Transforming customer experiences

This is an exciting time for contact centers and the customers they serve. Modern technology, such as digital channels and chatbots, has empowered consumers with more control over how they interact with businesses. At the same time, businesses benefit by being able to deliver loyalty-enhancing CX that also increases their ability to effortlessly handle volume swings.

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated the “consumerization” of health care—patients behaving more like consumers in their healthcare interactions. In a white paper on key industry insights, Deloitte says the consumer has arrived in the healthcare industry sooner than expected. It’s having major impacts throughout the industry, including on the contact centers that interact with those consumers on behalf of healthcare organizations and providers. In fact, the patient-consumer is already here. How will health care meet their changing needs?

When it comes to planning technology investment, the contact center is thought of as a cost center and unfortunately often overlooked or sold short. When it comes to technology initiatives, it might go unnoticed and underfunded. This creates two issues: a contact center that stays in the past can cost your business a lot of money, and you might be missing out on turning the contact center from a cost center to a profit center. For larger companies, this could have consequences in the millions of dollars. As technology continues to improve and competitors put in new systems that make customer service a breeze, it can leave other companies behind in the dust. Also, in a time when superior customer service is an important if not the main competitive differentiator, the contact center is probably not the best place to lag behind the industry.

As customer experience becomes crucial for brands to survive and the future evolves at rapid pace, NICE inContact has put its world-leading cloud-based contact centre solution, CXone, to the test with Toyo Tires (Australia & New Zealand) in a simulated contact centre experiment in a hot air balloon over Canberra.

Do you believe that the relationship between your business and its customers ends when they make a purchase? If so, your digital customer engagement might need a little tweaking to meet the needs of today’s modern consumers. Customers today require a lot more attention than they might have a few decades ago. People today are used to having their needs met instantaneously; doing otherwise can lead to a loss of business.

Now that 2021 is upon us and there is a faintly visible conclusion to the pandemic, the question remains – will public sector contact centers revert to the models they had relied on prior to COVID-19? The answer is unequivocally NO. Regardless of how the adoption of new flexible models in the contact center arrived (and yes, the speed with which it was done amid the pandemic was a painful way to do it) the reality is, it’s done. Contact center leaders have made the pivot.

Do you ever feel like you’re running a cost center rather than a contact center? Without performance management you may be experiencing high attrition rates and training costs, or low productivity and engagement rates, which can make the contact center feel like a necessary evil – rather than the true value-added function it is.