We’ve shared just how critical a well-tuned IVR system is. After all, your customers consider your inbound contact center to be as much a representative of your organization as your storefront or your salespeople. When it doesn’t deliver, and your customers are relegated to shouting at their phones in frustration. Or even worse, hanging up altogether, they directly connect that negative experience to your brand.
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When your customers contact you for support, sales or other purposes, what’s their experience like? Do you have a system in place for measuring your customer experience? Tracking contact center metrics is critical to delivering positive, brand-reinforcing customer service with every call. However, many companies lack the proper system to track and measure their data. Are you aware of what IVR capabilities you may be missing out on?
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User Experience Design (UX) is more than an interface on an application. UX is intended to design and develop clear, efficient, user-friendly interactions between customers and companies through a variety of applications. It is more than just recording prompts for your IVR with someone from the motor pool that has a cool sounding voice or redesigning a call flow so that customers get to the agent they need to talk to even faster. An effective interaction interface is intuitive. It is efficient, saving customers time and frustration. And it communicates clearly and is easy to use, making the experience a customer has a positive one.
Serving customers across numerous channels in contact centers with innovative solutions are readily available. Retail businesses often face a variety of challenges, like high call volumes, massive orders, and aggravated customers, particularly during seasonal surges. To ensure a superior customer experience is delivered, it is imperative to have a strategic plan in place. The goal is to leverage technology so that a seamless, efficient, and enjoyable contact center customer experience can be achieved no matter the channel of communication being used. Here’s a look at some pointers your contact center can utilize to ensure your customers have positive interactions with your brand.
Waterfield Technologies and Bright Pattern partner to deliver a comprehensive approach to application lifecycle management for Interactive Voice Response and omnichannel self-service solutions.
Tulsa, Oklahoma – October 09, 2018 – Waterfield Technologies, a leading enterprise software and professional services organization providing voice and mobile solutions that drive customer engagement, today announced a partnership with Bright Pattern, a leading provider of enterprise contact center software. The partnership will deliver an enriched customer experience through comprehensive omnichannel self-service technologies across all industries.
Automation has always been part of the contact center world – and it is getting even bigger with the addition of chatbots. While they are in a basic stage now, as is with all things related to AI, chatbots are getting better the more we use them. Machine learning is different than human learning – it’s only as good as the data we feed it. Chatbots lack natural cognition to challenge inputs such as 2+2 = 5. But over time, patterns are established that make chatbots “intelligent” – smart enough to take on more and more complicated tasks.
As Contact Center managers spin around feverishly trying to keep up with the latest self-service trends, customers are continuing to do what they have always done…pressing zero a bunch of times trying to reach an live person! Although technology is our friend when it comes to our smart phones and talking cars, customers still have a tendency to want to talk to an agent, even for the simplest of tasks.
This seems to hit the banking industry especially hard. A live person telling a person their bank balance is somehow more reassuring than hearing it from an automated voice. But is answering this simple inquiry in this manner an efficient way to conduct your business?
When searching for voice talent for your IVR it is important to understand the goals and objectives of the project and align those to the right partner. For the best result, it’s essential that you identify a voice provider that knows the contact center and its related technologies. The “too big” and “too little” options will leave you vulnerable.
Selecting a voice is a subjective process. You either like a voice or you don’t. Some solo voice actors may have a sound you favor so you might think it would be ok to contract directly with that individual. However, remember that you’ll not only be responsible for managing the talent relationship, including the contracts and continuous payments, you’ll also need to figure out the ongoing editing, file formatting, deadlines and delivery. In addition, any personal or professional issues that may arise are your problem.
Many customers first encounter your brand through the voice channel. Today, with an increasingly multichannel and digital marketplace, the phone (and the Web) is your company’s modern-day “front door.”
Each time a customer calls, your brand is on the line when “the door” is answered. A great experience over the voice channel depends on two factors—the technology and the human touch, meaning the prerecorded voice prompts that humanize that technology. To ensure the experience is as professional and brand-consistent as possible, it’s essential that that voice greets and guides callers with a clear and friendly sound, encouraging them to complete their goal as quickly and conveniently as possible, whether it’s self-service, a buying decision, or a handoff to a live representative.