What Can a Digital First Contact Center do for Customer Experience?

It’s easy to dismiss the statement “we don’t want to talk to you,” as an insult.  But in the world of the contact center, that’s considerate, valuable insight.  As consumers, a lot of us simply don’t want to speak with an agent.  Especially when there are more efficient options that satisfy our more run of the mill needs with the brands and enterprises we engage with.  It’s simple math – more channels to engage with your company equals fewer bottlenecks, speeds up resolution times and frees agents up from dealing with a simple mundane task so that they can focus on more complex issues. 

Mike Bowman, Director of Operations for Educational Computer Systems Inc (ECSI) experienced this first -hand when his customer base (largely made up of students with loans) specifically told him that they didn’t want to speak to agents, which led to him deploying an omnichannel contact center. 

“We didn’t have to improve headcount, we didn’t have to add any additional live chat staff because the tool that our platform offered really sped things up,” notes Bowman. “This platform was moving at lightening speed which made for a good experience for the students who were contacting us, so they were using it more, which meant fewer phone calls, which meant our phone bill was going down every month.”  

It certainly was no snap of the finger to implement these changes, but Bowman’s scenario is a common one.  We as consumers, want choice and sometimes there are more efficient ways of getting something done than speaking with an agent, the omnichannel contact center plays a significant role in driving that change.  It opens avenues and reduces strain on channels that may be costing your organization more capital to operate, in ECSI’s case, it resulted in a reduced TCO for their voice infrastructure. 

Far too often, contact center leaders take an “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” mentality when it comes to their legacy contact center infrastructure.  The reality is, taking that position means you are, without question, missing out on features that are no-brainers for improving all aspects of your contact center.  From cost containment to customer sat, opening digital channels to your contact center will drive certain and significant improvements to your operation that will have ripple effects and benefits across your broader organization. 

Hear more of Mike’s thoughts around best practices in our video series that focuses on the voice of our customers and how they are driving change in the contact center.