The Human-Tech Interface

03 October 2022

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a seismic shift in the development of technology deployed within contact centres and used by customer services teams from AI and Chatbots to Speech and Text analytics tools. There’re dashboards for all sorts of metrics and a desire to ‘deflect’ customers to digital self service solutions to allow firms to keep the costs of supporting customer services under control.

Whilst I can become a bit ranty about ‘deflecting to digital’ (I once posted on LinkedIn about it if you’re interested) I’m not averse to directing customers to self-service online tools (if they actually work!) and I wholly advocate the use of technology to support front-line customer service staff to deliver an excellent customer experience.

Today’s National Customer Service Week focus is on the Human-Tech Interface. Over at the Institute of Customer Service website you’ll find new research about the Heart of Artificial Intelligence and interviews with business leaders such as Gareth Turpin, CMO or Virgin Media O2, discussing the impact of technology on their customer service strategy.

You’ll also be able to find out more about how tech can be used for Customer Journey Mapping, which is something we’ve spent lots of our time working on with our clients this year. We’ve mapped out new welcome journeys, customer service enquiry handling and full marketing journeys for both charity and commercial clients.

Here at RBL we take a 3-step approach to improving customer experience.

Step 1 – Identify: what are the perceived challenges of the business and how do we think things are working. We use the mapping tools to map out what the business ‘thinks’ is happening and where in those customer journeys the perceived problems are.

Step 2 – Investigate: This is where it all starts to get real, and we discover the realities faced by your customers. Most often we do this through our Customer Experience Audits – getting your customers or target audience to engage with the business and tell us warts and all about that experience. We then bring those customer voices into the meeting room and use them to re-examine the planned journey maps from the customer’s perspective. We often redraw the customer journey maps in this phase. From here we can identify where the gaps are, discuss, agree, and prioritise the action list.

Step 3 – Implement: This is where our hands-on approach and client-side experience can be invaluable as we work alongside your teams to implement practical solutions that make a real difference.

Find out more about our approach or get in touch to see how we can help you CONTACT US

Elaine Lee