Addressing the experience disconnect
It’s well understood that customer experience is impacted through many stages, including interactions with customer service. However, contact center leaders often earn their success through a focus on operational efficiency while experience management has been left to creative marketing organizations. What we are seeing at Avanade is that the “future-ready” company brings the elements of efficiency and experience as well as the organizational silos, together for more profitable results.

“To become future-ready, a company must transform on two dimensions: customer experience and operational efficiency,” say Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). When it comes to contact center organizations, though, these two elements have sometimes seemed to be at odds and, at other times, are mistaken for one another. Contact center performance is often assessed on easily measured parameters like average handle time and first call resolution rates. Such metrics may gauge a call center’s productivity, but they don’t necessarily improve customer loyalty. Efficient customer interaction is essential for success, but it is not a synonym for excellent customer experience.

To address the efficiency/experience divide, future-ready companies are employing enterprise technology that brings together contact center operations with marketing customer-centricity.

How intelligence helped one contact center drive better experiences more efficiently
Recently, a global personal care cosmetics company demonstrated how a powerful technology platform can transform both efficiency and experience. The company sells its lifestyle and beauty products direct, online and through over 3,000 retail stores in more than 70 countries.

Employing Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure, the company worked with Avanade to build a cloud-based operating platform for contact center efficiency on top of which they were able to activate new services for superior customer experience. Key to their solution is a bot built on the Azure Bot framework using AI-driven insights to provide on-target solutions to customer and partner inquiries while dramatically reducing call volume to the contact center.

But this client went beyond efficiency to create great experiences. In collaboration with the firm’s marketing team, the company designed a compelling, graphical personality for the virtual agent. One that reflects the overall brand identity. The marketing organization amplified the impact of the bot by making it the face of their Twitter and other social media accounts. This led to increased adoption and reinforced the perception of a unified customer experience across touch points.

The results of this cosmetic company’s willingness to blend contact center efficiency with customer experience excellence through digital transformation has been extraordinary. The contact center reached its call reduction goals two years ahead of schedule. The client’s ability to blend contact center efficiency with customer experience excellence through digital transformation has been extraordinary. They have experienced improved business performance which has helped to propel their brand rankings as well as achieve their contact center goals.

Put your brand’s best foot forward with strong marketing-service collaboration
Being future-ready means excelling at what you do and how you do it. When customer care professionals step out of the contact center and connect with colleagues in marketing, they can co-develop great experiences that improve loyalty and efficiency. Developing maturity in delivering experiences on a solid operational platform begets business model innovation – the true goal of the future-ready enterprise.

Looking to drive more customer value with your contact center? Download our Contact Center Performance Guide and contact us to learn more.