Why 'total experience' is a top trend for 2021 - and how your contact centre can achieve it

The future of the customer experience centre is already here. It means that experiences - both customer and employee - matter more than anything else. When you have engaged, empowered employees in your contact centre, it has a direct and positive impact on customer experience.

Great experiences start with recognising that technology, devices and applications provide more modes of communication than ever before turning the focus of today’s customer journey away from channels. Instead, it is all about the ‘multiexperience’, which is the ability to create unique touchpoints – catering to each and every device and app – to offer the same great experience. Gartner takes this one step further and names total experience in its list of top strategic trends of 2021.

Total experience combines multiexperience (MX), customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and user experience (UX) to transform business outcomes. It’s no surprise then that organisations are making significant upgrades to their contact centres to deliver incredible multiexperiences. Mastery of the multiexperience, after all, is key to any total experience strategy.

Some organisations have spent years honing and crafting their MX and CX solutions (at massive R&D expense), yet they’re still facing trouble when it comes to aligning CX with other experience disciplines, like user experience and employee experience. Here are four tips to make things a little easier. Follow this guide to create a multiexperience contact centre that uses the power of cloud, AI, and IoT to set you on your way to successful total experience strategy.

1. Getting connected: Creating memorable, effortless experiences

Customers need to connect effortlessly, whenever and however they want, whether it’s using voice, chat, mobile or an app. Intuitive and varied self-service options are as important as providing an easy way to speak directly to a contact centre employee.

• Connect all touchpoints throughout the entire journey – physical or digital – from voice to video, social to chat, and more.
• Match the best resources to each interaction, whether human or virtual, with intelligent routing.
• Get ahead of every interaction by predicting needs and proactively engaging customers.

2. Process orchestration: Increasing responsiveness

Today, customers expect you to have aligned the right resources at the right time, regardless of role or department. Being able to predict a customer’s next move can mean the difference between success and failure.

• Personalise employee experiences with modern desktops that offer a single place for all information employees need.
• Connect customers to the right digital or employee resource automatically for best possible results.
• Empower employees, without IT intervention, to modify process workflows quickly and easily, including customer-agent pairing, self-service options, proactive outreach, and more.

3. Managing resources: Empowering employees

If employees are equipped with the right tools, support, and coaching, they’ll be more successful. Empowered employees become more than just employees – they become brand advocates.

• Offer insights across processes and performance with scorecards, automated quality management, and interaction analytics to identify process or training gaps.
• Optimise employee schedules to help ensure that the right people are doing the right things, at the right times, and doing them well.
• Improve employee performance with real-time performance feedback, mentoring and coaching, metrics, and more.

4. Knowledge & insights: Taking the next-best action

To serve customers, organisations must be able to collect, analyse, understand, and interpret massive amounts of data in real time.

• Deliver effortless customer self-service actions and embed virtual assistants to address queries and predict the next-best action using relevant insights.
• Apply patterns of successful behavioural interactions in real time for better, more informed routing decisions that lead to higher sales conversions and experience satisfaction.
• Augment employee support with real-time suggestions and prompts – in-the-moment during customer interactions.

Smarter tools mean better experiences

A well-ordered and thought-out employee experience can foster a great customer experience. It’s now time to give your employees the right tools to be able to solve customer requests quickly and easily in partnership with different departments and disciplines.

From powerful automation that connects the entire customer journey and empowers employees to succeed, to AI infused into every interaction to help ensure the best possible results, the multiexperience contact centre has what you need to create effortless, memorable experiences.