Contact centres “lack the personalised touch”
New research has found that over 50% of contact centres do not have technology to personalise customer service.
The survey by customer-related software company Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories found that offering a more personalised service should be a contact centre’s top priority.
This challenge can be addressed through an ‘intelligent Customer Front Door’ (iCFD) approach to routing that identifies both the caller and the purpose of the call – but over half of contact centres still employ DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency) systems that force customers to wait through many options.
The research also found that only 5% are using speech activated systems, which enable callers to voice their requests and ‘jump the queue’. While speech activated systems are a step forward from DTMF, only 22% offer this as a personalised service, which to a certain extent identifies the customer on the call. This could be identifying them by their account number or calling the customer by name – extended knowledge which makes the customer feel valued and improves the customer experience.
“iCFD is the next generation of call routing,” commented Bruce Eidsvik, VP of voice portal sales, EMEA at Genesys. “It not only identifies the caller based on his or her name or account details, it also intelligently maps the intent of the call by collecting context information from the back office system.
“For example, in the case where a customer puts a call into his or her insurance company to check on the status of a claim recently submitted, the iCFD system would, once initial identity and account number verification checks have been completed, do a “data dip” into back office information and see that the caller logged a claim only five days ago. He added: “It would then assume that the customer is looking for an update on the claim and would first ask ‘Are you calling for a progress report on your recent claim?’ If that were not the case, then all other available call options on the system would be put forward to the caller thereafter.“