Focusing on the customer experience at Customer Contact Week
As I’ve been preparing to take off for Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Las Vegas, NV, this week, I’ve also been ruminating on what it means to lead a truly customer-centric service organization.
As I see it, customer service managers need to remember that customer-centricity is about designing an experience tailored to the customer as an individual—not as a case number. In the nonstop flow of a call center, or even in back offices or in face-to-face customer service situations, it can be far too easy to lose sight of the actions that truly help an individual in need versus the boxes checked to close a case on time. A process may at first feel completely customer-centric, but if it doesn’t directly lend itself to the customer’s expectations, it may be worth a second look.
You can plan to modernize your customer service organization with new technology, new processes, and new ideas to help create a customer-centric experience, but where do you start when budgets continue to wane as customer expectations soar? These are the questions I’ll be asking myself as I meet with customers and industry leaders over the next few days.
Microsoft at Customer Contact Week
Microsoft is an exhibiting sponsor this week at CCW, one of the largest customer service focused industry events. Why CCW? The five-day conference in Las Vegas, NV, is where customer service and contact center leaders come together to share best practices in agent training, emerging call center technology, performance metrics, quality assurance, cost reduction, and other critical customer service priorities.
Sharing these best practices is a great start. But the next step is taking the learnings and designing a holistic customer experience that deepens loyalty and grows customer engagement. After all, if the solution is not customer-centric, it’s not a solution.
Microsoft will be demonstrating some of our latest customer-centric offerings around Dynamics 365 for Customer Service at CCW that focus specifically on the customer experience. We recently launched two AI-driven Dynamics 365 apps that can enhance the customer experience, Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service (currently in preview) and Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights. These apps extend the rich capabilities of Dynamics 365 for Customer Service by leveraging artificial intelligence. By unifying technologies, these apps empower agents and personalize the customer experience.
Customer service AI takes center stage at CCW
In case you’re not able to make it to CCW this year, I wanted to share an overview of some of our new customer service features and share some opportunities for you to check them out on your own time.
Let’s start with AI-enabled virtual agents. One of the most significant issues in most virtual agent offerings is the inability to make the subject matter expert (SME) central to the development of the bot. Often, coding expertise is required to create a bot, which significantly lengthens the development cycle. With each string of code entered by the developer or data scientist, the SME becomes further removed from the content, which impacts the quality of the bot conversation and its ability to perform. And, poor bot performance negatively affects the customer experience.
Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service is all about the solution, not the technology. Virtual Agent brings AI to those that know customer service best. Subject matter experts can build, launch and maintain virtual agents without the support of developers or data scientists. Customer service SMEs can create quality conversations and can refresh bots ad hoc, avoiding long update cycles and without soliciting the help of intermediaries. By leveraging natural language capabilities and AI models that adapt, bots can understand customer intent, personalize the experience, handle routine tasks, and can take action on behalf of the customer—leaving more complex issues to the live agent. By removing the complexity, Virtual Agent for Customer Service can help you focus on delivering a consistently positive customer experience.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights helps enhance the customer experience through the power of AI. It digests volumes of data to visually display performance and operational metrics that are consumable and actionable. Built-in dashboards with interactive charts and visual filters identify opportunities for improvement that have the greatest impact. This helps customer service managers evaluate and respond to key performance indicators (KPIs) while enhancing customer satisfaction.
The customer experience is enriched through the power of uniting these AI-enabled apps, creating a complete customer-centric solution that is easily adapted to any organization.
There’s no need for FOMO if you can’t experience our demos firsthand us at CCW this year! You can contact us any time to request a live demo or set up a free trial. We can also help you prioritize which opportunities will provide the greatest impact for your customer service organization so you can consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences.
For more information, visit Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. While you’re there, check out Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights, and be sure to sign up for the public preview of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service to learn how easy it is to create a bot to enhance customer self-service solutions. Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
