The Future of Hybrid Contact Centre is Here at the Intersection of Customer Experience & Employee Experience
Customers crave a ‘human-like experience’ with the brands at each touch-point of their customer journeys to elevate the way services are performed. An experience that gives them the feel of an empathic interaction irrespective of the contact channel is their demands. Customer experience powered with omnichannel capabilities is the future of a human-centered contact center to transform how brands interact with customers.
Source: IDC, Relating Employee Experience to Customer Experience, July 2021
In the above IDC survey, it has been one of the major findings that the Customer Experience (CX) has a correlation with Employee Experience (EX) that gives significant impact on overall performance of an organization.
As per IDC, “85% of respondents agree that an improved employee experience and higher employee engagement translate to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and higher revenues for their organization.”
Due to this undeniable correlation between these two stakeholders, businesses can’t grow and increase revenue with just focusing on one. Businesses that needed to improve CX and ROI should take first step with the EX improvement.
Pandemic bought disruption for the contact center to meet the steadily shifting customer expectations with brands. Contact centers became the lifeline for many companies during the pandemic to keep the momentum with the customers. They need to focus more on customer service and enhance service quality with each interaction to enhance customer journeys.
Therefore, in this world of ‘cutthroat’ competition and existing communication infrastructure, businesses must look for an efficient and effective solution for contact centers; Hybrid Contact Center.
Hybrid Contact Center
A hybrid approach for contact center integrates on-premise agents with cloud-based self-service technologies (including SMS, Chatbots, Live Chat, and Explainer Video) based on the required support. Businesses can now split up their employees for a leaner structure and rest for the cloud-based technology solution. The companies gradually adopt migration to the technology for monotones non-complex issues and utilize the human workforce for escalated issues.
In a Gartner research, they predict that by 2024, 30% of organizations will have moved their contact centers’ operations off-premises, which requires setting up remote contact centers effectively. Ensure agents’ connectivity and seamless availability for customers to meet their expectations.
Hybrid Contact Center Edge for Businesses
A hybrid contact center offers many fascinating benefits for businesses to keep customer service on track without losing their loyalty. The low-cost scaling is one of the advantages of a Hybrid contact center compared to the traditional on-premise contact center.
Additionally, the dynamic scalability nature makes it more appropriate for businesses where they can accordingly manage resources without unnecessary costs. And, setting up a Hybrid contact center is easier than the traditional method with omnichannel solutions for customers’ needs.
Businesses are aggressively collecting and analyzing the contact center interactions with the help of new-age technologies such as AI and data analysis. It reduces the dependency on customer feedback and agent notes to provide more insights as this model works at the intersection of human and data technology.
Latest Solutions for Contact Centers
It is a positive paradigm shift in the way contact centers used to function. Here, companies have started adopting some recent developments to empower contact centers and efficiently facilitate customers.
New-age intelligent contact center agents
Compared to the traditional contact center agents, the new-age intelligent agents focus on working 360-degree skill-sets for customer support. Earlier, the agents were just the support staff, but they are trained with multiple skills and tools in the Hybrid environment.
It enables them to work on omni-channels interactions with customers; someday over the voice call and another day chat support or email conversation. It ensures the resource optimization for each human agent as well in lieu gives them to avoid the monotonous job.
Self-empowered customer service
The high demand for customer services and high call volume made way for technology-based self-service support for customers. Pandemic and post-pandemic eras empowered customers to pick self-empowered support means, including chatbots, knowledge base articles, ‘How to’ videos, troubleshooting guides, etc.
However, the customers play a major role in deciding the future of contact centers, adopting self-service first and then moving to human interaction for complex issues. This empowers the customers and simplifies operations for contact centers, especially in the migration to the hybrid model.
Data-driven digitalized experience
The proactive improvements highly influence the success and sustainability of a customer-facing company it brings using the actionable insights from each interaction. In order to improve customer experiences and quality service are data-driven intelligence that thought leaders utilize to bring value to the customer journey.
Additionally, this approach is now more productive by connecting the dots with the contact center’s customer experience and employee journeys. Using this blended approach with digital experience at the hybrid contact center model, the quality, experience, and productivity can see a significant gain.
Common framework for success metrics
Businesses should be abreast of customer experience and employee engagement on common ground. Customer experience is usually considered successful for better customer satisfaction, lifetime value (LTV), wallet share, etc. In contrast, employees are based on the efficiency to higher call volume, handle time and call deflection. There is a need to find common ground for success metrics at the intersection of CX and EX for more profitable ROIs.
HYBRID CONTACT CENTER CHALLENGES
A hybrid contact center offers significant impacts and positive developments, yet businesses have few challenges in introducing the hybrid model. With the use of technological means with remote work culture, a Hybrid contact center has one of the prime challenges is the lack of personal interaction among workforces. Working from anywhere reduces the personal interaction that might impact relationships among employees.
Another challenge companies could face the team management as most of the team members will be connected remotely. So, developing a culture of constant communication is required to bridge the ‘physical gap.’ And last but surely not the least is the cost of the latest technology; as for some business entities, the cost of the latest technology seems higher though on-cloud basis, it gets on a comfortable note. A hybrid Contact Center or a mix of remote work and on-site presence could solve many challenges as the hybrid model was underdevelopment before it became an in-thing.
Hybrid Contact Center Building Strategies
In order to effectively build a Hybrid contact center with a blend of Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX), businesses can follow these strategies according to their business size and needs. This ensures common goals for each stakeholder to increase ROIs, enhance efficiency, bring innovation, and pace up the overall growth.
Connect with the employee and deliver
This is an undeniable fact for businesses that customer-facing employees are the face of your brand. These front-line work-forces are one of the vital entities for your organization to extract the ‘right information.’ Businesses should leverage their insights and deep-rooted engagements they have with your customers for you. Understand that employees are the influencers for your brands among the customer groups. Businesses should connect with these front runners, build a rapport, and resonate with their customers. Influencers are part of new-age marketing strategies, and eventually, you have an in-house team of potent influencers.
Employees’ reviews are as vital as customer reviews
Customer reviews and feedback are essential to evaluate Lifetime Value (LTV) for your organization, but you can’t keep your eyes close to employees’ reviews in revenue generation. During the customer journey, your company’s brand and public image are also factors to be closely observed by the customers. Businesses must solicit reviews from their existing and former employee regularly. Employee net promoter score (ENPS) surveys and employee engagement surveys can be helpful to gauge the employee satisfaction level and take necessary steps to timely manage it. This helps to understand the public image and take action to correct those perceptions. A happy employee brings more business value to your company and provides a better customer experience, so keep your focus on employee experience and satisfaction.
Identify the major irritants and fix them
The digital landscape evolves a little frequently on multiple aspects of digital infrastructure. There is a need to identify the key irritants in your existing operating system and fix them before your business starts lagging. Businesses need to bring a system to help them find the broken processes and outdated or poor technologies. It has a negative impact on the employees’ productivity and, in the end, impacts the customer experience. Make sure to empower your employees with the latest software and technologies so they can provide more efficiency at work without getting frustrated with it.
Empower a blended approach of connecting data with CX and EX
Businesses usually focus on customer engagement activities, but employee engagement activities get unnoticed despite the correlation between the two. In fact, most companies keep customer data separate from employee data. For the common good, businesses should align customer data with employee data and find mutual impacts. This would help them to reach the common interests, key performance indicators, data-driven behaviors (including customer satisfaction and employee performance), and design a collaborative strategy.
Knowledge management brings value at various touch points
A hybrid contact center needed to focus on empowering its workforce to stay motivated and passionate about delivering a higher customer experience. Businesses should cultivate the idea that customer experience is a priority for their brand with the active involvement of each stakeholder. This ensures accountability at the employees’ end, and they feel committed to delivering excellent CX. It requires extensive knowledge to deliver the right amount of customer experience; usually, a long-term employee brings a channel to share it with others and enhance the overall productivity, customer experience, and employee experience with satisfaction.
FINAL WORDS
A customer-centric business is always profitable; however, the path goes by integrating great employee experience with improved talent acquisition and retention costs. In order to provide a serious competitive edge in your segment, then first focus on great Employee Experience (EX). Delighted employees derive delighted customers and generate more profitability with a larger market share for your brand.
This is crucial as the recent shift in the new Hybrid work culture and increasing competition in the market. Integrating customer experience and employee experience develop a potential Hybrid Contact Center to address the workforce challenges and meet the increasing customer expectations.
Customers’ demand for ‘human-like’ interaction needed an omnichannel approach to deliver a tailor-made service-like experience to the customers. Businesses can see the direct correlation between CX and EX, or you can say that CX and EX are the two sides of a coin. When a business focuses on EX, it can also experience a positive impact on CX. We are in the age of digital disruption where businesses should embrace the Hybrid Contact Center for increased revenue, happy employees, and delighted customers.
