Skim the contact centre media and you could easily perceive that we are in the artificial intelligence era; machines learn to understand customer wants and needs and your customers are content to receive information as digital messages. Do you need to talk to customers?
Undoubtedly AI, Machine Learning and the swarm of Rich Communication Services benefit customers and contact centre operations. Many automated, self-service customer journeys are completed but most interactions (61%) continue to require contact centre agent involvement. (1)
When your customer’s journey steps off the self-service path what do they want? Easy, transactional interactions will increasingly follow self-service paths, but the corollary is that the typical agent-assisted interaction will address more complex scenarios. Customers most frequently seek the human touch at the start of the relationship with your organisation and when things have gone wrong. They want to talk to a well-trained, empathetic employee – usually by phone but increasingly via video.
Outbound contact centre engagement balances Customer Experience (CX) and cost
Customers interact with you for many reasons and through a variety of communication channels – phone, email, text message, app messaging, chat, social media … Self-service technologies provide frictionless experiences to complete transactional activities 24 hours every day.
The best AI, Machine Learning bot can’t deal with every scenario. It has been reported that only 9% of customers resolve their issues completely via self-service (2). When your customer steps off the prescribed path, then the most effective customer service response is to pick up the phone, talk and – depending on your customer’s initial channel choice – enhance with digital messages.
Outbound engagement in contact centres has been around for decades and used to be exclusively about mass contact. Call centres used predictive diallers to support debt collection, make sales appointments or follow up on service renewals.
Today’s engagement technology is more subtle and precise which means that specific requests for contact such as emails, tweets, chat escalations and AI trigger events can be fed into outbound engagement systems – ‘the dialler’.
Any fool can make a phone ring.
You need to keep your promises to keep in touch and call back. Central to effective outbound engagement are the Data and Campaign Management functions that deliver right-time-to-contact, right-channel-to-contact personal responses to customers. Simultaneously outbound engagement systems manage, monitor, support and optimise your most important resource – your agents.
Do we need to talk to customers?
The answer is a simple ‘yes’; most contact centre interactions are ‘live’ person-to-person. (3)
In a typical contact centre 40% of conversations are outbound. If Customer Experience (CX) is important you must ensure that your outbound engagement processes are tightly aligned to your inbound contact and self-service ambitions.
- Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark – NICE inContact, 2020
- Gartner.com, 2019
- The Inner Circle Guide to Video & Next-Generation Customer Contact – ContactBabel, 2021