We’ve been talking about it for nearly four years now: digital interactions are on the rise. It started in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. But rather than subside as daily life returned to normal, preferences for digital interactions have continued to accelerate.
According to the NTT “2023 Global Customer Experience Report”, the most popular channels for each customer age group continue to trend toward digital channels: particularly for age groups under 40 years old.
For example, preference for human-led telephone interactions has declined from 18% to 11% in the 25-39 demographic since 2021. For this same group, email is now the top preferred channel (21%), with chat (18%) following close behind.
At the same time, we’ve found from our experience and research that the total number of traditional call interactions is also growing.
So, why might this be? For one, there’s a growing disconnect between the experiences customers want from digital channels and the experiences they’re getting. As a result, they’re turning to voice channels that they can count on to get the job done.
Contact centers can see that this is happening. But they’re struggling to remedy the underlying experience issues that prevent them from bringing the percentage of digital interactions in line with their operational goals.
According to our own TTEC Digital research, contact centers currently estimate 36% of their customer interactions are carried out on digital channels, despite aiming for an average of 62% of all digital interactions.
Why Solving This Experience Disconnect Is Critical
While failing to meet customer expectations is reason enough to build a better digital experience, it isn’t the only reason digital-first contact center initiatives are so critical right now.
Labor costs continue to be the dominant cost associated with delivering customer experience (CX). While agents cannot be replaced for many critical high-touch customer interactions, filling their queues with low-effort, routine interactions significantly damages a contact center’s cost efficiency: when it requires more agents or longer hours to meet demand.
...there’s a growing disconnect between the experiences customers want from digital channels and the experiences they’re getting.
In a market environment where every cost is heavily scrutinized, this voice versus digital channel imbalance can lead to limited budget for other CX-enhancing initiatives.
Let’s recap. Customers want to solve their problems with digital channels. Yet, even in CX environments where these digital channels exist, many of them aren’t equipped with the right features to solve problems from start to finish.
To secure customer loyalty and combat rising operational costs, solving this digital experience conundrum is vital. Here are three strategies that can help deliver on both of these important goals.
STRATEGY 1: Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence represents an increasingly important strategy in the quest to digitize experiences and reduce call volume for less predictable customer issues.
At a foundational level, conversation intelligence is the process of collecting customer feedback and conversation data from all customer support channels. And then integrating it with first- and third-party data to drive deeper customer insights using proprietary algorithms and Generative AI.
This process aims to establish an always-on predictive analytics engine that can solve critical contact center desired outcomes such as lowering costs, improving customer outcomes, and reducing friction throughout the customer journey. It can even identify key product or service issues before they can damage brand reputation.
Making digital channels more accessible or adding new, robust digital channels can’t happen in a vacuum.
Let’s walk through a hypothetical example. Say your customer support team serves a bank and 80% of customer inquiries include one of two requests - either checking transactions to see that a paycheck went through - or looking up forgotten account login information.
Identifying these two problems as experience initiators enables your bank to take a new approach. In this case, it might be worthwhile to create a small, automated process right on the login page that allows users to easily recover their account information.
And for customers who just want to know their hard-earned money is going into their account, perhaps a push alert or notification could eliminate the need for customer support completely.
By eliminating such a large chunk of call volume through proactive automated solutions, your bank can expect to see massive cost savings across the entire support operation.
In other words, think of conversation intelligence like the watchtower overseeing your entire CX. As new issues begin to trend, or customer frustrations begin to coalesce around a shared problem, your organization is equipped to see it faster and respond to it quickly.
STRATEGY 2: AI-Enabled Deflection and Knowledge Management
While chatbots tend to be the face of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, there are a variety of different AI techniques within a holistic chatbot strategy that can drive exceptional start-to-finish digital interactions.
- Insight-driven deflection. Whether you decide to continue IVR deflection for those customers over 40 who still call in, or you establish text-driven (ITR) deflection for younger audiences, the primary question is always: “How do I know which intents are the right ones to build into our IVR/ITR trees?”
- This is where conversation intelligence is a powerful partner in better preparing your digital channels to deliver exceptional CXs. Paired with insights around customer queries, trending topics, and common knowledge gaps, Generative AI tools can uncover the emerging questions your customers ask most often.
- Let’s say a ticket website’s server goes down right as tickets for the big game are set to go on sale. Conversation intelligence and adaptive virtual agents can rapidly build an understanding of what ticket buyers want to know and then allow contact centers to create automated answers to those problems: across all your front-line channels.
- Generative AI-driven Q & A. Similarly, many companies already have the information they need to expand the use cases for their digital channels. But the challenge becomes scaling their potential responses to answer questions in the same way customers are asking them.
- This is where Generative AI’s natural language understanding (NLU) abilities are so game-changing.
- Rather than painstakingly creating decision trees and drafting chatbot responses up front, AI works in the background to seamlessly pull the right elements of your knowledge base together into personalized responses that directly answer the questions asked.
- Alongside real-time additions to your IVR or ITR intents as topics and challenges dictate, expanding the usage of your existing knowledge base data can significantly increase digital channel containment.
STRATEGY 3: Journey Analytics
Between chatbots, virtual agents, knowledge management, AI-enabled IVR, and other emerging strategies, selecting the right digital channels and automation tactics can be complicated. Even worse, selecting the wrong digital channels and wrong strategies can sometimes just cannibalize existing digital channel successes.
What do I mean by this? Making digital channels more accessible or adding new, robust digital channels can’t happen in a vacuum. It’s important to think about which current experiences your new channels will draw from.
This is where journey analytics can be a valuable tool. By looking across the full CX, as well as customer movement between channels, you can begin to identify the specific use cases that you want to automate and build out the right digital channels to do so: rather than the other way around.
Getting Started
To get the full value of AI in CX, it’s not just about “turning on” tech. Success requires a thoughtful approach to operationalizing and optimizing AI-enabled capabilities within and across functions and operating units.
Before you start using AI to interact with customers, it’s important to set clear goals for what you hope to achieve.
Which KPIs will you use to measure and track progress toward improving customer satisfaction: CSAT, NPS, something else? Ask these same questions about the key areas you want to reduce costs. Once you know what you want to achieve, and how you will know you are achieving it, you can start to develop digital solutions that will help you reach your goals.