Driving loyalty and engagement with empathetic customer experience

Providing great customer service should be at the heart of every company, despite this, many often fall short on delivering the experience customer deserves. In this blog Patrick Fahy, Associate Director, Product Management, Tata Communications, discusses how companies can employ the use of a cloud contact centre to improve customer experience, ultimately driving loyalty and engagement. 

Last year I met someone who worked for a large retail bank in South Africa. When she introduced herself, instead of describing her job as a contact centre manager, she spoke from the heart about her purpose – to ensure that no customer who falls into financial difficulty will ever lose their home under her watch.

Now compare this with the worst customer experience we have come across. The clear demarcation between both the scenarios is empathy and emotional intelligence.

“Each customer is highly important to a company and customer loyalty can only be earned by delivering highly personalised experiences every time a customer contacts a business.”

The mindset to increase long-term value for the customers is often missing in business today, but research published by Rob Markey in Harvard Business Review has shown that customer loyalty leader organisations grew their revenue 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers. So how can businesses gain customer loyalty?

Embedding empathy and emotional intelligence into every step of the customer journey  

Customer journeys can be broken into three simple stages:

1 – Research leg: websites visited and online touchpoints

2 – Inbound leg: IVR / Chat Bot / App

3 – Agent leg: routing to an expert to help

A cloud contact centre will address channel choice and route to an expert, but the hard part is to embed emotional intelligence into the process. The key to this is the following:

• Obtaining insights through a pre-integrated contact centre as a service (CCaaS) platform (includes voice and text analytics), that can capture data from customer’s every touchpoint in the research leg
• Avoid silos of technology: if the bot is unable to resolve the customer’s issue, offer contextual routing to a suitably skilled agent
• Retain and provide key customer journey insights to the agent, via a journey management gadget on the agent desktop, together with insights from the customer’s research
• Additionally, customer sentiment and emotion are captured so the agent is fully prepared
• CRM integration to reference the customer’s account history and reason for calling
• The Identification and Verification Process is sped-up when one knows the customer and the context of their inquiry. Multi-factor authentication and biometrics technologies further reduce friction and potentially cost
• Through AI, predictive behavioural routing allows matching of the customer and agent-based on demographics and even personality types
• Knowledge management and FAQs can be embedded into the agent desktop to help resolve a complex query or close a sale in the right call
• Transcription embeds the text of the customer conversation into the CRM record, saving agent effort and wrap time

“Empathy is simply good business. When the employees and contact centre agents are empowered with data and analytics to understand the customer, they do what they do best – build relationships.”

This requires a design thinking approach to the cloud contact centre.

At Tata Communications, we have been designing, delivering, and managing global cloud contact centres for 12 years through our InstaCC^TM CCaaS portfolio. We understand that migrating to the cloud is only the start of your journey and that ultimately, it’s about the empathetic conversations you have and the loyalty you build with your clients and the results this achieves for your business.

Learn more at https://www.tatacommunications.com/solutions/unified-communications/contact-centre-as-a-service/