Although great improvements have recently been made in AI and machine learning, today’s workplace is still missing those functions that decrease the knowledge worker’s efforts while improving efficiency and productivity. Brand representatives often work through multiple communication channels, occasionally simultaneously, to effectively interact with customers and resolve their issues in the shortest possible time. Agents are missing transparency across the customer’s history and channels, so they are unable to see what has been done in the past, what was promised to the customer, or who contacted them before.
To better understand the customer issue, the agent needs to know where the customer is in their journey and what should be the Next Best Action. Agents need tools like AI-assisted knowledge bases, context search documents or emails, and the ability to receive and send messages to customers via their preferred communication channels.
Knowledge Workers & CX
For contact center owners and managers, it’s easy to explain the benefits of computer telephony integration (CTI) for your agents, as everyone may have a negative call center experience they can recall. Endless call transfers and constantly repeating information, due to a lack of system interoperability and data silos, are easy ways to highlight how CTI can be a differentiator for customer service.
Call center agents are key in delivering a quality customer experience. However, as modern customer expectations continue to rise, the need for support and knowledge from a variety of channels within the organization increases. At the center of superior customer service stands the knowledge worker who provides creative problem solving, and/or a subject matter expert who focuses on quick resolutions. It’s not surprising that management teams value knowledge workers as some of their biggest assets and allow them to make critical decisions. However, enabling and empowering them with the necessary tools is still missing in many cases.
Though if you want to greatly improve CX, you not only need to involve the knowledge workers across your organization, you may need to add new toolkits to their existing desktop features similarly to contact center agent’s omnichannel capabilities. Knowledge workers enabled with CTI can significantly improve customer service by having all the information and records they need to empathetically solve any customer’s problems.
Top 5 Most Important Tools for Knowledge Workers
Tools like a 360-degree unified desktop and access to historical interaction data are needed in organizations that understand CX’s pivotal importance to retention and overall satisfaction. Repeatedly requesting the same information over and over again that can cause frustration both for customers and for agents as both are wasting time. Provide all customer touch points with interaction history and context, reduces customer frustration, and speeds up the resolution process. In daily operations, this leads to fewer clicks reducing overall handling time and automated activity reporting reduces post-call work and errors.
AI-assisted contextual knowledge search is able to queue up the best answer and enables the agent to reply to the customer in the shortest possible time. This could also be used in self-service by automatically pushing the most relevant content from a knowledge base to give customers quick answers to common inquiries while freeing agents to focus on critical tasks.
Desktop embedded messaging services, like the ability to initiate a chat or send a message to the customer in real time through text or WhatsApp, can enhance the effectiveness of the communication, especially if the customer is contacted over a mobile device.
Dynamic agent scripting can help brand representatives proactively lead the conversation in the most efficient way to ensure no important aspects are forgotten along the journey. Create custom scripts for each business unit, from sales to customer service.
Standard response libraries help knowledge workers to share curated information with customers based on a single click. This can be anything from company addresses, URL links to datasheets, and FAQs.
With all these features available for knowledge workers through their unified desktop it makes the interaction with the customer faster, more efficient, and effortless which heightens the agent and customer experience while decreasing service costs and errors.
Incorporating An Enterprise CX Strategy
Support the routing of all incoming customer interactions in order to include knowledge workers in your CX strategy. Eccentex ServiceJourney supports channels like voice, email, SMS, social, and webchats beyond the contact center. If an employee is spending too much time on a case, they can use ServiceJourney to prioritize and assign work to the best available agent or knowledge worker. Built on Microsoft Azure and with a host of integrations from Genesys to AWS, Eccentex ServiceJourney has everything your enterprise needs to provide fast, quality, and empathetic service.
For a more detailed description of how to improve customer service or experience strategy, check out our guest blog with Genesys – Use A Service-Centric Desktop To Enhance Customer Experience.
