Customer Experience Expectations
Cost savings and speed often drive a business’s technological investments, but only so long as the quality of products and services meets the high standards of customer experience. Organizations have shifted their customer strategies to keep costs down and deliver products faster.
Customer experience defines how a business operates and competes against other companies. Investments in customer experience initiatives result in loyal customers buying more and sharing their experiences with other potential buyers. Businesses capture touchpoints to gather feedback at every stage of the customer journey and look to improve the experience.
Reality
Users often dread calling support lines, as they have to navigate through a myriad of choices that often do not meet their requirements. This can lead to a frustrating game of customer hot potato, transferring them from one agent to another. Bots, chat, and SMS options have emerged because of a poor experience finding a resolution using voice calls.
Some customers prefer self-service systems that provide solutions instantly, but when something goes wrong, they prefer to talk to a person. The other side of the coin in customer experience is to empower your employees to support your customers. Your employees should have the information about your customers to make the experience seamless.
Evolution of Contact Centers
Contact centers are a powerful tool for customer engagement. They provide options for businesses to instantly connect with their customers for sales, support, operations, and marketing. Traditional contact centers are complex, requiring significant investment to design, build, and support. They need substantial upfront hardware costs, software licenses, maintenance contracts, upgrades, and dedicated staff to maintain the infrastructure.
Businesses that rely heavily on contact centers for operations need to maintain data centers for hosting contact centers and managing disaster recovery environments for business continuity. Companies like changing their systems dynamically in an Agile world and traditional contact centers are not designed for rapid changes.
Cloud Technologies
Cloud technology has leveled the playing field for organizations. A start-up can have the same access to the latest and most innovative resources as a large enterprise. Amazon is one of the most customer-centric companies in the world, aiming to deliver exceptional service. The company serves millions of customers in multiple languages and countries. Amazon built a tool to support its customers and now offers the same product to those customers so they, in turn, can help their clients/partners.
Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center that scales to support businesses of any size. It is simple, scalable, secure, reliable, and can be set up in minutes. Connect enables agents and managers to use it with exceptional voice quality from anywhere. Your customers can reach you via phone or chat. Amazon Connect lets your employees support your customers from anywhere in remote work.
Amazon Connect – Cloud Contact Center
Amazon Connect has standard contact center capabilities, including skill-based routing, call recording, and real-time and historical analytics. Like any AWS service, you pay as you go for every customer-connected minute.
Organizations can leverage the services and tools provided by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem to extend the capabilities of AWS. Companies can use Amazon Connect to build a simple, on-demand contact center to support seasonal demand or build an enterprise-grade contact center with complex integrations to various CRM and Workforce systems.
Organizations can create conversational interfaces with Amazon Lex, the service that powers Alexa. Building Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems with natural language processing and automated speech recognition can enhance the customer experience. The information you shared with the IVR systems can be passed to the operator so the customer does not have to repeat the same information.
The transition from the machine to humans is crucial so the business can answer basic questions through self-service and let agents solve complex problems that need human intervention.