Every year in October, the world celebrates international customer service week. This year, the week was celebrated from October 7-11 under the theme ‘The Magic of Service’. It is during this week that service providers take time to celebrate and appreciate their customers in different ways. In Rwanda, it has almost become a tradition for corporate companies in the services sector especially those in the banking, insurance and telecom industries to make efforts of treating and pampering their customers with special offers and gifts as a way of appreciating them for their loyalty. Clients are increasingly making the rules by demanding more from their service providers every day and they not only expect tailored services based on their individual needs but also expect to be able to interact with their service providers through different channels that suit their preference. This has pushed most service providers to listen and up their game to meet their customers’ needs by deciding to embrace the use of technology in their day to day interactions. The future is digital and that’s a mantra no one should argue with and, in recent years, we’ve started to see how the practical applications of AI and automation can empower us as consumers, streamlining many aspects of our interactions with the organizations that provide goods and services. Through apps and automated services, we can now make secure transactions, change settings and get most of the information we need at the touch of a button, without having to talk in person with service providers. So far, so good. And on top of this, our digital connection to the company is a two-way street. All this digital interaction is generating vast swathes of data on products and purchase trends that service providers can use to refine their services and gain insight into customer preferences. The “moments that matter” However, while consumers and businesses alike have embraced the benefits of technology, there are still many situations when the human touch is essential. Indeed, all that data generated can be used to profile customers and route interactions for optimum efficiency to strike the right balance between automation and human service. For lower-value customers with straightforward inquiries, automation works well, but for high-value customers, with complex queries, human interaction is what’s needed; customers become frustrated by automation and only a human will do. Research has shown that 60 percent of consumer interaction on average is via voice and video, and in the “moments that matter” – when there is an emergency or need for specialist advice – this rate jumps to 83 percent. These calls are some of the most valuable from a customer service perspective. By the time the customer picks up the phone, it means they need help with something they cannot resolve themselves; they may be angry or need immediate assistance. At that point they expect to talk to someone who can solve their problems quickly and professionally, making immediate judgment calls on the best course of action – it’s the human touch that remains at the heart of customer service. For customer service agents, however, this means that the days of dealing with simple inquiries are over. However, just because the customer interaction has, at this point, seemingly crossed the border from digital to human, this doesn’t mean that the process shouldn’t continue to be supported by innovations in digital technology. Indeed, because of the high-value strategic insight that these more complex calls offer, capturing and integrating their content into customer service streams to assist call operators or call center agents (as some may call them) is becoming a priority for customer-focused organizations. Closing the digital loop When a call comes in, the call operators have only between 3-5 seconds to prepare – that’s no time at all in which to absorb any background data available on the customer and context of the call. When they pick up, they may fail to initially understand the customer’s request, which is likely to be complex. Even if they do, they must then enter it manually into the CRM system. Operators are only human and this is where errors creep in – fatigue, pressure, and inexperience can all lead to inaccuracies – and the opportunity to build up a comprehensive “digital signature” for the customer is lost. Furthermore, and most importantly for the brand, the customer’s experience is less than optimum. With the evolution of communication services, many service providers will soon start using AI (artificial intelligence) and conversational computing to close the digital loop. Voice calls can be transcribed into the system with all questions or actions captured via speech-to-text, analyzed for understanding, sentiment, and topics. In short, it offers digital insight into the conversation, not via the operator’s keyboard, but via the conversation itself – no gaps, just great data. Innovations have also seen the emergence of “tuned” speech processing that aligns with specific industry terms, products and phrases with incredibly high accuracy, together with the addition of AI and deep-learning capabilities, are giving call operators a real-time edge. These technologies “listen-in” to the call conversation and can detect questions, interpret sentiment, flag up keywords and cross-reference with internal data or notices such as product notifications or sales offers, draw in external data from other sources and summarise all the previous voice interactions. This helps call operators to provide a more informed, satisfactory service, turning those critical “moments that matter” interactions from risks to opportunities, at the same time as protecting and enhancing the brand. Insights that form a competitive edge The businesses or organizations that are deploying this capability are capturing massive insights. They’re going beyond the contact center as a low-value, transactional service and transforming it into a strategically important differentiator. Call operators’ performance is dramatically improved in quality and complexity of what is being captured within the system of record, or simply by assisting with a summary of the call actions once the call has ended and they hit the wrap-up timer. This is a premium role, non-scripted, that requires knowledgeable professionals that can react to customer needs and use a range of AI and information systems to deliver excellent service or sales strategy. It is no longer a humble job, it is the center of a business, as all calls that reach this location seriously matter. By supporting contact center agents in real-time with rich and detailed customer history across all channels, from web inquiries, voice calls, backed up with contextual insight around the tone and sentiment of those conversations, this makes all that data work effectively on a human level when the interaction occurs. This underlines the fact that we shouldn’t be talking about a binary choice between automated or human interactions. Instead, we need to operate on a customer service scale that collects and monitors data at all points – even voice – and uses it at the point it’s needed to deliver fully 360-degree customer service. In this way, we can combine the best features of automation, artificial intelligence and the human touch for optimum effect. The Author is a Marketing, Communications and Public Relations specialist based in Kigali.
