A recent article published on Bloomberg.com reports that the UK is less productive than the US, Germany and France following years of reduced growth in the market.
Yet, recent research found that data silos cause employees to lose 12 hours a week chasing data – leading to disconnected customer experiences, inefficiencies and an unengaged workforce.
Great consumer experience (CX) should be at the heart of any brand’s operations, and to deliver this, they need consistency throughout the whole interaction. Making customer experiences more fluid requires important customer events and data to flow between systems and trigger intelligent workflows. Yet, most businesses have customer data spread across different applications, and the data from these various sources needs to be integrated to improve customer interactions and ensure employees have what they need to give the best service possible.
Integrating business systems is time-consuming and requires reliance on IT resources for system-to-system integrations, development, and maintenance. So, businesses must look at technological integration of departments across the entire business.
Luckily, Workflow Automation (WFA) is an intuitive no-code/low-code automation option that is built to address businesses needs for enhanced customer experiences. It enables non-technical users to easily create, deploy, and maintain automation workflows and helps create exceptional experiences through the seamless data integration between the customer service systems and other enterprise business software, such as sales, marketing, or HR. It also enables companies to seamlessly connect disparate systems, aggregate information, act on customer data and the context in real time, and trigger cross-platform workflows, automating CX while reducing workload and cost.
WFA powers fluid customer experiences, but there are many integrations and workflows businesses can take advantage of to create seamless journeys for customers.
Identifying Customer Intents in Self-service Interactions
It is essential to understand a customer’s intention and context when managing customer interactions to provide a meaningful experience. WFA allows easy integration with multiple back-end systems enabling organisations to use data in a meaningful way.
Using WFA, AI systems can recognise repetitive or priority callers and understand the customer context. This enables the system to identify callers, understand their needs and preferences, and customise treatments to individual callers, thus delivering a better customer experience.
Data Synchronisation
Employees in customer experience departments work with a wide range of systems like CRM, service management, order entry, billing, and more that support different functionality and store unique information. Difficulties developing and maintaining system-to-system integrations mean that manual workflows are needed to coordinate actions and keep information in sync. Workflow automation is built to seamlessly connect these disparate systems, aggregate information, provide comprehensive views of performance, and automate simple to sophisticated workflows.
By utilising automation, agents’ time is spared, and organisations can produce more predictable results by supplanting manual processes and repetitive human actions with streamlined automation.
A library of pre-built connections to popular business systems and a visual “low code” approach to workflow design lets businesses easily create intelligent, automated workflows. Streamlining and supercharging work through automation can improve efficiency, productivity, and the overall customer experience.
A good WFA system also provides open connectivity to many data sources, allowing businesses to keep customer data consistent across different applications in real time. This solution enables the ability to sync data across systems while tracking customer interaction details.
Orchestrated Customer Journeys across Multiple Touchpoints
WFA enables solutions to leverage customer context data from different back-end systems in real time. This allows organisations to create a consistent customer experience across all channels and engage customers based on their individual context. Companies can then meet customer expectations and increase the potential to generate more business.
For instance, if a customer sends an email to a financial services provider seeking information to buy her teenage daughter a car, the company should be able to provide targeted cross-sell information automatically when the customer visits the website.
Send Proactive Notifications
Businesses will have successful interactions when they know their customers and engage proactively with them. But it’s impossible to do this manually. WFA can continuously monitor system events throughout a business and automatically initiate outbound customer contact. Monitoring capabilities include CRM, order management, service management, and additional business-critical systems.
In addition, support for email, SMS, voice, and social communication channels and intelligent event handling lets a business tailor outreach according to customer preference, business priority, issue urgency, and other key factors.
Becoming agile in Interactions
Implementing new technologies into a business’s customer service function can help in a myriad of ways but most importantly, it enables brands to cater to their customers’ needs with agility and adaptability. Consumers expect amazing experiences with brands that make them feel special throughout their whole journey with the business, and to do this, organisations need to deliver a modern, seamless, omnichannel experience. Integrated solutions are the only way to successfully deliver the right information at the right time to solve customer queries – and Workflow Automation is here to help. It brings both efficiency and context to customer handling by using insights and interacting with customers in ways that exceed expectations.
About the Author
Sarika Prasad is Senior Manager at Five9. Five9 is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than 2,000 customers worldwide and facilitating billions of customer engagements annually. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation, workforce optimization, and practical AI to help customers reimagine their customer experience. Designed to be reliable, secure, compliant, and scalable, the Five9 platform helps increase agent and supervisor productivity, connects the contact center to the business, and ultimately deliver tangible business results including increased revenue and enhanced customer trust and loyalty.
Featured image: ©peshkova
