New platforms are emerging that change how consumers seek service and engage with brands. In doing so, these platforms are disrupting the traditional call center model. Today’s call centers range from the ancient and decrepit to the ultra-modern and technologically streamlined. Despite the differences in capability, though, they still rely on the telephone to call and connect with customers. As we shift into the messaging era, this is going to change.
The maturing millennial generation is sparking a mobile messaging revolution across all age groups. Text-based communication is fast becoming the most-preferred communication method. And to attract, engage, acquire and retain customers in the text-based era, businesses need a customer communication strategy that incorporates mobile messaging.
Executives are facing three key challenges:
Offering a mobile-native, text-based customer service solution to keep up with changing communication preferences of consumers.
Satisfying the demand for always-on, 24-7 responsive service.
Maintaining cost-efficiency in the call center.
A solution comes in the form of new technology: chatbots and intelligent automation.
Chatbots allow businesses to automate the 80% of general inquiries that are repetitive. This leads to a smaller volume of inquiries requiring live assistance from agents and reduces operational costs while maintaining — or even improving — customer satisfaction ratings. It’s this combination of chatbots and human agents that can usher businesses into the messaging era while reinventing the call center model.
The Current State of Customer Service
Every business strives to provide exceptional experiences that increase customer satisfaction and raise their Net Promoter Scores (NPS). The reality, however, is that executing an effective customer communication strategy is challenging. Often, exceptional customer service is limited by the capabilities of traditional service channels: email, social media and call centers.
By 2020, customer experience will have a such a significant impact on business success that it’s expected to play a bigger role in competitive differentiation than price and even product quality. Customer experience and NPS are fast becoming the new business battlegrounds. Providing experiences that meet or exceed the ever-increasing demands of customers could be the difference between success and failure.
Call center performance has a significant impact on a company’s NPS and customer satisfaction ratings. Given the direct and personal connection a call center enables between a business and its customers, the overall experience of the interaction can have a major influence on how that person perceives a brand on the 1-10 Net Promoter Score scale.
And while call centers work positively by enabling direct connections between businesses and consumers, there are endemic problems for both sides. Businesses are faced with high operating costs and are vulnerable to changing communication trends. Meanwhile, consumers often have to deal with long hold times, outdated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, inter-departmental transfers and inefficient service.
As new technology such as chatbots and intelligent automation emerges, any business that relies on strong customer service can benefit from innovation.
There is a significant opportunity to gain competitive advantage and lead the market by developing call centers that are not only technologically advanced, but also resolve issues with far greater customer satisfaction.
The ideal result is customer service that improves the relationship with customers while maintaining cost efficiency for the business.
What follows is an outline of the current state of customer service in today’s fast-moving, on-demand and customer-driven world. We also detail how the call center can be reinvented through mobile messaging and intelligent automation to deliver a win-win solution for both businesses and customers.
Connected and Demanding: Generation Z, Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers
There is a reason why there is so much buzz around millennials: Their generation is one of the largest in U.S. history, and they are maturing into their prime spending years.
Starting in 2017, they will have the purchasing power of more than $200 billion annually. The opportunity for businesses to drive revenue and gain market share with this generation is unprecedented.
The driving force for new technology and communication trends
Millennials are driving mobile and instant messaging adoption. Because they have grown up with technology and information at their fingertips, millennials are highly connected and expect 24/7, on-demand access to the businesses and brands in their lives.
Gen X, baby boomers
In addition, the millennial obsession with mobile messaging is influencing older age groups, with text-based customer service now an increasingly popular choice for generation X and baby boomers.
Generation Z
Millennials have also set the precedent for generation Z. Mobile messaging use is even higher among the first true digital natives; they place even more emphasis on personalization and relevance when interacting with companies.
The Challenge of Delivering What People Want
The adoption of mobile messaging as the preferred communication channel is forcing companies to change how they approach customer service. Today’s call centers no longer meet customer expectations. From long wait times to frequent departmental transfers and ineffective IVR systems, customer service can be a frustrating experience for consumers.
Now, in 2016, with the proliferation of new technology and 24-7, on-demand services, the shortcomings of customer-contact centers are even more apparent.
The competition is fierce, and customers have no forgiveness for poor service. A sub-par experience can destroy a consumer’s relationship with a business.
Key Business Challenges Affecting Call Centers and Customer Loyalty
The shortcomings of the current call center model and its inability to effectively meet the needs of today’s customer also represent a significant opportunity for businesses. There has never been a more appropriate time to dissect the call center and explore new ways to increase its effectiveness.
Executives and business owners need to address the following three business challenges to ensure the future success of their contact centers:
Offering a mobile-native, text-based customer service solution to keep up with the changing communication preferences of consumers.
Satisfying the demand for always-on, 24-7 responsive service.
Maintaining cost-efficiency in call centers.
Each of these areas needs to be explored to maintain, or even improve, customer loyalty and Net Promoter Scores.
Challenge 1: Offering a mobile-native, text-based customer service solution
One of the drawbacks of telephonic customer service is the limit imposed by the phone on call center agents; they can only answer one customer inquiry per call. This limit drives costs up. In comparison, using mobile and web-based chat, agents can effectively manage as many as five inquiries simultaneously. This significantly reduces operational costs while providing a better experience for customers.
Fortunately, thanks to mobile messaging’s rapid rise in popularity, it’s now easier than ever to incorporate mobile chat into an existing customer communication strategy to better engage consumers. Mobile messaging is the modern vehicle for businesses to deliver great customer service at significantly lower costs. The result is a better customer experience that drives loyalty while improving the bottom line.
Using an intuitive interface familiar to more than two billion people, businesses can effectively engage with customers and fans using simple decision trees for fast and convenient issue resolution.
Benefits of mobile messaging solutions:
On-demand customer service that allows consumers to get the information they need, when they need it, without having to look for it.
Faster issue resolution thanks to an agent’s ability to manage more inquiries simultaneously.
Reduced, or potentially eliminated, hold times.
Real-time conversational connections with customers.
Improved customer experience with greater omni-channel service capability.
Secure identity authentication and user verification.
Challenge 2: Satisfying the demand for always-on, 24-7 responsive service
The role of automation, bots and artificial intelligence in customer communication has become an increasingly popular topic. And as the technology continues to develop, more businesses are starting to realize the benefits of automated customer service and how it can drive customer service ratings higher.
Chatbots are virtual agents that operate through natural language processing, meaning they are able to absorb, identify and react to a number of different queries. These sophisticated programs and targeted automated strategies provide an efficient solution to handle the high-volume, repetitive inquiries that overwhelm call centers. Businesses are then freed to devote more time and resources to customers who need one-to-one conversations. They can deliver a far better customer service experience at a far lower cost.
As with any emerging technologies, automation and chatbots need to be approached with tact. Currently, the best strategies use both human agents and chatbots. Businesses can test bot technology and assess what’s right for them without drastically affecting customer satisfaction.
A good starting point is a website’s frequently asked questions. Today, people are more inclined to seek information themselves than engage with a human agent. Using chatbots to automate FAQs is a cost-efficient test that can form the foundation for larger automation plans as the technology develops.
Chatbots can be used as the front-line customer service interface to answer the majority of repetitive inquiries. This combination helps businesses improve efficiencies without compromising customer satisfaction ratings.
Challenge 3: Maintaining call center cost efficiency
Businesses can improve customer communication and drive customer satisfaction ratings by following a simple five-step process to automation:
1. Opportunity Analysis
Review customer service data
Examine IVRs and CSR scripts
Conduct Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis
Identify all opportunities for automation
2. Chatbot Design
Sketch blueprints including flow designs for all areas
Identify integrations needed to enable bots
3. Engineering and Integrations
Receive blueprint approval
Develop bots for intuitive user experience.
4. User-Acceptance Testing
Demo bots in test environment
Adjust as necessary
5. Activation and Optimization
Conduct marketing efforts for Phase I onboarding
Track usage analytics and fine-tune
Benchmark performance against key performance indicators.
With this approach, businesses are able to automate as much as 80% of low-level, repetitive inquiries, saving call center agents for the complex and uncommon issues that require the nuanced knowledge of a live agent. This results in faster issue resolution and more efficient service.
Chatbots: An Emerging Technology
Other technologies may help improve call centers incrementally, but chatbots offer the best, most revolutionary opportunity to scale their capacity and ensure future success. If archaic call center models can’t innovate and keep up with changing consumer trends, they’ll fast become obsolete.
As with any emerging technology, chatbots are still experiencing growing pains. They’re not perfect; key development issues must be overcome to improve the flow of conversation. Increased investment in chatbots and NLP will help the technology mature fast. And as it does, chatbots will increase in capability and become more common, providing new opportunities for businesses across all industries.
The sleek interfaces and one-click payment processing available in products and services in the banking and retail industries have left an indelible mark. People now expect that same user experience elsewhere. Unfortunately, the insurance industry is still playing catch-up with the demand.
Consumers today expect intuitive technology that knows and remembers them from one interaction to the next. Many companies are adding features without improving the core experience for their customers. For the record, automating a broken or deficient process does not constitute an improvement. Instead, we must thoughtfully and deliberately design an end-to-end architecture that is easy, effective and memorable for the customer yet is consistent and scalable for the business.
With that in mind, let’s analyze the basic elements of the customer experience where insurance companies can improve:
1. Communication flow: In any large enterprise, the communication flow is always going to be both an internal and external issue. The more departments and business units a company features, the harder it is for customers to get the information they need in a timely fashion. That’s why we’re starting to see so much interest from insurance companies in new transactional communications platforms. At Pypestream, it’s a problem we’re trying to solve using a secure, chatbot-powered mobile messaging platform.
The customer experience has to be is about breaking down the barriers to information, streamlining the communication flow and getting a resolution. With everything available at the swipe of a finger or at the end of a text message, people don’t want to have to navigate from department to department, through various channels. Companies need to focus on bridging the silos that exist. Communication should be easy and free-flowing — almost as if you’re interacting with a friend.
2. Access to customer service: Customer service can be a competitive differentiator for companies — for better or for worse. Some do a fantastic job of providing experiences that people love, while others are seriously lacking. A lot of this has to do with the processes and technology in place. For example, there are many repetitive customer issues that only require scripted responses and simply don’t need live agents. Instead, these routine issues flood the call queues and slow the process for everyone.
The solution here is using conversational chatbots to provide a front layer of support, managing the majority of repetitive inquiries while saving the live agents for more complex and higher-touch issues. The best thing is, this technology exists and is becoming increasingly popular. There are tens of thousands of chatbots out there across various messaging channels, and businesses are exploringnew chatbot use cases every day.
3. Simplified processes: There are few people I know who actually enjoy processing an insurance claim or dealing with call centers to check on the status of a claim. The process is broken and frustrating. To fix this annoyance, a mobile-first approach is paramount.
Consumers are gravitating toward mobile messaging to communicate in a 1:1 format with brands and businesses because they want service to be personal. In addition, they want to be understood — without having to repeat themselves over and over or follow an antiquated process that takes precious time out of their day. With all the capability that smartphones offer today, there’s no reason why processing insurance claims can’t be simplified to improve the customer experience.
4. Reinventing the call center: In the financial sector, the insurance industry is the most heavily reliant on call centers as the primary mode of customer interaction, with 78% of insurance industry clients contacting their company via a call-center. This comes as little surprise; there are no other options available for people to chat and transact directly with customer service. This distinct lag in the insurance industry reflects a broader reluctance to adopt new technologies. Some of the hesitancy can be attributed to traditional biases that anchor thinking and affect behavior in incumbents. Insurers have also been underserved by technology solutions that address their regulatory constraints.
If we consider how quickly people are flocking to messaging (it’s the most used data service in the world, with more than 6 billion messages sent every day), maybe it’s time the call centersundergo a revamp. Americans alone message twice as much as they call, according to Nielsen, and messaging is fast becoming the most preferred communication method. With this in mind, it only makes sense to incorporate a text-based channel to contact centers and customer service outlets.
It’s always easy to prescribe improvements for industries from afar, and I understand if some readers approach this article with an easier-said-than-done attitude. But, in reality, decision makers know where the industry is lacking. These gaps are opportunities to deepen customer engagement and loyalty.
The solutions are simple when you consider what everyday customers are seeking from their providers. Now it’s about dedicating the relevant resources and time to ensuring the innovation happens so the industry can catch up to the innovators in other industries and future market disrupters.
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