Perspective to Contact Center
Aminudin Zainodin, Head Contact Center, Affin Bank Berhad [Klse: Affin]
Aminudin Zainodin, Head Contact Center, Affin Bank Berhad [Klse: Affin]
The adoption of digital devices and high-speed connectivity is changing the way of customer behavior in communicating with organizations. The trending is obvious that it forces the service industry to evolve in a quest to become more digitalized than before. Conversations are no longer limited to voice channel; instead, the customer is expected to engage seamlessly via multi-channel like apps, chats, voice and various social media. Gone with the days the old school of thoughts that contact centre only has a human behind every interaction with the customer.
As I was looking into how the contact centres’ technology has evolved by adopting the best practices that work from other industries, it triggers my mind on how organizations prioritize their spending into the right technology to reap the best outcome in meeting the company’s objectives and exceeding customers’ expectations. I have experienced many implementations that have many positive outcomes, and some requires modification to turn the negative into positive results. Let me share some tips as basic guidelines to any companies who wish to start investing in this world of technologies that serve wonders. 1. State the objectives of the contact centre. The existence of a contact centre in your organization must be supported by a purpose; i.e., is the contact centre supposed to provide 24/7 multi-channel interactions? Then you need to look at alternatives to reduce your operational cost, i.e., bots that can perform easy/ simple interactions across all channels.Not only it can reduce the FTE cost, but more important is that it will allow live agents to focus more on complicated matters (requests/ complains), which have a bigger impact to the organizations. To make the investment even worthwhile, invest in bots that can perform multitask instead of single capability.
2. Prioritize the objectives.
If your contact centre has more than one objective, then prioritize it whether you will be focusing more on services or sales or both equally across the channels. Some contact centers priorities their objectives by channels, i.e.. voice to serve priority customers while other alternative channels such as live chat (human/ bots) and social media are used to service other segments.
3. Identify the scope of work (SOW) requires achieving the objectives.
This is where the project team needs to sit down with the operation team and identify the coverage and details require in meeting the objectives. The idea is to have both sides of thinking (innovation with traditional) to be merged to make it works. The creative thinking of the project team can sometimes go beyond the operation team’s capability, and here is where reality comes into check and balance between what can be implemented that works for the customer. Getting them to be involved at an early stage would help to ease the experience, which guarantees the success of any project.
4. Based on SOW, identify the type of technology requires.
There are plenty of technologies available out there that cover end-to-end from channels platform, knowledge management, data/interaction analytics to most advanced artificial intelligence that could provide you with immediate results of an engagement with a customer. In the current multimodal digitalization era, we can now witness more companies are investing into intelligent solutions that cover chat/voice bots as well as artificial intelligence with a segmented approach that offers customer effortless pro-active personalized experiences with some incentives given as part of the customer adoption program.
5. Identify Solutions and partners.
This could be tricky at times. Most of the technology provider provides technology solutions. However, most of its implementations failed because they do not have the expertise that understands how to localize the solution in meeting the business goals. More often we see the business ending up changing its objectives to meet purchased technology capability ensuring its investment is not wasted. Having said esethese technology companies are now setting up their business consultant or partner with other service consultants to provide not only technology solutions but effective implementations as well that can fit the business model.
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