Conversational technology is in a continual state of disruption. New channels launch almost weekly. Understanding the communications landscape can feel like picking your way through a minefield. How can you respond to changing customer expectations when you’ve also got to manage increased complexity and balance stretched budgets?
With new channels supplementing – rather than replacing – traditional ones, it’s inevitable that you’re facing additional complexity.
And with digitally-dependent consumers and employees expecting flexibility in how, when and where they communicate, you’re under pressure to deliver.
New technologies should – and can – be enablers of great conversations. But if their deployment’s not right, they can easily become disablers. And if you’re not using the best channel for each type of customer communication, you’re not enabling a good dialogue.
But the bottom line is pretty straightforward: for rewarding conversations, the criterion should simply be what’s best for the customer.
Too much focus on the technology itself – and too little on the people using it – has led to low adoption rates and high user dissatisfaction.
The adoption of new channels has too frequently been siloed, with different channels managed by different teams. Unsurprisingly, the resulting customer experience is fragmented and increasingly frustrating. If a customer gets in touch via email, then follows up the next day with a phone call, do you really want them to have to repeat everything they’ve said in the email?
If the new digital channels that are supposed to enhance customer conversations aren’t talking to each other, they actually end up diminishing the customer experience. And it’s a small step from dissatisfaction to the arms of a competitor. Goodbye customer. See you sales. Cheerio repeat business.
Social media is clearly a case in point. If you’ve got a marketing team managing your channels and a front-line contact centre operating independently, you’re in a classic silo bind. How do you synchronise your response, for example, to a customer complaint about poor service quality?
Adapting to our new, multi-channel world puts pressure on existing communications infrastructures. It also turns up the pressure for the IT, network and contact centre teams who manage them.
The clamour for digital transformation can drown out the voice of reason. New technology is being implemented without customer impacts or ROI being properly assessed. Change for change’s sake is simply a waste of money and resources.
Attempting to meet the demands of internal and external stakeholders in a rapidly changing digital landscape isn’t easy. It’s even harder when organisations deploy too many point solutions, which then become difficult to manage.
The need to maintain ageing, legacy infrastructures – alongside newer technologies – results in too much time being spent firefighting, and not enough on planning for the future. Teams can end up struggling to tread water when they’re inundated by day-to-day demands.
Touch points need to join up. That means having a communications strategy that’s not just in line with the business’ overall objectives, but also fully aligned with customer expectations. You’re setting yourself up to fail, for example, if you’ve installed web chat but not synchronised it with your contact centre’s working hours.
Many organisations find themselves trying to integrate multiple, disparate technologies, often delivered by numerous different suppliers. Attempting to graft new technologies onto old infrastructure is rarely straightforward, and if each new technology has a different vendor, you’re likely to end up with redundant technology and an audit nightmare – gaps are missed and your budget’s burning itself up.
If you don’t have the management technology in place to equip you with the data you need to understand what’s going on with your communications channels, you simply can’t see what’s happening. You need to know what’s working well – so you can do more of it – and what isn’t – so you can make improvements. When you’ve got siloed data from different systems, you’re likely to be in the dark about compliance with your SLAs.
1 .The Connected Workforce, Capita, 2016, 2. Customer Conversations: A Research Report Understanding How And Why Customers Want To Talk To Us, Capita, 2017, 3. The Society for Information Management (SIM), 2017