First impressions are lasting. Every customer touch point reflects upon your company. This especially applies to the front door of your company’s virtual store-front, whether it’s by web or phone. A poor user interface can create a less optimal customer experience, which could reflect negatively on your company and may not engage the customer to complete the transaction. For example, difficulty in navigating or quickly finding options will cause callers to opt out and talk to an agent, defeating one of the key purposes of implementing self-service.
The ideal solution for your telephony front door is to design a single unified interface where, after callers are successfully identified and verified, the solution allows them to navigate through any available application using a cross-business, multi-application framework. This design not only maximizes caller satisfaction, but offers the organization additional benefits:
- Branding benefits through a single toll free number
- Personalized caller experience; the caller’s profile and previous call interactions can deliver an interface tailored for the caller, yielding a more efficient call, and successful experience
- Cross-selling opportunities and
- Seamless call experience across multiple lines of business applications.
So you might be wondering how do you do this? Investment in a good User Interface requires several steps. Short cutting any phase of the process reduces your success in boosting your results for maximum user acceptance and for providing an enriched customer experience.
- First define your business drivers, user needs, new opportunities, network call center architecture, and host interfaces. Get samples of caller-agent dialog and success metrics for both agents and self-service systems. This is achieved through multiple interactions with your business as a whole: interview Customer Service Reps (CSRs), review your self-service systems, websites, advertising, and industry competitors. Operational data such as call-types, their frequencies, call volumes and durations, customer survey results and performance reports need to be collected.
- Second, observe sessions of the business in action. Identify your image of your virtual agent to be portrayed through the ‘persona’ via discussions with business stakeholders including CSR’s, contact center managers, marketing, and branding owners.
- Third, develop a Recommendations Report summarizing your business drivers, prioritizing motivations for reducing cost and creating new services, and steps for maintaining or increasing customer satisfaction; evaluate the relative risks and rewards for each.
Preparation is only the beginning. It is now necessary to build on what you have learned in these prior steps and deploy a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to leverage the resources behind the front door more effectively. SOA systems comprise loosely coupled, highly interoperable application services making resources available to applications in a standardized way. Services now become cross-platform and highly reusable, increasing your business agility and responsiveness of IT to the dynamic needs of the business, under the control of business policies. This in turn increases your service velocity by reusing existing services to build new services by the larger applications developer community which now reduces time-to-revenue due to human-centric delays that is inherent in many business processes. Gain business differentiation, individuality, and uniqueness.
Hand-in-hand with SOA, select a Service Creation Environment (SCE) GUI tool that enables you to easily and effectively build your front-door; pick a pure standards based tool. Unified SCE will provide an environment for creation, configuration, administration, and deployment of communication services as part of an integrated ‘business process’ with a high-level graphical workflow representation. SCE automates business process communication workflows (not just dialogs) utilizing SOA based web services. This will enable you to fully unify your solution to span multiple applications and to take advantage of existing transactional services and quickly apply them within all your new contact center applications.
Lastly, ensure a successful User Interface into your contact center by adding speech-enabled call routing. Use natural language call-routing to make it easier for your callers to ask for what they need, versus guessing which menu item addresses their call. Deliver fewer misrouted calls and benefit from shorter calls with more efficient interactions with callers. Automation rates will improve with your customer getting a more satisfying experience having only one number to call and by simply asking for what they need.
Make it easy to use your front door. Let it open quickly to all your contact center resources. These steps and tools will help you achieve excellence with your user interface design to gain superior customer service.