A massive and rapid shift in customer expectations is underway. Customers want personalized and highly relevant experiences across each business interaction — and they want these experiences instantly, which puts pressure on businesses to sell faster, respond smarter, and move with an unprecedented sense of immediacy. Employees also have their own set of wants for efficiently servicing customers across multiple channels, and this is putting even more pressure on businesses to transform their processes.
This concept is also referred to as Multiexperience, that is, customer relationships and user journeys based on effortless experiences designed across all touchpoints and interactions, versus channels and channel-focused teams. This new focus on experiences — lightning-fast and hyper-personalized for both customers and employees — is transforming everything we once knew about the way people work and live.
A context center for the New Experience Economy
One key area where the increased focus on customer experiences is having the biggest impact on businesses is the contact center, where so many customer interactions now take place online, across multiple devices and channels. The contact center has long been the tip of the spear in addressing customer inquiries, fostering customer retention, and growing customer relationships. Today, however, in highly connected digital organizations, the contact center is the heart of the company, and every employee must be an extension of it, working together to support customers across the broad range of interactions that serve up different digital experiences.
Needless to say, today’s contact centers go far beyond simple customer service. Contact centers are no longer siloed from the rest of the organization. Instead, they are becoming more integrated with the entirety of the digital business and the digital workplace as a whole. And today’s contact center technologies leverage artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and other innovations to customize each experience and redefine what the customer journey looks like. These contact center technologies also help businesses reimagine their interactions with customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders as they continue to embrace a Multiexperience world.
In this sense, the contact center is evolving into a context center that goes beyond providing information and support for customers to providing comprehensive and rewarding experiences that last long after the “contact” has ended.
How AI can help create a context center
Image Credits: Avaya (opens in a new window)
A key step in building a customer context center is arming all employees — beyond the contact center, across all departments — with information that is relevant, personalized and actionable, so they can take advantage of the information in real-time to enhance customer relationships, through both direct customer service and other relevant experiences.
This starts with the information that organizations gather about each individual customer who engages with the contact center. How do customers prefer to contact you? Do they prefer web, mobile, chatbot or IVR, and are they most comfortable with touch, voice, vision or face-to-face? How do they prefer you contact and engage with them? How many times have they purchased from you in the past six months? Were they happy, or did they return items for a refund?
An AI-driven contact center can put information about every interaction at the agent’s fingertips in real-time for holistic and personalized customer engagement. But in the new context center, every employee across the organization will also have this information at their fingertips as they increasingly take ownership of the customer experience. This can, for example, enable organizations to provide predictive outbound engagement with customers to provide them with what they want before they ask for it.
Avaya enables businesses to drive a context-enriched customer experience with Avaya OneCloud CCaaS, a cloud-based contact center solution that ensures Multiexperience continuity across each phase of the customer journey. For example:
- Avaya combined our AI capabilities with Google Cloud Contact Center AI, so organizations can seamlessly blend automated and assisted experiences into the customer journey. AI-enabled Agent Assist delivers complete info and context and can advise agents on the next best action to take. Conversational Topic Modeling presents agents with popular topics based on an analysis of customer conversations, complete with recommended responses. Businesses can also add Virtual Agents (VAs) that capture and analyze the intent of actions and the ultimate outcome of each interaction in real-time while delivering natural and contextually appropriate responses to customers.
- Avaya is also integrating with Amazon Web Services Contact Center Intelligence (AWS CCI) to deliver enhanced customer engagement. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers can benefit from AWS machine learning-powered intelligence to improve self-service, analyze calls in real time to assist agents, and learn from each contact center interaction with post-call analytics, giving customers and customer-facing employees better, faster, and more rewarding interactions.
- American Hospital Dubai has adopted a comprehensive suite of digital contact center services with Avaya OneCloud CCaaS at the core, enhancing the ability of its teams to communicate with patients along their health journey. The solution is also helping the health system optimize its operations and enable care team members to communicate seamlessly so they are more accessible.
Smart organizations see the big picture of the context center
Evolving customer expectations have radically changed the nature of engaging with organizations, and the evolved context center provides a tremendous amount of context about customers that smart organizations can use to strengthen brand affinity, business performance and customer relationships.
Everyone can benefit from the use cases of an intelligent, AI-enabled context center. The future of customer experience depends on it.