The Nextiva team attended this year’s Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Las Vegas. There, Nextiva’s VP of Contact Center Sales Shane Marquis connected with Five9’s Director of Technical Marketing Erin Wilson to discuss the importance of creating high-performance teams and the future of next-generation customer experiences as we head into 2023.
Below we share the highlights from that conversation. It’s a good read for any organization preparing to transform their customer experience and satisfy customer expectations in the “new normal.”
The evolution of digital transformation in the “new normal”
Before the pandemic, many companies were just starting to explore the idea of digital transformation. They were asking questions like:
- How do we evolve as a company?
- How do we provide care to our customers differently?
- How do we go and attract net new customers?
Then the pandemic happened and those questions suddenly became a lot more urgent. Digital transformation has graduated from a theory to something more actionable. Now you see companies bringing it into the boardroom and considering, “Okay, how do we put forth a strategy to actually treat our customers differently, and attract them differently, too?”
On the employee side, this concept is evolving with the rise of remote work and the Great Resignation. Now more than ever, individuals are looking for meaningful work. How do employers keep employees happy by giving them job responsibilities that a) keep them employed, but also b) offer meaningful work, day in and day out?
By implementing technology that radically transforms the way their teams work.
Connected communications software like the Nextiva contact center (powered by Five9), for example, enables traditional contact center employees to work remotely, thereby improving job morale.
At the same time, it automates many of the day-to-day tasks by allowing customers to solve them via self-service, through communicating with chatbots instead of calling the company. This frees up agents’ time, allowing them to take on more meaningful interactions with customers and creating high-performance teams.
Chatbots: a small lift with a huge payoff
Today’s customers are used to instantaneous gratification. For companies with a web presence, introducing chat is a great way to offer customers the instant gratification they expect. With chatbots, customers can get quick answers to simple questions that they previously would have had to wait for a human to provide. It’s faster and more convenient, and provides an overall improved customer experience.
Conversational AI is powerfully sophisticated, but surprisingly easy to implement. Of the companies leveraging artificial intelligence today, two in three offer chatbots. You can always go big with chatbots, but even a relatively simple implementation can provide huge benefits.
One of the easiest use cases, for example, is using chatbots to answer and resolve all of those common, quick-hit questions like, “Where’s my order?” or “Has my shipment been delivered?” Chatbots can be innovated and created very quickly to answer these questions, simply by tapping into existing tools. Before you know it, you’re servicing your customers differently.
Chatbots are particularly exciting because you dip your toe into the technology, and as you realize what your customers are asking, you can keep on iterating. With each conversation, chatbots capture incremental data you can use to further improve your customer experience. You can see what questions your customers are asking, what drives them to escalate an issue, and more, all thanks to a relatively minor technical lift.
A new agent experience and the power of high-performance teams
Chatbots also support the rise of high-performance teams, which further contribute to a better customer experience. Once some of your call center tasks are automated through chat, you can uplevel your contact center agents into creating meaningful interactions in a different way. You can empower them, train them, and even create outbound campaigns.
For example, your business may have a need to reach a specific set of customers, but previously you didn’t have the manpower trained in order to do so. Now, you can create a pool of resources that are not only trained for those outbound conversations, but understand your specific customer experience at a deeper level — making those conversations even more effective and meaningful. It’s a game-changer.
It all comes down to understanding your customers, and you need the right tools to do that.
That’s why we’ve taken our own advice and created NextivaONE, your all in one suite for VoIP, CRM, Surveys, and Live Chat. By listening to our customers and actively soliciting their feedback, we’ve evolved our own software to power these experiences. And as the business and agent experience continues to evolve, so will we.
It’s time to connect your conversations with NextOS. Learn more and book your demo today.
