Mastering Customer Service Digitisation

Keeping up with always-connected customers is one of the biggest challenges going. They expect brilliant service, simple digital journeys and the freedom to engage with your business on their own terms. Phone, mobile, chat, video, social. Whenever and wherever they want. And if you can’t do that, they’ll switch to a rival who can.

 Nevertheless, each time you open a new channel you’re not necessarily getting rid of another. Often you end up creating more interactions to manage with the same budget and resources. So, how are customer experience (CX) leaders tackling digitisation? Where are they focusing their efforts and how can Genesys help?

 Customers are calling the shots

As digitisation is being driven by consumers, let’s start with current trends. Forrester cited email (54%) as the most commonly used customer service channel last year. Nearly 64% of respondents expect to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to engagement channels, while 52% plan to support messaging apps and virtual assistants. The latter saves customers the hassle of visiting websites and finding buttons for live agent-assisted chat.

 Demand for automation continues to rise. Over 60% of US consumers said they preferred to self-serve using a website or mobile app for simple tasks. The growing maturity of AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants has led Gartner to forecast that by 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be handled solely by AI – a 400% increase on 2017.

Digital practitioners

Many organisations have adopted multichannel or have a roadmap to move to an omnichannel CX model. Or they’re agile, low cost entrants set up as 100% pure ecommerce plays. As a result, we’re experiencing a seismic channel shift.

 Mid-sized contact centres provide a good yardstick. A Frost & Sullivan survey of 600 business and IT decision makers found only 60% of respondents support inbound calls, compared to 86% for email, 84% for web (websites, forums, FAQs and web chat) and 70% social media.

 And there’s a decent payback from digitisation success. Millennials are the only demographic who tell more people when they have a good experience rather than a bad one. Better still, they’re willing to pay 21% more to do business with companies which excel at customer service.

How Genesys can help

When you consider how customers are shaping our market two points are clear:

• Digital CX is the new battleground for sustainable business growth
• Cloud is fast becoming the delivery platform of choice (cloud contact centres are growing 27% year-on-year, while on-premise solutions are declining at 8% per annum).

Genesys is strongly placed to help with both challenges. Three years after launching PureCloud, we have 1,800 customers in production worldwide. A new customer goes live every day. Many have between 10 and 20 agents. Our largest customer has 10,000 concurrent users.

Digital enablement one of the top reasons for choosing PureCloud

AWS microservices architecture means each app can run standalone yet communicate with others via a well-defined API. So, you’re able to interconnect more systems than ever before. There are also over 200 ready-made applications and integration templates available on Genesys AppFoundry.

Compare that with legacy on-premise contact centre solutions, which tend to use hard-to-scale, monolithic architectures. As an application’s code base grows, it gets more difficult to maintain. Introducing new features, languages, frameworks and technologies becomes increasingly difficult, stifling digital innovation.

Electrical retailer AO.com doesn’t have these problems. Now, with PureCloud, customers are often served without having to talk to an advisor. They have the option of using email, Facebook and Twitter. Live chat is available on every web page. With cloud-based elasticity the company can quickly scale-up during retail peak periods. Results include:

• 50% reduction in contacts per order
• Significant NPS improvements
• Trustpilot customer satisfaction rating up from 7.5 to 9.5
• Fresh insights for empowering e-commerce teams

Learn more about hot CX trends and see how PureCloud is helping organisations like yours digitally transform.