Modernize Your Customer Experience with Self-Service

In my last blog post, I advocated for beginning your customer experience modernization journey by consulting with IT. My next piece of advice centers around what the end goal of your modernization efforts should be: allowing your customers more access to self-service—and I mean good self-service.

Do you feel like you’re working on antiquated equipment? Are your customers demanding that you do something different to improve their experiences? If so, it’s time for your customer care organization to modernize—but what does that mean, exactly, and how can you best position yourself and your organization for success?

This article originally appeared in Security Magazine.

Customers want to be more than a number. They want companies to quickly recognize who they are, anticipate what they want, and solve their problems quickly. And they want this recognition to extend across any interaction they have with a business—whether it’s phone, email, chat, SMS, or social media.

2020 raised the bar on customer experience across the board. Most people spent more time at home using more devices connected for more time, driving up both costs and awareness. In response to the changed landscape, utilities have pivoted to provide more personalized service, helping customers use energy more efficiently while providing access to more services virtually. From an internal operations perspective, many agents went remote, supported by cloud infrastructure and AI.

Modernization: The concept isn’t new, but the form factor may be. This is due in most part to the consumption models of cloud, SaaS, and hybrid offers that are now available. Modernization has taken many shapes over the past 20 years because of the technologies that are available at any given time.

Healthcare IT vendor Allscripts recently faced a significant and costly upgrade for its operating system environment. At the same time, its premises-based contact center system was up for annual maintenance renewal. Allscripts decided to take the opportunity to simplify contact center operations and move to the cloud—a move that was in line with its general commitment to cloud migration.

Just ask your Customer Service Representatives, "What is the toughest or most annoying part of your daily tasks?" The answer may not surprise you. You may find that your workforce is spending a large amount of time on things that are necessary, but repetitive. Frankly, these items do not add significant value to the business and, in turn, they diminish employee satisfaction. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is built to handle tasks that are slowing down your employees, as well as ones that are just very boring for them to do. A trusted partner can help you figure out where automation can add to the efficiency and effectiveness of your Contact Center or Back Office.

Recently, I was asked to speak about Public Cloud Services, and specifically, CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) during a training call. It was actually really good timing, because this has been a hot topic with vendors, partners, and customers. In those discussions, I find that there’s a lot of misconceptions about what CPaaS actually is. As mentioned, CPaaS stands for Communication Platform as a Service, but even that term can mislead you into thinking that it’s a much broader and more inclusive thing than it actually is.

Harvard Business Review published an article on “Reinventing Customer Service,” and I believe they—and one of our customers—are onto something.