Now is the time! The customer at the center of the strategy

Breaking down the barriers between people and technology, this is the mission for which, together with my team, I work on every day.

Much has been said about the pandemic, even more work has been done to survive it and keep operations and businesses active, and now is the time to put what has been learned to the test and solve one of the most important problems in society and especially in this sector of the Customer Experience, the communication and satisfaction of the interactions with the client.

A few days ago, I heard on the radio about cases of people who had not yet been contacted to be vaccinated and cases of people who had been requesting PCRs for days due to direct contact with infections and were still waiting to receive instructions. Oftentimes, I have found myself angry about online order delays and lack of follow-up by the distributor to my emails, these are cases of patient and/or customer dissatisfaction.

How can we identify and eradicate these situations? We are immersed in the era of immediacy, where waves of contagion follow each other with little time to breathe, where sales campaigns come one after another and where the customer wants everything for yesterday.

Solving this demand is only possible with the help of technological and operational innovation, which allows the operation to be adapted to each situation, redirect campaigns in real time, redirect teams and provide personalized responses to customer interactions.

This is achieved with cutting-edge, cloud and scalable technology that responds to the data collected with big data and analytics tools integrated into the Contact Center solution, and reinforced with metrics such as ROI and, above all, ROX. With these metrics, we can identify what is happening in the operation and with the right technology we can intervene in real time and redirect the activity.

But… Hadn’t large investments been made to implement digital transformation and smart technology? How can situations of dissatisfaction continue to occur?

Yes, the large companies in the sector have made significant investments in moving operations to the cloud, implementing a real omnichannel interface with the contact platform, artificial intelligence tools have been implemented, etc., but more than complying with that check list, what really is important is to have a functional solution that responds to the daily needs of operations. Likewise, not everyone has followed the process, they have trained human teams to know how to work with these new cutting-edge functionalities, however, many have forgotten to humanize these processes or to offer the client hyper-personalization in their interactions.

We are in the era of technological communication, where large amounts of interactions enter contact centers through various channels. For this to work, we have to organize the processes from within, respond not only in record time, but also offer personalized responses and give the customer the attention they demand.

An example of the lack of this attention can be found is in the 2021 Contact Centers Study report carried out by GoContact, where voice is the preferred channel for customers to contact companies, but they look the other way, putting most of their investment in artificial intelligence in the chat, when it occupies the sixth place of preference by consumers.

There is no doubt that 2022 will be the year of the hyper-personalization of interactions through intelligent technology and of the assessment and analysis of operations to improve incidents and failures, solve them and assess the investments made. The time has come to put the customer and their experience at the center of the company’s strategy and investment.