The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated change in customer service. Daily at-home life for customers and agents has forced organizations to look closer at digital transformation as a serious opportunity to provide scale and cost savings to human touch to people when they need it most.
On Shep Hyken’s Amazing Business Radio podcast, he recently spoke with Jonathan Lerner, president of TTEC Digital, about what it means to move beyond the new normal. Here are three takeaways from the discussion that are essential for providing meaningful engagement in this very different looking world.
1: Employee experience is a necessity
Creating moments that delight customers are crucial during the crisis, but employees need to be delighted too. The move to an at-home environment has given organizations a prime opportunity to invest in technology and digital transformation that make their agents’ job easier. The time to jump into intelligent automation is now.
Advancements in augmented tools such as chatbots proactively give agents information and insights during overwhelming volumes of interactions, which is essentially a digital shoulder to lean on. Augmented tools will be important for a remote-based future where the perks of having a co-worker nearby are all but absent.
Understanding the tools your front-line agents use to free up their time to work on the conversations that need empathy and authenticity will be crucial. Leaders who can orchestrate digital tools into roadmaps and strategies can take the lead.
2: Embrace change and charge
The COVID-19 crisis is and will continue to be incredibly challenging; companies need to embrace the innovations happening now to create moments that truly matter. While brands generally understood the importance of digital adoption for the future, the pandemic made it an urgent priority for the present.
Forced, global digital adoption—regardless of an organization’s readiness—has redefined the marketplace across industries, geographies, and customer expectations. Whereas organizations may have once relied on personal relationships to differentiate them from the competition, effortless experience is the new standard that defines the . In a support world that once operated mainly with voice, video technology can become a mainstay opportunity to deliver face-to-face moments that is incredibly important and will become an integral part of life in the future.
The pandemic has shown how customers can adapt to change. For customer service to be proactive, they need to take the lead on utilizing the channels that are out there.
3. Enable strategies with ROI potential
Your agents and team leaders are on the front line of the innovations happening today. They’re experiencing real changes that are affecting customers as well as themselves. They are dealing with incredibly emotional moments and working under these new conditions has enabled them to create better strategies for the future. Organizations with C-suites that are open to implementing these real-time strategies can better meet the modern expectations.
Proposing strategies to executives takes work. If agents want their strategies to be heard loudly it’s essential to attach an ROI to your strategy. Executives want to look at innovations that are affecting both their customers and employees, this is a very much a numbers game. Sharing an ROI with shareholders will give your strategy the extra punch it needs.
Great CX: A crucial differentiator
As brands exit crisis-mode, their ability to capitalize on these temporary innovations will be invaluable as they move forward. Now more than ever, the future of CX will be won by those able to create the best experiences.
Let’s continue this discussion when Shep Hyken is the featured guest on TTEC’s live webinar, Rise Above the Chaos in Uncertain Times, on May 14th 12:30PM ET.