The number of customer contacts continues to increase, that is the purport. Add to that increasing consumer expectations and a variety of contact channels. Making decisions about the right way to handle contacts is becoming increasingly complicated. What is the value of contact and how do you make the right assessment?

 

While CCW2020, at the beginning of March Danny Kuivenhoven, Head of Digital Transformation EMEA Teleperformance, the Value Interaction Matrix. A useful guideline for analyzes and discussions about the meaning of transactions and interactions. After all, they all influence the customer experience – not least because of the choices a company makes.

 

“Payments generally have little value for the consumer, but are of course essential for the organization – think of the slogan of the Tax and Customs Administration,” says Kuivenhoven. “Together with our clients, we map out which interactions there are, what the underlying intent of the customer is and what lead times and volumes are involved. We then use the Value Interaction Matrix to determine the value of the interaction for the brand versus the value of the interaction for the customer. For payments you will rather choose to simplify. For example, by using low-threshold contact channels such as messenger, which contribute to a high NPS and a high degree of first-time fix.”

Does the e-mail channel still have a future?

At comdirect, a German online bank, e-mail was found unsuitable because it is so difficult to achieve a first time fix. Is there still room for it E. in the Value Interaction Matrix? “The advantage of conversational – such as messenger – is that people don't ask five questions at once,” says Kuivenhoven. “With email you often see consumers trying to put all their questions in one message; it is quite difficult for an agent to answer all those questions in the right context. In messenger that goes more smoothly, there is more dialogue.”

When interactions yield relatively low value for both customer and organization, you end up with 'optimize' or 'eliminate'. What Kuivenhoven, the root cause of that interaction leads you to what you should eliminate through, for example, process adjustments or RPA. “This often also results in cost savings; you can use that to invest in solutions for the other quadrants.”

Added value of contact

In interactions with a lot of value for the consumer, but with little direct value for the brand, you want to offer the customer the best possible experience at the lowest possible cost. “In this quadrant, high-quality self-service is the solution: think of portals, my environments and chatbots, says Kuivenhoven. “And interactions that are valuable for both customer and brand are ideally intended for employees. There you can apply empathy and creativity. You can also use technology here, but mainly to support employees – think of next best action, next best agent, emotion detection, etc. RPA can support agents in the background, so that the agent can focus on the conversation.”

Only digital?

Comdirect invested in the fully automated handling of credit card blocking. However, you can no longer do upselling without human intervention. “There is a chance that you conclude too quickly that there is no value in a certain interaction,” acknowledges Kuivenhoven. “With the help of analytics, we can intent good, but plotting what belongs in which quadrant is a matter of finding out and weighing up together with the client. Not all organizations have a clear understanding of how to recognize and determine value. There are also companies that have exchanged their call avoidance strategy for a value-driven strategy for handling interactions.”

Hyperpersonalization

“Ultimately, of course, you also want customer characteristics to determine how certain interactions are handled. That is hyper-personalization where you no longer let your channel strategy depend on the subject, but let the customer determine it. I expect that companies will ask their customers more often about their preferred channel in the coming years. Look at the context of the customer, then look at how you can make it easy for the customer and finally you can respond to the customer's expectations, with the aim of exceeding them. You can never actually achieve the latter with the use of robots, because they do what they have to do, but never more.”

Kuivenhoven foresees a bright future chatbots. “You have to keep thinking critically about where they add value. The robot that Marriott hotels launched a few years ago (see video, ed.) provides part of the room service. Such a robot is initially good for a wow effect, but in the end it mainly provides value for the hotel in the form of cost savings. I think that if there is a person at your room door, that really adds more value for the customer.”

Automation 'meets' empathy

At Teleperformance, therefore, they do not just look at the 'hard' side of automation. Kuivenhoven: “We use machine learning to recognize the customer's intent. The input for this consists of transcripts of chats and calls. Once that intent is clear, you can structure the actions. That is all work for IT professionals. But the accompanying chatbot dialogues are developed primarily by former customer service representatives. As a result, the chatbot's tone of voice is well aligned with that of the live agents. The bots generally score somewhat lower on NPS than live chat via employees, but higher than voice agents.”

 

 

Technology Teleperformance