If one was to list the most commonly used business strategy buzzwords, the top spots would include “rapid pace of change”, “disrupted world” and “unprecedented data growth”, among others. This dynamic change, rapid pace and disruption reflect the need for business leaders to think ahead or be left behind.

Despite the ongoing digital evolution and the related uncertainties that come with it, customer experience (CX) still remains the key differentiator between leading organisations and their counterparts.

Combine these two factors – the need to think ahead and CX – and the critical success theme that emerges is ‘how to modernise customer engagement’. If we look at customer engagement, we see a multi-faceted mechanism that is undoubtedly enabled by technology, but is also critically dependent on the processes and people who drive it.

The best example is the contact centre, which drives customer engagement through various processes – customer self-service, assisted service, back office fulfilment, underlying quality management, and people performance management, to name a few. It is very difficult to rapidly and totally change these processes and people practices without (negatively) impacting CX and the employee engagement.

A key tenet of a successful modernisation strategy is therefore to preserve what works and build innovation on top, not rip and replace everything. Similarly, modernisation doesn’t need to happen overnight; making the transition through a series of limited and pragmatic use cases ensures projects get off the ground without overwhelming the organisation or severely impeding operations.

Take quality management for example, which is a critical process to ensure employees perform effectively and ethically. In the traditional quality process, few random interactions are selected and evaluated for key criteria: did the employee greet the customer properly?; did they read the right scripts?, etc. These are binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ examples. Additionally, the evaluator may look at soft skills – how well did the employee understand the issue?; how well did they empathise with the customer?; what strategy should they have adopted to effectively upsell?; and so on.

A modernised quality process would leverage speech analytics to automatically check for the abovementioned binary criteria so that greeting and compliance script checks are automatically evaluated – for all calls – to provide a comprehensive quality view. That frees evaluators to focus on high-value tasks, address soft skills and improve employee performance to deliver better CX.

Apart from automatically evaluating interactions post-fact, analytics can also help provide real-time guidance to employees. Should a dissatisfied customer request to close their account, real-time guidance would advise the employee to make a compelling offer to the customer to remedy the relationship and reduce overall customer churn through a more positive CX (“this company listens!”).

Another example is to introduce smarter self-service for customers. One of the main issues with voice self-service (or IVR) has been the numerous menus and sub-menus that complicate relatively simple tasks. Customer wants to know whether your product D has the feature Z. But to get that answer, the customer is often forced to navigate a tiring maze of menus. How about revamping the self-service to provide more conversational interfaces? After all, it shouldn’t take more than a simple question and answer for the matter to be resolved. This functionality can be delivered via the same self-service platform, which now gets additional power from a natural language processing (NLP) based conversational algorithm to replace the erstwhile hierarchical “Press or say 1…” menus.

Modernisation is a concept the Avaya team will be evaluating closely at the upcoming Verint APAC Engage conference. Alongside our friends Verint, we will outline strategies that have enabled leading organisations – those in Australia and around the globe – to successfully embed automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) into their businesses to amplify the return that real-time analytics can deliver. Join us to take the discussion further as we explore the importance of an open standards-based approach to customer engagement, and how innovation-on-top can help organisations modernise their CX processes.