Arthur Nowak, Senior Vice President – APAC OperationsThough digital automation is here to stay for customer experience support, these technologies cannot replace all human capabilities. Technology solutions will also be critical in engaging an at-home workforce in a post-pandemic environment. It takes a commitment to a great employee experience, enhanced by digital technology, to provide the types of employee engagement and motivation to deliver experiences customers are looking for. Even more critical is that the frontline workforce is engaged to identify where technology solutions can be improved to remove friction from customer journeys. In this manner, there is a symbiotic relationship between technology and human even more critical post COVID-19. At TTEC, we say that the unified equation of superior customer experience is EXDX=CX, where EX, DX, and CX denote employee experience, digital experience, and customer experience, respectively. Said differently, it is employees powered by technology that also work to optimise how technology is implemented that create exponential returns in customer experience.
Onboarding the Contact Centre Workforce of Tomorrow
Contact centre employee engagement is not easy in a traditional bricks and mortar environment. It becomes even more cumbersome when that workforce operates at home. The contact centre industry needs to leverage technology to create employee engagement at every step of the employee journey. Digital marketing and employee recruitment, self-paced e-training and onboarding, digital collaboration and video conferencing tools, and gamification and rewards are all required for this transition.
At TTEC, social platforms have been leveraged to communicate the employee value proposition and attract and recruit the talent needed. Digital AI solutions help to facilitate the employee application, assessment, and selection process. Learning solutions have also leveraged technology to create sandbox environments to move away from instructor led facilitation to hands-on e-learning modules more consistent with how people learn in the modern world. These solutions apply to traditional brinks and mortar employees but are especially critical to onboarding a remote employee workforce.
But successful onboarding, engagement, and collaboration is not simply enough. The purpose of the contact centre also needs to shift from tactical measures like handle times and customer satisfaction to customer effort reduction and customer friction prevention. The best customer experience may be no customer experience at all when you think about eliminating customer friction. Eliminate the root cause resulting in the friction versus training your contact centre staff on how to apply a band aid to the problem to resolve the customer issue.
The unified equation of superior customer experience is EXDX=CX, where EX, DX, and CX denote employee experience, digital experience, and customer experience, respectively
Elaborating further on TTEC's equation of customer experience (EXDX=CX), TTEC SVP of Operations Arthur Nowak highlights why employee experience plays a crucial role in customer experience, even more so in at-home environment.
With more technology disrupters entering the business landscape, customer expectations are growing. Customers expect brands to manage their product or service proactively so that they do not encounter friction, and if they do, customers want it to be resolved rapidly. As a result, many of the legacy brands are now trying to catch up with the trend of CX by revamping and modernising their aging customer engagement systems and matrixed decision trees and customer resolution processes. For large organisations, this is not an easy feat as it means investment in unifying legacy platforms, breaking silos within organisational structures, and creating agile based teams to make decisions from a holistic customer point of view. Even though brands are taking these large strategic steps, there are always blind spots that can have high impact with relatively little cost outlay. But how does an organisation identify these blind spots?
To identify and address such spots for its clients, TTEC has created a feedback mechanism to identify the underlying issues in a client's technology stack, process flow, or product design and resolve those through the first-hand observations of TTEC's own experienced workforce. TTEC arms its contact centre agents with the skills to monitor customer journey touchpoints and synthesise observed failure points into actionable plans for execution. This involves understanding the customer journey before and after the contact centre experience to best identify the true root cause of customer friction and build plans with its clients to address it. Many times, these solutions involve the tuning of technology that was supposed to optimise the customer experience in the first place so employees are skilled in their familiarity with these technologies and what best in class experiences with this technology looks like.
Further, TTEC incentivises these employees for not just the ideas, but also the successful implementation of these solutions. This collaboration builds employee engagement with a remote work-at-home workforce using digital collaboration and conferencing solutions to work together as part of a cohesive team. These tools are critical in engaging a remote workforce to come together to truly understand and map a problem and collaborate on the optimal solution that results in effort reduction or friction prevention for customers. And employee recognition is maintained through a gamification platform that rewards employees in both monetary and non-monetary ways.
"We raise the pride of our frontline staff by giving them opportunities to impact the customer experiences they support. They identify blind spots our clients may have and optimise the customer experience. But more importantly, employees graduate from entry-level process followers to process designers and customer experience influencers," adds Nowak. With such novel initiatives, TTEC, a true champion of customer experience, implements the same idea of improving CX by enhancing EX in its workforce.
Equipping Workforce Towards CultureCX
As Nowak highlights, the goal is to create a more engaged and motivated workforce that works on effort reduction and friction prevention for customers they support. That means training staff from a reactive mindset of problem resolution to a proactive mindset of problem prevention.
To facilitate this, TTEC has built a proprietary e-learning series, where employees can work on and grow this professional skill set. Through gamification, the company allows employees to progress through a lateral career path where they grow beyond the tactical and reactive expectations of their job of problem resolution to the strategic and proactive focus on issue prevention. Employees build analytic skills on customer journey mapping, root cause analysis, solution building, and return on investment analysis. Collaboration is critical so when this happens in a work at home atmosphere virtual collaboration and conferencing technologies are used to facilitate the process. According to Nowak, this initiative will help employees understand upstream failure points and work with clients to resolve the issues proactively. Moreover, such a motivated and engaged group of employees enables TTEC to move beyond the usual "one-off" approach of traditional technology deployment. TTEC continually helps clients in fine-tuning and continuous maintenance of the deployed solutions, which in turn helps TTEC uniquely position itself as a company that acts as a true partner with clients.
Humanify: Powering the Customer Experience
In addition to fostering a skilled workforce, TTEC provides a fully integrated CX software solution—Humanify CX-as-a-Service —that delivers an optimised and flexible user-friendly omnichannel capability for its clients. TTEC's clients can deploy the software solution on the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid solution.
"In three weeks' time, TTEC and its clients migrated over 31K employees to a secure, work-from-home environment"
The dynamic omnichannel routing feature of Humanify allows users to leverage intelligent routing across different communication channels based on real-time agent availability and skill levels. Features such as IVR and automation further reduce costs and improve efficiency by directing routine customer interactions to more cost-effective, but still personalised, self-service applications. Additionally, users can leverage customer journey orchestration to enable deeper data insights for greater business impact. When combined in TTEC's employee workforce solution, the resulting synergy of technology plus people deliver considerable returns in optimising the customer experience, reduction in customer effort, and issue prevention, which ultimately delivers cost savings for its clients that TTEC commercially guarantees. Hence, the true power and possibility of EXDX=CX.
The Humanify solution was put to work when stay-at-home orders forced new ways of providing customer support due to COVID-19. In three weeks' time, TTEC and its clients migrated over 31K employees to a secure, work-from-home environment and technically enabled over 43K of its customers' employees to be able to work using at-home technology.
The Journey Ahead
Having established itself as the CX champion across multiple industries, TTEC is now poised to expand its at-home footprint across the globe. In a post-pandemic environment, clients will want the business continuity work-at-home offers while continuing to leverage digital channels and automation to make customer experience effortless.
While work at home will become a mainstay in the post-pandemic environment, the combining of technology plus people in effective synergistic ways becomes critical regardless of whether that workforce will operate in bricks and mortar offices or as remote employees. The key in this equation is linking the frontline contact centre employees who interact with customers and taking their observable insights to optimise technology solutions that support this effort.
"We are on a mission to develop the necessary talent for the contact centres (regardless of that workforce being at home or in a physical office) that will take us into the digital future," concludes Nowak.
Humanify: Powering the Customer Experience
In addition to fostering a skilled workforce, TTEC provides a fully integrated CX software solution—Humanify CX-as-a-Service —that delivers an optimised and flexible user-friendly omnichannel capability for its clients. TTEC's clients can deploy the software solution on the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid solution.
"In three weeks' time, TTEC and its clients migrated over 31K employees to a secure, work-from-home environment"
The dynamic omnichannel routing feature of Humanify allows users to leverage intelligent routing across different communication channels based on real-time agent availability and skill levels. Features such as IVR and automation further reduce costs and improve efficiency by directing routine customer interactions to more cost-effective, but still personalised, self-service applications. Additionally, users can leverage customer journey orchestration to enable deeper data insights for greater business impact. When combined in TTEC's employee workforce solution, the resulting synergy of technology plus people deliver considerable returns in optimising the customer experience, reduction in customer effort, and issue prevention, which ultimately delivers cost savings for its clients that TTEC commercially guarantees. Hence, the true power and possibility of EXDX=CX.
The Humanify solution was put to work when stay-at-home orders forced new ways of providing customer support due to COVID-19. In three weeks' time, TTEC and its clients migrated over 31K employees to a secure, work-from-home environment and technically enabled over 43K of its customers' employees to be able to work using at-home technology.
The Journey Ahead
Having established itself as the CX champion across multiple industries, TTEC is now poised to expand its at-home footprint across the globe. In a post-pandemic environment, clients will want the business continuity work-at-home offers while continuing to leverage digital channels and automation to make customer experience effortless.
While work at home will become a mainstay in the post-pandemic environment, the combining of technology plus people in effective synergistic ways becomes critical regardless of whether that workforce will operate in bricks and mortar offices or as remote employees. The key in this equation is linking the frontline contact centre employees who interact with customers and taking their observable insights to optimise technology solutions that support this effort.
"We are on a mission to develop the necessary talent for the contact centres (regardless of that workforce being at home or in a physical office) that will take us into the digital future," concludes Nowak.
June 03, 2020
