The frightening truth about bad customer service

(Cue horror laughter sound effect)

With Halloween mere weeks away, monsters, ghouls and witch outfits line the stores. One must wonder what the Celts, who started the tradition with their festival of Samhain, would say about Halloween. Who knew that ‘scary’ could have such entertainment and monetary value.

However, with fright night so close and the breath of Christmas chasing shortly behind, will your customer service strategy deliver magical customer experiences or turn ‘nice’ customers into nasty brand hating trolls? Horrendous customer service can have even the most loyal customers turn into fire breathing dragons if they feel that they have been let down.

Mirror mirror on the wall, what should businesses do to have it all?

Businesses looking to gain the competitive advantage should make customer experience their focus point. Bain & Company reports that companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4 – 8% above the market.

The frightening truth is that when customers experience bad service, with multiple digital channels to choose from, it could be hard to stop the domino effect tarnishing your brand’s reputation, once it’s in motion. Deloitte research shows that 85% of customer service organisations view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. However, to improve customer experience, it’s important to understand how to gauge and measure how customer expectations translate into good or bad experiences.

**Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!**Customers want answers in the channel they’re from. And will see red when it takes too long.

It seems obvious that we all want quick answers to questions, however with Statista reporting that over 81% of the UK population now own a smartphone and with the revelation that is 4G, consumers are increasingly turning to online channels to contact an organisation to resolve a customer service issue. In fact, Mckinsey & Company report that 75% of online customers expect help within 5 minutes.

Alarmingly, figures show that response rates and times to questions sent via e-mail or posted on social channels are proving disappointing, having a significant effect on customer satisfaction levels.

Twitter

• Over 1.5 million direct questions go unanswered (Source: socialbakers)
• Average question response time is 9 hours (Source: socialbakers)
• 20% of users posts mentioning brand accounts are questions (Source: socialbakers)
• Only 32% of brands have a dedicated customer service handle (Source: Simply Measured)

E-mail

• 41% of consumers expect an email response within 6 hours (Source: Forrester)
• Only 36% of retailers actually respond that quickly and 14% never respond at all (Source: Forrester)

Facebook

• Only 65% of questions are responded to by brands on Facebook (Source: socialbakers)
• 25% of user posts on Facebook pages are questions (Source: socialbakers)
• Dust those customer experience cobwebs

With a large percentage of posts on social media being questions, it makes sense to give customers the opportunity to self-serve answers to the most commonly asked questions themselves online, rather than keeping them in a perpetual state of hold. And since conversation is part of natural human behaviour after all, it’s no surprise that 35% of consumers would prefer to see more brands answering questions, using chatbots. (Source: ubisend, 2017)

Treat

At Synthetix, we’ve have experienced first-hand, the positive impact self-service through Virtual Agents / bots, web self-service and integrated knowledge has had on customer service delivery and are eager to prove that it is not a second-rate customer support channel or scary.

Three challenges contact centres should have overcome by now

Unlike the uncertainty surrounding Brexit negotiations, the last ten years’ advances in technology (and especially AI) has helped many leading brands turn their contact centres into profit centres by improving first contact resolution, decreasing agent burnout and making their customers happy.

Technology has also changed customer expectations and customer experience can no longer be sacrificed for the convenience of the brand. Customer service is an essential part of contact centres, and with uncertain times upon us, delivering exceptional customer experience to customers via their channel of choice might have some contact centres feeling like they don’t have the right weapons to win the battle of delivering increased customer satisfaction whilst also reducing their cost-per-serve ratio.

But, there is hope yet for those who choose their arms wisely…

Bite the bullet with efficiency

Unpredictable call spikes cause frustrated customers and weary agents, resulting in lost revenue. Self-service options like Visual IVR, FAQ Search and Virtual Agent chatbots help to optimise agent contact, coping with spikes in enquiries and assisting with rapid contact resolution in the event that a query is escalated to an agent.

Plan of attack to retain and attract

Teams burning out quickly and high agent attrition costs time and money. Gamification programs promote healthy culture; performance data improves development and retention. Dashboards reporting on agent productivity will assist contact centre managers to identify staff needing more encouragement as well as identifying those to reward.

‘Omni-channelling’ successfully with Customer Experiences

Being there for customers when they reach out via chat, email or social media is challenging when the best skilled agents or a full customer history is not be available. Using APIs and CRM integrations, real-time data can be unified in one place across channels, enabling a 360 degree view of the customer, regardless of which channel they choose to interact through.

These quick reads provide some valuable insight to taking small steps to prepare for the ever-changing customer experience landscape and how it can create winning results in the contact centre.

Water utility boosts customer engagement through Alexa

Alexa natural voice experience aims to offer customers a more intuitive way to interact

One of the leading water and sewerage companies in England Wales has upped the stakes again in their mission to deliver high levels of customer service, with the powerful addition of an Alexa Skill which is set to enhance and offer a new way to communicate service to customers.

Already recognised as one of the top scorers by Ofwat in the SIM league for customer satisfaction, the Alexa natural voice experience aims to offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with this organisation.
The Alexa skill enables customers to have instant access to hundreds of relevant answers to their questions, just by asking. The FAQs are drawn from the same channel-independent repository that serves the website which insures a single source of truth.

The company will capture the feedback from the Alexa skill and use this to develop a roadmap for further voice assistant features, such as integration to middleware and payment processing to make Alexa more functional and personal.

The OFWAT Customer measure of experience (C-MeX) initiative redefines the way water utilities are rated, taking into account customers who have not made proactive contact with their water company. The current investment in new channels and the ability to measure Net Promoter Score will help this organisation to raise their profile and deliver excellent customer experiences through 2019 and beyond.

Alastair Taylor, Commercial Director at Synthetix said, “By launching an Alexa skill, customers will have instant access to hundreds of relevant answers to their questions. SentienceAI, the power behind the technology DNA of Synthetix, enabled us to extend our naturally searchable knowledge and conversational customer experiences to the Alexa voice assisted channel in record time. It’s a privilege to work alongside companies who are embracing technology to help serve their customers better.”

The dawn of a new Contact Centre

AI stretches far beyond Botman versus SuperAgent

Managing a large group of loud personalities, having to forecast and plan resources tightly against projected inbound contact, meeting big targets and running countless meetings, if this sounds like your typical day, you must be in the profession of overseeing a contact centre. Finding time to think about and plan what needs to be done to develop or improve performance is a tough task when most Managers spend their time battling to keep agents and customers happy. To further complicate matters, any big changes need to be run past upper management, which according to a recent report, still perceives the contact centre as a ‘cost centre’.

And with headlines stating that AI will be ‘the death of the contact centre’, it’s understandable that Contact Centre Managers might feel like the world is against them. However, it’s the dawn of a New Contact Centre. Businesses can no longer afford to rely on archaic siloed channels for customer support and experience. The time has come for businesses to fill their customer support armoury with new strategies and AI tech to win the war on remaining relevant and profitable.

As consumers grow more and more comfortable with messaging, AI applications offer the contact centre some dramatic benefits that stretches way beyond ‘Botman versus SuperAgent’. For those businesses looking to invest in AI, there is light in this confusing artificially intelligent world of darkness. There already exists reasonably priced and ‘modest’ AI-powered solutions that can translate into cost savings, increased productivity and improved customer experience with minimal demands on IT resources.

But for AI to introduce new value and break fresh ground, strategists must take an innovative approach to CX and consider its impact beyond its novelty. As a ‘Customer Experience General’ looking to outwit the enemy, the following quick reads provide some valuable insight to taking small steps to prepare for the ever-changing customer experience landscape and how it can deliver ‘super-powered’ results in the contact centre.

Discover the small step towards AI that can deliver quick-win business results – Download the whitepaper.

Synthetix stood its ground when featured amongst the AI elite in the latest Opus Intelligent Assistants top vendors report

Synthetix, pioneers in conversational AI Natural Language Understanding technology are proud to have been included into Opus Research’s “Decision Makers’ Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants” again this year.

Opus Research is a leading analyst organisation. In their latest report, Opus Research presents a comprehensive assessment of the current Intelligent Assistant (IA)solution provider landscape with special focus on those offering “enterprise-grade” solutions.

With Opus reporting enterprise spend on Intelligent Assistants set to exceed the projected $2 billion in 2018, and heading up to $5.5 billion in 2021, compound annual growth rate for the next five years comes to a whopping 67%. The reason for the level of growth is the result of what Opus refers to as “the perfect storm where technological advancement in Speech Processing, NLU, machine learning and knowledge management coincides with (or gives rise to) heightened levels of comfort and confidence in human-to-machine communications.”

Synthetix has been included in the report once again, which presents an inclusive valuation of top vendors within the Intelligent Assistant solution landscape with a focus on enterprise grade solutions. Synthetix are immensely proud to have been included in this report, especially as a pioneer of Intelligent Assistant technology. With clients across all industries, empowering brands to be there for their customers, Synthetix has over 200 Natural Language Understanding deployments worldwide, which have helped many organisations to reduce costs and see fast ROI, increase their first contact resolution and conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and gain valuable customer insight.

Dan Miller, Lead Analyst at Opus Research said, “The rapid adoption and use of new, conversational end-points and services may not have caught every business by surprise, but it has them scrambling to meet the growing demand from their end customers for intelligent, conversational brand experiences. This report helps those organizations understand what criteria they should consider when evaluating prospective solutions and provides an overview of vendor capabilities and track record, which can inform the process of getting an IA up and running successfully.”

Peter McKean, Director at Synthetix says, “Our ability to scale and the maturity of our AI technology has demonstrated the dramatic impact it has to improve the effectiveness of the contact centre dramatically and make human interactions more impactful. We are proud that our business model and cutting-edge innovations have gained such global recognition.”

Get your game on with these 3 powerful customer service tools

I really looked forward to watching Wimbledon last week. Don’t we all love a good game? However, as a loyal fan, the nail-biting joy of watching tennis was spoilt for me, as I had to turn down the sound to be able to focus on the game rather than the disturbing noises made by some players.

This reminded me how some businesses on-board new digital service channels. They might deploy a new channel simply to keep up or intimidate the competition, but forget that their customers will be the ones using it. Businesses must be ‘present’ on their customers’ preferred support channels. But mere presence isn’t enough: customers expect their experience to be equally swift no matter the means they use to get in touch with a business.

Let’s leave the noise for the crowds.

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” – Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon

The game of tennis bears many similarities to a business. Both are painful to watch when their performance isn’t up to scratch. And not being on top of your game can lose you valuable customers or fans.

Self-service

Although the aim of the game appears quite simple – keeping the ball within the bounds of the court, but out of an opponent’s reach – the point scoring concept can make it hard for a new viewer to keep track of what is going on. And in business, on-boarding new digital channels for customer support might seem simple enough, but there is so much more to online support than just providing customers with a means to contact you.

Think about the last time you bought tickets for an event (maybe Wimbledon). Did you drive to the venue, maybe pitch a tent to wait in line for tickets, or did you register online to buy tickets and have them printed or emailed to you after a few simple clicks? If you’re like most people, the self-service online option certainly makes more sense. The same can be said about customer support. Overwhelming statistics across industries state that 81% of all customers prefer to self-serve answers to their support queries, before having to speak to an agent ~ Forrester

Forrester also reports the cost of a self-service query on average costs less than 10 pence, while the average cost of human aided support (phone, e-mail, or webchat) is more than £5.37per query for a B2C company and just under £10 for a B2B company.

Given the huge potential benefits with using self-service tools to enhance customer satisfaction and reduce costs, businesses have much to gain by implementing web self-service technologies. With major advances in NLP architype, self-service technologies have been enormously effective at removing low-complexity issues from the agent support queue.

Agent Knowledge-base

But herein lies the challenge though: As customers self-serve simple issues themselves, frontline support agents get increasingly more complex queries and issues customers can’t solve on their own. So, what’s the problem?

Some companies that have focused on new self-service technologies, underinvested in agent support. With the absence of an agent knowledge-base supporting contact centre agents, inconsistencies in answers lead to both customer and agents getting upset and frustrated.

When agent numbers increase from 25 to 125 during the Christmas season, one of London’s leading upmarket department stores are still able to maintain high levels of customer service. Using a Synthetix knowledge platform, temporary customer service agents can be trained rapidly, with the assurance that they are delivering correct and consistent information to customers over telephone and webchat channels.

Retailers of this type see a huge percentage of their online business crammed into six weeks each year, which makes its critical for their customer satisfaction rates to remain consistent throughout this surge during festive months.

Businesses that have invested in a contact centre agent knowledge platform have reported:

* Agent training times to be reduced by 30%
* Average call handling times to be reduced by 30% – 50%
* Call abandonment rates to be reduced by circa 20%
* Certain types of questions via telephone and email to be reduced by circa 80%

However, it’s important that your omni-channel game plan integrates digital support channels with each other.

Virtual Agent / bot

Remember when “there’s an app for that” was a popular catchphrase? Now, as customers’ smartphones fill up with apps they’ve only used a handful of times, and businesses try to reach consumers while they’re online, the zeitgeist has shifted to “there’s a bot for that.”

The most exciting thing about a bot or Virtual Agent as a medium, is allowing humans to step in when needed. Bots in themselves aren’t revolutionary – we’ve had phone trees and robotic dialogues for a while – but when paired with human intelligence for tasks a Virtual Agent can be a powerful tool.

Virtual Agents are not only upping the personalisation stakes. The hybrid approach of blending AI with human support enables contact centre agents to focus on complex customer queries and transactions requiring an emotive connection. A Virtual Agent, when deployed correctly, with a set of specific goals, can generate leads, increase sales, and grow a business in a big way, switching on an entire additional support channel, and this is only the beginning!

But don’t build a bot just to follow a trend; build a bot if it helps you solve a problem better, or get to market faster.

Conclusion:

Implementing a successful omni-channel strategy is tricky.

In tech years – Synthetix are pioneers. We have been creating ‘New World’ customer experiences, revolutionising online customer service with our seamless integration of customer contact channels such as Virtual Agents, FAQ search, live chat and e-mail management.

We’ve put together a selection of concise resources to share our wealth of knowledge and best practice tips from our customers to cut through some of the hype surrounding new and existing online customer service tools.

Embrace the shift, don’t get left behind.

Synthetix are proud to be a finalist in the last round of the Digital Self-Service Awards

Synthetix are pleased to announce our progression to the final of the Digital Self-Service innovation category of the UK National Innovation Awards 2017. May is truly a month of celebration here at Synthetix as not only are we through to the final round of the Innovation Awards, 12 May sees us celebrating our 16th birthday.

This might not sound very old, until you think about the light-speed advances of technology over the last 16 years. Not only are we known as one of the pioneers of Virtual Agent Technology – creating Virtual Agents for companies like the BBC, Vauxhall, and Ford, comparable to Siri, Cortana and Google Now, before they became the norm – Synthetix has revolutionised online customer service with our seamless integration of customer contact channels such as FAQ search, Live Chat, Dynamic Web Forms and E-mail Management.

To be chosen as a finalist in the Innovation Awards 2017, Synthetix had to demonstrate the power of our integrated Synthetix online customer service technologies. Our entry highlighted enhanced customer experiences, a reduction in overall customer contact and costs for our customers from Retail, Travel and Insurance.

Jon Snow, Chairman of Directors’ Club United Kingdom praised standard of entries, “Directors’ Club are delighted the Synthetix entry was voted through to the final of the Digital Self-Service Innovation category on May 23rd. The competition from other entrants was high, as was the quality of the submissions. I am sure their live final presentation will further demonstrate the innovation at the heart of their offering. Congratulations and best of luck.”
Adam Ashcroft, Marketing Director of Synthetix said “The effectiveness, efficiency and customer satisfaction results from our customers speak volumes. As customer behavior constantly adapt to advances in technology, Synthetix will continue to create cutting-edge multi-channel online customer service solutions ensure consistent and accurate information is available via every customer touch-point.

We are excited about this award entry and thank the UK National Innovation Awards 2017, for the opportunity to showcase why we are market leaders of multi-channel online customer service.”

The Digital Self-Service Innovation category final will take place live online at 11am (BST) on Tuesday, May 23rd 2017, judged by the business leaders who employ the technologies.

Digital customer service channels to blame for poor CX?

Customer support is not exempt from customer experience.

Customer experience in one industry sets the bar and shapes expectations for all experiences. This has never been more true and applies to many aspects of our lives.

I wonder how many people have walked into a hair salon, clenching a photo of what they would like their hair to look like, just to walk out crying, disappointed that their expectations were not met in the mirror? And how many blame the hair dresser’s skill, not the fact that maybe the style or colour just doesn’t fit the shape of their face or skin tone? This begs the question: Should a stylist simply follow instructions from the customer or should they advise (as they are the experts) customers to try something more suitable?

Customer support is not exempt from customer experience or expectations. And businesses have responded offering a plethora of communication channels to customers for support. Why is then that managers are struggling to tie tech investments to improved operational outcomes or the growth of their business through efficiencies and improved customer experience?

It has become increasingly apparent that many channels are being bolted on with little or no consideration for how they are integrated with the rest of the organisation. For the customer, the existence of siloed channels can be apparent in a variety of ways, such as inconsistency in actions from channel-to-channel; different tone of voice; duplication of messaging; or having to start the conversation anew every time it shifts to a fresh channel.

With a huge 82% of customers having stopped doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience, the message is clear: Organisations that cannot provide a seamless experience across multiple channels are in danger of losing customers to those businesses that can.

These free guides offer practical advice from improving agent productivity, NPS or CSAT scores to busting the operational silos to deliver consistent customer experiences across multiple channels.

Snow day should not equal icy customer support

Maintaining high levels of support

The severe weather and storms this year has created havoc throughout the UK. Heavy snow not only had some commuters spending hours in their vehicles, or having to be rescued, train, flight and bus cancellations has resulted in an unprecedented surge in commuter enquiries. And with further weather warnings being issued by the Met Office, the increased demand on customer service departments is set to continue.

And it’s not only travel updates required by commuters. With staff unable to commute to work, some businesses are struggling to operate efficiently. The convenience of our always ‘on’ online world has changed the way in which we interact with businesses as we expect to be able to communicate with them over multiple channels when we want to.

With the rapid rise in the use of mobile devices, 24/7 support is within reach to those businesses eager to achieve operational efficiency, by utilising digital channels such as Virtual Agents, web chat or web self-service, especially during unexpected circumstances.

Digital channels allow businesses to maintain high levels of service during peak and off-peak times. Web self-service options and Virtual Agents don’t get snowed in. And kudos to those using web chat via agents working from home – an often-overlooked advantage of chat over voice.

Businesses cannot risk being stuck in the past, however many are still finding it difficult to adjust to advancing technologies.

We’ve put together concise free guides and practical advice on implementing web self-service, Virtual Agents or web chat which you can download here:

* Multi-channel Online Customer Service for Dummies.
* Virtual Agents for Dummies.
* Web chat – 5 killer reasons why you are doing it wrong.
* Virtual Agents – to bot or not?.