Take a Digital-First Approach to Customer Excellence

Guest post by Nick Beardsley  Enterprise Director, Onecom

Today's fast-paced world has customers expecting more from brands, and businesses can no longer put off adopting a digital-first approach for that personalized experience the modern consumer demands.    

Self-service to Reduce Customer Wait Times 

In the UK, many industries are struggling with employee attrition. From call centres to sales assistants, 32% of companies with over ten employees reported shortages towards the end of 2022, and this isn’t an issue that’ll be fixed overnight. To maintain and improve customer experience with a smaller team, more businesses are turning to self-service and automation technologies. With Five9’s Zendesk Integration, businesses can provide FAQ sections on a website with voice memos and videos to answer questions, allowing the customer to solve their issue without direct contact with an employee.     

How do You Automate in the Contact Centre  

Five9 Intelligent CX Platform utilises natural language processing (NLP) and AI to leverage massive amounts of data to spot trends and challenges and automate workflows. Agents seeing the customer sentiment analysis can offer a more personalised interaction with customers in real-time, identifying negative, positive, and neutral language, and understanding how consumers view their business and level of support. With Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs), businesses can speed up customer service by offering a practical way to direct consumers toward self-service solutions that don't require the help of an agent.     

Omnichannel as Default to Handle New Customer Demand 

More than half of all consumers now expect a customer service response within one hour. They also expect the same response times on weekends as on weekdays. This need for an instant response has forced organisations to remain accessible and on-demand, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Companies that can offer immediacy, personalisation and accessibility to their customers will win in the long run. For example, a customer who contacts your company through social media should be able to pick up the same conversation if they later call the contact centre. With an omnichannel solution in place, agents can see the customer's history across all channels, providing a more personalised experience. 

Why You Must Personalise the Customer Experience 

Personalisation ensures that everything a customer receives from your company is tailored to their wants and needs. In fact, 60% of consumers surveyed agreed that a lack of personalised experiences could reduce their loyalty to a brand. With the combined AI and automation technologies from Five9 and Zendesk, along with their ability to understand customer sentiment, enable businesses to recommend products related to those the customer has already bought, offer discounts and promotions on relevant products/services, and only email them content that’s relevant to their interests.   

It seems the most effective way to keep customers around is by making things easy and seamless for them when they need to get in touch with you. Therefore, it is vital to connect your agents to the rest of the business because they are now the first point of contact with the brand. By sharing customer feedback to improve the service experience, companies can meet consumer expectations and are best positioned to drive growth.   

In conclusion, it's clear that investing in technology to improve customer experience is vital in today's world. By meeting customers where and how it's convenient for them, and sharing customer feedback to improve the service experience, companies can drive growth and retain loyal customers. Interested in learning more? Join the upcoming 18th May webinar, ‘Taking a digital-first approach to customer excellence’ featuring Nick Beardsley, Enterprise Director at Onecom, Thomas John, VP EMEA Channels, Five9 and James Stubbs, Manager UKI Mid-Market at Zendesk for a fireside chat as they discuss the latest CX trends such as AI, Chat GPT and how to prove a demonstratable ROI on your contact centre investments. Register now to receive details about how to join the webinar.