Clarity begins at Home - Best help and solutions for staff

Bringing dynamic knowledge to your customers through AI will have an instant impact on customer experience but is it always the best place to start if you also have a driver to increase business benefit? Providing customer service training and waiting for agents to reach competency where they can start to add value requires patience. Watching them leave as they realise their role is to deal with repetitive questions and tasks is frustrating. Improving how agents learn and apply their knowledge is a priority, as it has the potential to drive a quicker return on investment and many more intangible benefits.

Most contact centres have a high number of young new entrants whose phone has always been smart and have grown up on social media, the information they receive needs to be surfaced in ways they recognise. Handing new entrants a pack of PowerPoint’s and telling them to read through it will lead to instant disengagement and frustration.

Providing content and learning through an interface that can predict questions and guide them to the right responses will increase their chances of successf

ul engagement. The benefits can be significant:

· Reducing time to staff competency as new entrants learn faster through interactive engagement.

· Provide a single source of the truth for consistent processing of tasks and improved customer satisfaction

· Remove dependency on your most experienced staff, often used as floorwalkers to help new entrants and less experience colleagues find the response they need.

· Mitigate the risk of errors as agents are guided to the right information first time and do not guess the process as they try to best serve the customer.

· More satisfied and engaged staff drives less turnover and the repeated cost of training

· As agents become more proficient dealing with the repetitive questions it releases time for empathy to help customers with value adding tasks that not only improves customer experience but also can stimulate growth.

· Adding conversational and system-integrated enquiries will further help speed up response times and agent and customer satisfaction.

When business is sold through intermediaries but serviced by a single organisation dual processing of the same task heightens the risk of error. Being able to demonstrate how agents have direct and clear access to the intermediaries’ specific rules can win new large-scale business reducing the cost of acquisition and the risk of future problems.

Delivering AI by first establishing it on your customer facing online journeys may be the best step to understand your customers but understanding and supporting your servicing agents is likely to deliver far more benefits.