Playbook to transform your contact center into an Xperience center

In the not-so-distant past, COVID-19 bought the ‘perfect’ storm that changed the entire customer experience landscape. Despite tech innovations crossing your paths, it might feel like walking through glue and not making any revenue progress. Between shifting agents to new remote working environments, racing great resignations, to galloping economic downturns, your contact center is now facing sinister like attacks from multiple fronts. Not just that — amid the changing needs of empowered customers and limited resources – many of you might feel that your contact center is now turning into a house of cards. Any new challenge can break it down anytime. No matter where you are at with your foolproofing measures to handle surging customer expectations – you need a contact center that can weather any storm and support customers by any means. A powerful Xperience center is a key to survival now! And if you are not shoring up and making moves to become one, you will have a tough time staying afloat in 2023! 

But we have some good news. The road to Xperience center is not as gnarly as it looks from where you stand today — and we’ll show you why. But before that, let’s once again face your fears head on!

What’s making your contact center sore today?

Here are the 3 significant challenges faced by contact centers worldwide:

Challenge 1: empowered customers have high expectations

Your customers have (infinite) demands
Social media-empowered customers are demanding more and seeking personalized attention, with 87% not wanting to repeat themselves on multiple channels and 73% not committing loyalty.

Your customers are evolving, but your tools are not 
Contact centers are still sitting on legacy tools and infrastructure that are not designed to support modern customer expectations. 

Goodbyes are not hard for the stressed
89% of consumers have already switched to a competitor following a poor customer experience. Customers hate waiting and expect instant resolutions and personalized support, and attention, 24x7. 

Challenge 2: unstable economy leading to cost cuts

The great resignation and mass exodus of the best people are eating at you

Unpredictable working hours, stress, and lack of tools and training, due to massive cost cuts make it difficult for agents to fix complicated issues and leave them exhausted and unhappy. 

Missing the light at the end of the tunnel
Contact centers are still viewed as cost centers. Most leaders are not considering the revenue potential of customer service interactions and not making substantial investments to transform contact centers into profit centers. 

Getting cold feet and still expecting miracles to happen
Call center IT budgets are considered exorbitant and the first to be slashed without hesitation. Managers are expected to perform miracles in terms of boosting agents’ productivity and lowering costs while providing superior customer service at all levels. 

Challenge 3: inconsistent performance on standard metrics

Contact volume soaring through the roof
Surging contact volumes have resulted in longer than usual wait times. Rigid seat-based arrangements and one-size-fits-all strategies further make it challenging to scale during peak hours and on short notice. 

Point solutions impacting agent productivity
One of the key metrics that contact center agents are assessed on is the number of tickets they have been able to resolve without breaching SLAs. Point solutions and the absence of unified platforms increase the chances of errors and duplication of efforts, thus impacting the overall efficiency and productivity of the support team.

Remote and hybrid working is the new norm 
According to a Gartner survey, 70% of customer support employees want to continue working remotely. While employees are confident, many contact center leaders believe that the new working environments have impacted collaboration. 

Have you found your BIG vision?

Leading brands are addressing these challenges by shifting their focus from a traditional service center to an Xperience center. 

However, becoming an Xperience center starts with a mindset shift. 

Take into account changing customer needs, what your consumer insights are revealing, siloed data stacks, blind spots, and areas of innovation. This will be a good starting point to get a handle on your roadblocks and start your Xperience center journey. 

What exactly do transformational outcomes mean, and how do you mature from foundational to transformational?

To mature from a foundational contact center, you need to transform every service interaction into an opportunity for shared value creation. This would mean assessing your maturity to drive:

1. Loyalty through proactive service 

Your core focus is to

• create a seamless customer journey from purchase to usage and, ultimately, repurchase 
• facilitate customers to achieve maximum value from their purchases 
• pre-empt customer needs and drive customer loyalty. 

And you do these from scratch by:

• being available wherever your customers are: integrate social, digital & traditional channels, and focus on delivering consistent experiences across customer journeys.
• learning, understanding, and actioning customer intent: understand the context of every interaction to identify top contact drivers, predict customer journeys and engage proactively.
• consolidating reporting on every interaction: drive aggregation of customer sentiment from all channels from purchase to usage and, ultimately, repurchase.

2. Growth by helping customers get more value

Your contact centers gradually move beyond efficiency and speed as they become the driver of continuous innovation. As a leader, you start focusing on embedding integrated, personalized, and contextually relevant AI nudges into your operations. And you begin by: 

Empowering customers with frictionless self-service: focus onbuilding and deploying conversational AI and bots. Provide interactive guides and a community forum with robust gamification

How to craft a winning customer service strategy using self serve

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Empowering agents to solve queries faster: enable remote work with One Agent desktop to support all channels, with an integration with third-party systems. Reduce resolution times with smart responses, Agent Assist, and an AI-powered knowledge base. Proactively engage with customers while identifying frustration signals.

3. Collection of Unified insights across pre-purchase to re-purchase touchpoints

You don’t necessarily have to rely on fragmented data, and resource-dependent processes for data pull, refresh, and basic reports on product and service experiences. Real-time rich insights help predict customer behavior by providing a holistic view of all customer journeys across channels. Here’s how you begin: 

Use a single pane of glass for rich insights: ingest data from all support channels, validate data on coverage, and capture speed. Discover top contact drivers across channels.

Action the insights with the feedback loop: collate personalized insights and actions based on roles and get real-time alerts on potential product and service escalations through anomaly detection. Facilitate efficient handling of sensitive issues for severity-based stakeholder alerts.

Now that you know how transformational outcomes can get you one step closer to your Xperience center journey, let’s understand how to get there. 

How to get there: unmasking the Xperience center maturity checklist

Since different contact centers stand at different levels of Xperience center maturity, their capabilities to leverage technologies will vary based on their size and CX strategy. Even before you begin your Xperience center journey, ask yourself:

• What does the ideal customer experience look? 
• How do I need to engage with my customers during pre and post-purchase journeys?
• What should I know about their behavior?
• What should I know about them before they start facing issues?
• What expectations do my agents have, and how can I improve their productivity and efficiency?
• Have I prepared my contact center to face tomorrow’s aggressive challenges? 

From there on, you can start assessing your Xperience center maturity level to deliver loyalty, growth, and unified insights with the help of Sprinklr’s readiness checklist. This checklist will give you a quick understanding of where you stand today and what key elements you need to be an Xperience center. Let’s explore them. 

Best care is no need for care

By harnessing AI and customer insights to discover potential issues early, your team can be more proactive with their outreach and alert customers first — well before they feel the need to reach out for help. 

Second best care is when customers can help themselves

The best customer experience happens when customers can help themselves across any channel they choose through AI-driven automation tools. Customer prefers self-service options rather than engaging with a customer service representative unless absolutely necessary. 

By expanding customer self-service capabilities that encourage customers to find solutions on their own — like AI/automated chatbots, customer-facing knowledge bases, online community forums, and static web pages (like FAQs) — you’ll eliminate redundant ticket load for agents and garner more loyal customers. 

How to craft a winning customer service strategy using self serve

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Third best care is facilitating agents to resolve queries in the first interaction

Customers hate to repeat themselves. Your agents must be empowered to solve issues quickly in the first interaction. It’s critical to unify agent and supervisor experience and provide a 360-degree view of customer information right at their fingertips. By leveraging a single unified contact center solution, you can support customers when they switch between channels during their resolution journey. In addition, you’ll be able to better ensure that your agents are delivering seamless omnichannel customer service every time customers reach out.

Xperience Center Maturity Framework: your tool kit to enable contact center transformations

One of the missing pieces in your contact center's transformation is the lack of relentless adoption of emerging AI tech and practices to create value for customers. Sprinklr’s Xperience Center Maturity framework is a powerful tool that will help you assess your strengths, practices, and gaps within your contact center's critical areas. Think of it as a yardstick to know where you stand today. Evaluate what capabilities you need to add more channels, people, and support languages to become an Xperience center. 

Sprinklr’s Xperience Center Maturity framework has identified four phases of maturity:

Phase 1 - Foundation for efficiency

Your contact center is in its foundation stage, providing customer experience and resolving issues via a single channel (phone or email). At this stage, your goal is to improve agent efficiency and minimize redundant tasks with better triaging and ticket management capabilities. 

Phase 2 - Foundation for growth

Your contact centers have firmly built a foundation for growth by adopting practices that favor more than one channel of communication to handle increasing volumes of service requests. In this phase, the emphasis is on managing ticket load and boosting agents’ productivity and efficiency. 

Phase 3 - Accelerate growth

Your contact center has now become a critical driver of the entire organization’s growth. At this stage, your contact centers start delivering seamless customer experiences by using rich AI-powered insights and reaching out to customers on their preferred channels of interaction (omnichannel).  You are gradually moving from a cost-center mindset and focusing on transforming your contact center into a revenue driver for your entire organization. 

Phase 4 - Xperience Center

In this phase, the focus is to become an Xperience center and drive spectacular strategic business results. Contact centers at this stage can connect the dots between the increasing ticket volume and agent burnout. The key focus moves toward customer experience metrics. Agents of such contact centers resolve tickets without breaching SLAs. AI-based technology is seen as a competitive weapon. Benefits begin to be realized sooner and at scale as contact centers start embracing voice-based AI functionalities like automatic dispositions, speech analytics, voice bots, and IVRs. 

Prioritize AI-powered capabilities based on your goals

Now that you know where you stand; it is time to prioritize and leverage AI-based capabilities based on your current state and maturity level. The Xperience Center Maturity framework gives you an overview of capabilities that your contact center needs, thus helping you prioritize focus areas and become a powerful Xperience center. 

Think of prioritizing AI-powered capabilities based on the following goals:

Focus on improving agent efficiency and productivity

Increasing tickets can create productivity snags for agents and put them into dicey situations if they do not have the right tools to manage them. The best way to deal with this is by simplifying their ticket load and lowering handling time with technologies like AI-based filtering, Rule-based automation tagging, and Auto response. 

Drive proactive engagement and support the deployment of AI-based insights

Not having enough data to interpret your customers' needs and behaviors can lead to trust issues and create disconnected customer journeys. Focus on using AI-based customer insights to decipher what your customers want and, at the same time, create more compelling customer experiences. In addition, conversational AI and bots can listen to conversations, analyze sentiment and customer context in real-time, and resolve customer cases at scale without any human-agent intervention.

Reimagine ways to handle increasing volumes of service requests

When the volume of service requests soar, agents panic, and ticket response and resolution times increase automatically. In such situations, it is important that you understand how well agents are dealing with customers and pay attention to their workloads. Deploying tools like Workforce Management,AI-powered agent assistance, and knowledge base pathways can make your agents’ workloads more manageable while facilitating faster, successful case resolutions.

Embrace voice-based AI technologies as a competitive weapon and redefine your CX strategy

To improve your agent's interaction quality with your customers, your agents should be facilitated with the right access to actionable insights, sentiment, and metrics related to a customer call. Voice-based AI technologies like Speech Analytics, Voice Bots, IVR Deflection, and Automatic Dispositions help identify a caller's true sentiment, reduce repetitive customer queries and automate routine tasks seamlessly. 

Don’t jump through hoops. Take baby steps and transform your contact center 

By now, you have identified your existing gaps and opportunities to compete and win. You also know that you need more than just transforming your contact center from a cost center to help you face tomorrow's new challenges. So it may be time to reimagine your contact center as an Xperience center. But where to begin? An Xperience Center Maturity framework can help, but how do you bring in the needed changes to transform into an effective Xperience center? This is where Sprinklr's proven experience and expertize come in. 

First and foremost, Sprinklr believes that to embark on the Xperience center journey, a mindset change — from viewing contact centers as cost-centers to looking at them as revenue centers — is needed.

Second, you must know the good and bad with every AI-based tech investment and ensure that you maintain outcomes and don't go easy on the metrics simply for the sake of transformation.

Third, avoid boiling the ocean to get results quicker. Work out your strengths and weaknesses and evolve as you learn. Xperience center is not just transforming your contact center; it is about leveraging the best practices with the help of the right partners who can implement necessary changes and capabilities on the fly. 

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