3 pillars to future-proof your contact center in 2023

The global economy is reeling due to uncertainty. Terms like ‘recession’, ‘downturn’ and ‘layoffs’ are getting bigger and bolder owing to rising inflation, increase in Federal interest rates and the long-drawn geopolitical turmoil. It is safe to say that there is no escaping this scenario and that every industry will be impacted by it.

It's clear that new uncertainties will arise and you need to future-proof your contact centers to stay ahead of the curve. Shifting focus on operational excellence, customer retention and loyalty, and enhancing employee experience will ensure your business thrives in these uncertain times.

Let's dive in and explore how you can future-proof your contact center and ensure that your business is ready to navigate the new-age challenges that lie ahead.

3 key pillars to future-proof your Contact Center

Sprinklr's 3 pillars for Customer Service is a principal differentiator to delivering consistent loyalty, growth, and employee experience.

Our approach to building a resilient and future-ready contact center rests on the following three pillars:

• Proactive care,

• Powerful self-serve, and

• Agent empowerment.

Let’s take a look at each pillar in more detail.

1. Proactive care

96% of customers will switch a brand after one bad customer service experience. Therefore, customer service is of prime importance in today's uncertain times.

But what is the best way to serve your customers?

As visionary as it sounds, the best customer service is no service. Your customers feel delighted when they don't have to raise a support ticket for their queries, and brands address their concerns beforehand.

The vast amount of data that customers willingly share as part of their interactions must be processed, analyzed, and executed to ensure customer benefit at all times. While interacting with your customers, anticipate possible issues — and engage proactively with them to eliminate the issues that would cause them to reach out for help before they actually arise.

For example, while ordering online, customers often felt the need to reach out to support teams to understand where their packages are and what are the delivery timelines.

Retail giants like Amazon recognized that their customers wanted more information about their delivery and experienced friction in the existing customer experience. They addressed this challenge by proactively notifying customers about their order status, tracking, and delivery timelines.

Some of the ways to offer proactive care:

• AI-powered listening: Use AI-powered social listening tools to discover what customers and prospects are saying about your products and services in real-time. Identify opportunities for improvement, critical market trends, and unmet customer needs.

• 360º view of customer needs: Consolidate siloed customer insights into one 360º view. Know your customers better to deliver personalized and proactive service across every channel.

• Journey Facilitator and Workflow Engine: Map complex business logic to automated workflows and proactively engage and re-engage with customers at multiple points in their journey.

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2. Powerful self-serve

Over 80% of customers attempt to solve their queries before contacting customer support. The second pillar embraces this preference. It fosters a self-serve culture and allows customers to solve their issues without help.

Not only does self-service deliver an expedited service for customers, but it aids your agents, too. When simplistic tasks and requests are not bombarding your agents, they can focus on more complex customer requests.

Self-serve options also result in significant cost benefits. Forrester's Total Economic Report suggests that every customer-agent interaction costs around $6-12 while automating these interactions can bring the cost down to 25 cents.

Tools like online customer communities, knowledge bases, FAQ pages and AI-powered chat enable customers to help themselves. Deflecting repetitive queries to AI-powered chatbots can significantly reduce your call volume, allowing your agents to deliver quick resolutions without getting overwhelmed. You can also leverage AI to process petabytes of information, automatically find the most helpful resources and place them at your customers’ fingertips.

How to craft a winning customer service strategy using self serve

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3. Agent empowerment

If you want to transform the customer experience, consider improving your employee experience as they represent your brand during every customer interaction.

Agents bear the pressure of solving complex customer problems — the first time, every time. Therefore, to improve the first call resolution (FCR), agents must have access to a 360° view of customers, real-time contextual inputs based on similar case histories, and seamless escalations to the supervisor, if required.

Sprinklr Service empowers agents with AI-enabled capabilities:

• Training & upskilling: Instead of training your agents to solve rudimentary customer problems, you can leverage them to add value to customers and open avenues for cross-selling and upselling. Train your agents regularly on product use cases to help them create more value for your business and customers.

• Higher productivity: Leveraging virtual assistants helps automate agent workflows such as call transcription, call summaries, and scheduling call-backs, thereby improving agent productivity.

• Real-time feedback: Initiate customer feedback surveys right after the conversation ends on the channel your customer prefers. Evaluate every customer interaction and provide actionable insights to your agents, to help them learn and improve on the go.

• Automated routing: Chatbots are the first level of interaction for your customers. Ensure the chatbot can seamlessly route customer queries to the right agent with the required skill set while retaining full context. Automated routing sets your agent up for success and keeps the customer engaged throughout the conversation.

The Sprinklr way

Given the importance of AI in contact centers, Sprinklr goes over and beyond the basic AI functionalities to help you unify your contact center operations with a one-stop solution – Sprinklr Service.

Sprinklr Service is an end-to-end purpose-built solution for your contact center that helps you deliver best-in-class customer service by consolidating all your channels, data sets, and experiences into one unified platform.

It empowers your agents to offer frictionless support at scale across 30+ digital and traditional support channels — including voice — with self-service systems, AI bots, and one unified view of the customer.

With Sprinklr Service, leading companies are empowered to outsmart adversities and market fluctuations by taking specific actions to achieve a unified customer experience.

Learn how a French e-commerce company Cdiscount, analyzed all its customer conversations, understood customer sentiment and improved its CSAT rate by 15% with Sprinklr.

Final thoughts

Legacy contact centers fail to keep up with evolving customer expectations due to point solution chaos, inefficient self-serve options, and lack of intent detection for contextual responses.

Therefore leading brands are changing their customer service approach to unify and future-proof their contact centers. Instead of treating the customer service function as a problem-solving function, there is a need for shared value-creation to transform contact centers into Experience Centers.

Unified AI goes a long way to support this new approach to customer service. It provides a seamless experience for your customers by offering quick resolutions. It also ensures a meaningful experience for your agents and other stakeholders with a transparent view of all customer interactions, allowing them to manage their operations effectively.

Contact our experts today to know more.

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