The Challenges of Managing Customer Interactions

Learn more about customer interaction at CRM Evolution 2022.

See more videos from CX Connect 2021 on the CRM YouTube channel.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Daniel Ziv: Now let's dive into looking at a CXO or a head of customer service and what these executives are facing today. These are the challenges that we're seeing specific to these roles. First of all, CX (customer experience) and engagement is top of mind of many senior executives, not just CXOs, but almost any senior executive in the organization is thinking about and asking themselves, "Are we meeting customer expectations? Can we increase customer loyalty? Can we reduce churn?" Those are top of mind. On top of that, there's still in some cases even more policy and compliance regulations--are we compliant, both with internal regulations and external and legal requirements? How are we managing complaints and escalations in an effective way?

Efficiency and cost continue to be a key part of solving the engagement capacity gap. How do we do this more efficiently? How do we do more with less? How can we reduce costs? Can we transition to self-service? Can we transition to self-service in a way that that doesn't hurt the customer engagement?

All that needs to be powered by real customer insights. Do we understand what customers need and what they want and why they're calling us, or why they're interacting with us. And are we constantly monitoring and collecting that insight and sharing that and taking action on that? Revenue and growth are obviously important to many functions and for any company. But it's really about, how do we maximize the opportunities? We've seen revenue growth through phone channel, through other text channels where that replaced the human-to-human interactions in branches. But we see that opportunity continues, and companies that did effectively sell through these digital channels did much better. And then finally back to the remote employee. How do you hire, how do you train, how do you supervise, how do you motivate employees when they're working from home? And do they have the skills and all the tools they need? So all of these create a challenging environment, and you need a platform or set of solutions that really can support these challenges.

So how our organization is addressing and responding to these challenges ... I'm sure you're familiar with DMG Consulting. They've come up with very good reports in this area for many years. And this is one of their latest reports. And really, these are the top five contact center technology priorities for 2021. I don't think these are surprising, but I want to go through then for a second. First, self-service. Obviously, every organization realized that they need solutions like IVRs and IVAs and bots to really self-serve, to address the surge in requirements and engagement from customers. That's pretty obvious and reduces the cost at scale, but obviously doing this right is not trivial.

The second imperative is cloud. We've seen a huge transition to cloud, and one of the reasons is, overall it can save costs. The total cost of ownership in most cases is much it's much more effective, but it's also the agility. You're much more nimble when you're in the cloud. You can change things. You can add capabilities, you can add solutions. And Verint has been very, very focused on helping organizations make that transition to the cloud, which is not always easy. We allow this ability to maintain and leverage what you have on-prem, but slowly add services in the cloud.

If you look at the next three, speech and text analytics is really the third imperative. And I think part of it is because of the need for those insights to understand and listen deeply to your customers. But also even if you think of the first two is being able to add these capabilities in the cloud, as well as identifying what can be self-served. What are the interactions that we're hearing people calling that we can transition to self-service? What are the actual words and phrases? So I'm not surprised that that is the third.

The fourth, related to that, is democratizing these insights through reports that can be shared in dashboards across the enterprise. Everybody breaking down those silos of data and insights.

Finally, quality. When you talk about compliance, many organizations have this process of manually reviewing a small percentage of interactions. If you're in one location, you can walk the floor. There's other things you can do, but if you're remote, you really want to extend that and have full coverage. How do you monitor a hundred percent of interactions to really create a foolproof compliance program, and much higher level of quality management? And those are fed also from the same analytics engines. So you can see three of the five key priorities are related to what we're talking about today, interaction insights.

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