Contact Center Technology Finally Enables You to Be Customer Centric

0
117

Share on LinkedIn

Do you remember that joyous feeling when the thing preventing you from having an easier life was removed? Can you remember what it feels like when the elephant that was sitting on your chest finally gets up? Have you ever experienced relief when that huge barrier preventing you from being more customer centric was finally removed?

The irony of many legacy contact center communication platforms that are being used to serve customers often prevent you from doing it effectively. Most of these platforms were primarily built from voice being the foundation and then as channels grew, they were merely added onto the voice channel versus being merged with voice from a workflow and queuing perspective.

When all of your different channels act as silos of interactions versus unique customers needing to be served regardless of their communication channel, it prohibits you from being customer centric. By default, you end up being more process focused. You focus on volume and queues by interaction type instead of customers needing to be served.

But that feeling of an easier life and that elephant getting off your chest just might be what happens to you when you learn about the Single Waiting Room from Zailab. The Single Waiting room is a pool of interactions regardless of the channel that allows you to move the most important interactions or customers to the front of the line based on rules you help to define, while machine learning ensures best agent fit.

I learned about the Single Waiting Room and more when I met up with Nour Addine Ayyoub, CEO & Founder of Zailab at Customer Contact Week.

Here is an edited transcript of my interview with Nour Addine:

Jim Rembach: This is Jim with the Fast Leader Show and Call Center Coach and I’m at CCW with Nour Addine Ayyoub of Zialab. Nour Addine, how do you help folks get over the hump?

Nour Addine Ayyoub: Okay So, the one thing that you want to create is a really great software that is accessible to everyone. And what I mean when it’s accessible to everyone firstly, we wanted to make sure that you can actually get your contact center going within a couple of minutes. Which is one of the first. Secondly, we don’t want to charge you a user license or an initiation fee or an upfront fee, in fact we only want to you charge you when you actually use the software.

It’s truly a consumption-based model very similar to the way did you pay for electricity, etcetera. Also, what you wanted to create is as self-manage contact center with a very strong artificial intelligence component into it. Which, helps you to achieve higher customer satisfaction and positive outcomes in the means that it actually connects the customer to the right agents and so many more things.

Jim Rembach: Okay, so now for me one of the things I found very interesting is when you start looking at the traditional queuing models that we have for customer interactions we’re essentially just putting them in a funnel, right? You know, first in, first out type of scenario. But you guys are doing something quite uniquely different with a hold room or something, tell me about that.

Nour Addine Ayyoub: Fantastic, Okay I’m actually glad you’re asking that question. So, we’ve got this concept, it’s called a single waiting room. The problem with queues is that we’re actually separating different functions within your organization. It’s almost like different islands.

So, we’ve got this single waiting room where all your interactions actually come together regardless of what channel it is – it’s email, text, social media, voice and then in that single waiting room we start doing two things. Firstly, we prioritize each of these interactions making sure that the interaction with it with the highest business value is actually treated first. So, we re-prioritize things regardless of which one came in first or second. Secondly, because of this single waiting room, our artificial intelligence can start interrogating each interaction to determine which agent is actually best-fitted for that specific job.

Jim Rembach: One of the things that you had mentioned too is talking about coming to America and North America and it being different to doing business here than it maybe in other areas or parts of the world. Because you’ve been around for a while. So, what makes this particular market so different than the rest?

Nour Addine Ayyoub: Okay, I think the first thing you know, the United States market is a huge market, right. It’s also not an easy market to penetrate because there’s a lot of great companies here. So, that’s the first thing, but once you cracked it, that’s the beauty of the United States. Once you crack it, you actually do quite well from a business perspective. So, from a Zialab perspective we are just doing the steps inch-by-inch until we get there. But the things are looking quite good and is it just helps to have a good a good product.

Jim Rembach: For me, the frontline supervisors is a critical role in the contact center. How do you make their life easier?

Nour Addine Ayyoub: I think that we need to change the status quo firstly. I think the contact center have been managed in a specific way for the last decades, very similar in the same way. But, since the introduction of artificial intelligence, we are trying to resolve the basic stuff first. There’s a lot of hype around artificial intelligence, about self-servicing etcetera, etcetera. We don’t follow hype.

What we’re saying is, let’s first sort out the routing. Matching the customer to the right agent, which we’ve done. Then the next thing is about, how can we actually make sure that each agent is performing very well.

The one thing that we just launched actually today here at CCW is basically, we’re doing quality assurance in real-time. Meaning, we don’t need human beings to do that. Software is actually performing, making sure that the agent is greeting, doing all the necessary stuff. To make sure that he’s performing according to the rules of the company. On top of that, you also start looking at moods, in a sense, is the customer happy or unhappy. In the case he’s unhappy, that’s how a supervisor can be alerted and actually can start jumping into the conversation.

The usual technology, which happens after-the-fact when you start running reports, but then it’s already too late. So, we’re trying to make the supervisor work as easy as possible. And we also want to make sure that the supervisor can actually start working with agents which are situated anywhere in the country, so not necessarily on the same floor. But before that, you really need to have some strong artificial intelligence and systems that can handle that.

Jim Rembach: So, Nour Addine, how to folks are more?

Nour Addine Ayyoub: That’s very simply go to www.zailab.com, there’s also a section called Zai News and you can find a lot of stuff about us.

Jim Rembach: Thanks for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and we wish you the very best.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jim Rembach
Jim Rembach is recognized as a Top 50 Thought Leader and CX Influencer. He's a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner and host of the Fast Leader Show podcast and president of Call Center Coach, the world's only virtual blended learning academy for contact center supervisors and emerging supervisors. He’s a founding member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s CX Expert Panel, Advisory Board Member for Customer Value Creation International (CVCI), and Advisory Board Member for CX University.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here