In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, customer experience (CX) holds immense significance, and considering the proven correlation between engaged employees, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction, the interplay between CX and the employee experience (EX) cannot be overlooked.
Contact centres are increasingly leveraging technology such as AI and chatbots as part of a typical customer journey yet contact centre agents are becoming more and more responsible for handling complex and demanding customer interactions that technology alone cannot resolve.
Call centre agents work within intricate and multi-vendor collaboration environments, requiring seamless functioning of every part of the IT infrastructure to ensure employees have the necessary quality of experience to deliver the new customer journey.
It is this transformation of the customer journey that means it is now crucial to acknowledge the corresponding impact on the employee experience. However, actively assessing the impact on the employee experience and, more importantly, measuring the resulting influence on CX, is a complex and difficult task, without the right IT infrastructure in place
Customer experience is driven by employee experience
Too few companies consider exceptional CX and great EX in tandem. Disengaged employees are unlikely to go the extra mile to aid customers, and contact centre employees regularly dealing with dissatisfied customers do not have a great EX. This situation can lead to higher rates of churn, disruption, and ultimately, a poor CX.
It is a two-way street, and the challenge lies in the complexity of today's contact centre environment.
Companies have made significant investments in innovative technologies to enable customer interaction through various mediums. They leverage AI and chatbots to empower customers with 24x7 self-service and at the same time encourage agents to directly engage subject matter experts to expedite the resolution of complex customer queries.
However, both customers and employees often experience a lack of seamlessness across this complex environment.
Hybrid work and the customer experience
Achieving a desired customer journey vision requires true understanding, tracking, and management of the interaction between CX and EX. The customer journey is often conceptualised at the corporate level, but translating it into reality is not straightforward, particularly when departments utilise different technologies.
While it makes perfect sense for customers to self-serve, what happens when an individual needs to transition to an agent? Is the information provided by the customer during a webchat automatically captured and shared with the contact centre agent during a video call?
If not, and the customer must repeat the information each time, the agent starts each interaction on a negative note, causing frustration on both sides.
If contact centre employees do not have a good digital workplace and their tools do not perform optimally, their EX becomes subpar, hindering the delivery of the desired CX.
Optimise the collaboration connecting your employees
It is crucial for CX and EX teams to collaborate, understand the customer journey, identify points of intersection with the employee journey, and determine where and when problems arise.
This requires an end-to-end view of the entire IT infrastructure, as relying on disparate data from different monitoring tools hampers the depth of understanding and speed of response required.
Comprehensive monitoring of the entire contact centre environment, including remote work and the diverse unified communication (UC) tools used across the organisation, can provide invaluable insights into CX and EX and their overlapping areas.
With a unified view spanning contact centre tools, voice applications, video platforms, web and collaboration tools, businesses can quickly evaluate whether their current IT infrastructure supports the customer journey vision.
IR Collaborate for Contact Centres
IR Collaborate offers a single view across multiple platforms, identifying strategic issues such as peak hour capacity increases, as well as enabling the rapid identification of an issues root cause.
A single view enables swift identification of granular problems, minimising disruption and preventing dissatisfaction.
It can also identify any issues in successful interactions between contact centre agents using one UC platform and subject matter experts using another. This comprehensive approach enables speedy issue resolution.
Wrap up
Companies are prioritising technology investments not only to improve CX but also to address the challenges of employee recruitment and retention by delivering a better EX. However, in the process, many have unintentionally created new pressures that urgently need to be addressed for businesses to achieve their optimal customer journey.
By bringing together CX and EX stakeholders and providing trusted, cross-business insights, organisations can undergo a transformative experience.
With a complete understanding of both journeys, their overlaps, and their complementary nature, companies can ensure that every change and technology investment is thoroughly understood and managed to realise the customer journey vision to the satisfaction of both customers and employees.
