved, just ask them!
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the article, please click here!
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