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Customer Experience: How can you adapt to customer and agent needs all year long?

These past few years have shown a major change in consumer habits and practices. These changes especially impact their expectations toward brands and the customer experiences these brands offer. Indeed, these consumers no longer interact the same way with brands and now expect greater interaction, more reactivity, and a more omnichannel approach.

These changes affect the work of agents, which is itself evolving rapidly. The work environment is evolving and becoming more digitalized. Remote working has also taken hold. A Global Workplace Analytics survey found that 77% of salaried employees wish to continue remote working once the pandemic is over. Companies are therefore handling new mobility and HR challenges.

This is why offering a great customer experience requires adapting to customer needs and requests. This response to customer expectations also applies to agents, as a satisfied agent is one who will better advise and support your customers.

Tackle seasonal peaks autonomously

Seasonal peaks are commonplace for many companies and industries. Often linked to commercial flagship events, they strongly impact customer service. One major contact center issue is therefore finding a means of handling all inbound calls efficiently. Instead of allowing these peaks to affect customer experience and thus satisfaction, prepare for peaks by managing your business activity and scheduling. Such is the case for Babilou, the European leader of business daycare centers. Every year from June to September, Babilou’s customer service teams are faced with a rise in business activity which must never affect service quality. Business growth prospects for the company are strong for the coming years, which entails special attention to overseeing service quality. The systematic recourse of the Vocalcom contact center solution’s customizable dashboards allows the company to define priority goals and adapt organization, scheduling, and processes continuously.

Once these schedules and processes have been developed, your company must put in place the actions which have been agreed upon. Different options are available to you, such as recruiting more agents (at least temporarily) or investing in a contact center solution. In order to manage peaks, choose a solution that is flexible, is omnichannel, and gives you autonomy. With an average of 40,000 to 50,000 calls received per year and strong seasonality, Babilou now directs every request to the most qualified agent. This process optimizes inbound lead conversions as much as it guarantees customer satisfaction. “We have complete autonomy when modifying the settings of the interactive voice response and managing our agents’ skills. We can also adjust messages according to current events and activity peaks,” states Benjamin Cazin, Customer Service Manager at Babilou. For example, during the 2020 health crisis, inbound calls increased by 60%. The IVR was able to handle this increased call volume by offering automatic callbacks, allowing agents to fulfill their tasks in a delicate context.

When making your choice, a solution’s technical criteria are therefore important to consider:

  • Choosing an omnichannel solution that allows you to showcase asynchronous channels such as email. This allows your agents to handle requests at different times and reduce the flow of instantaneous inbound requests. In addition, thanks to media blending, your agents will be able to manage many channels at once during the same time slot with a priority given to inbound calls.
  • Choosing a solution with a powerful interactive voice response (IVR) allows you to create seamless and personalized customer journeys. In addition to managing activity peaks, an IVR facilitates self-service. Simple requests can be handled by the customer himself without an agent’s assistance. A powerful IVR solution therefore enables flexibility and intelligence in your customer experiences, offering a customized journey to your customers.

Offer a personalized experience thanks to data

Customers these days want personalized conversations. Grouped communication is over—they want to feel that they are unique. When they contact a brand, they expect to be recognized with a follow-up of their customer history. Beyond this need for recognition, many customers need to be reassured. For example, Babilou’s family advisors receive questions every day from parents who are anxious to understand the conditions in which their children are received. In this context, it is essential for agents to be able to deliver personalized answers.

To offer this personalized experience, brands must take advantage of CRM data. This is why Babilou relies on the native integration of the Vocalcom contact center solution with Salesforce, which allows agents to manage inbound or outbound calls from the CRM. The identification of the caller’s number triggers the automatic pop up of the customer file on the agent’s screen, enabling him to base his conversation on a clearly identified customer context. The family advisors also manage web lead callbacks created in Salesforce, and they access all the information provided by the prospect in order to offer the best response. They further assist in optimizing the occupancy rates of the daycare centers and facilitating families’ daily lives by allocating short-term spots in the centers. Once again, CRM data plays an extremely strategic role in the quality of service delivered by bringing advisors and families closer together. Essentially, taking advantage of your data helps you refine your customer knowledge. Your agents will recognize every customer and will more easily identify his history with the brand, which will allow them to better support the customer. And yes, customers happily accept recommendations when they are relevant. And to do this, recommendations must be personalized.

Case-study-Babilou-ENG

Preserve the same service quality while moving to 100% remote working agents

The new trend for remote working—which developed mostly as a response to the Covid-19 crisis—requires contact centers to offer a new way of working. During the 2020 lockdowns, remote working represented 40% of working hours, reaching up to 47% in certain contact centers. Call centers must therefore offer their agents the support needed to guarantee their success while continuously maintaining their operations. To ensure productivity, contact centers must prioritize equipping their agents with reliable technology that allows standardized access to features, whether agents are working on site or remotely. Human resources managers and contact center supervisors must also adapt to the use of digital tools which enable remote support. With a NPS that surpassed their goal by 10 points and a referral rate of 80%, Babilou was able—thanks to its teams’ know-how and the Vocalcom tools—to tackle a complex health crisis by easily switching its family advisors to a remote working model based in the cloud.

 

Babilou is not the only Vocalcom customer who was able to move its customer service to a remote working model quickly. For example, Comdata, a major BPO player in Spain with 600 agents across the country who use the on-premise Vocalcom contact center solution, successfully moved the majority of its BPO agents to a remote working model in less than 2 weeks. This was also the case for Experta Seguros, an insurance company based in Argentina, which moved all agents in its contact center to remote working in less than 2 days.

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