Orchestrating Customer Service Journeys in a Multi-Channel Maze

Customer service nowadays has evolved into enabling multi-options of communication between the customer and the brand for resolving the customer’s issue. Other than just calling the call-center and waiting to talk with an agent, customers today can choose between other communication channels such as: IVR, chatbot, agent based chat/call, mobile/web self-service and more. 

However, as also a recent Gartner report shows, adding more channels does not improve resolution rates or customer satisfaction enough for most service providers and clearly causes an increased number of interactions a single customer will make in an attempt to resolve an issue. 

This brings to longer time to resolution and more importantly- frustration on the customer’s side trying to resolve the issue with limited success which equals an overall bad customer experience.

Similarly, service providers have not been getting the desired results in new channels, as support costs and journey complexity have increased. Self-service is not new to the ‘modern customer’, it has been around and has evolved for almost 20 years now and yet, according to Gartner, only 9% of interactions initiated on self-service channels actually get resolved on that channel.

Multi-channel is not enough. You need to tie those journeys together. 

If a service provider is truly looking to elevate the customer experience and reduce service costs there are more steps to be made in order to maximize the great potential of having multiple service channels. These steps include:

1. Creating a continuous journey from start to finish with high resolution rates
2. Incorporating multi-session capabilities (pick-up where you left-off) within the customer journey
3. Personalizing the experience of each individual customer 

Take John for example. John is a Telecom customer who is experiencing some issues with his Netflix service. He decides to call  his service provider’s call-center and learns that there is ‘an estimated wait time of 20 minutes’ to speak with an agent. Not wanting to wait that long John tries the chat that is available on the service provider’s website. He then gets interrupted and drops the session, only to return later to the chat, explain the problem all over again and be directed to a knowledge base where he doesn’t find the information needed for resolving the issue. 

Frustrated and impatient, John starts a new chat with the automated bot that asks him all kinds of unnecessary questions, eventually concluding that John has no choice but to talk to a live agent who does indeed resolve the problem.  John has tried various channels (including an agonizing IVR flow) only to go full circle back until the issue was resolved. 

Q: Why did this happen? 

A: Because customer service journeys are ineffective and siloed. 

In fact, all of John’s interactions in attempt to resolve the problem were not seen as a single continuous customer service journey and as a result:

• John’s customer data and journey history were not reported into a central repository and therefore the system could not personalize and create a more specific journey that offers the most accurate solution for his issue over the most compatible communication channel.
• He was forced to take unnecessary steps on his path to resolution.
• Since John’s activity was unorchestrated, he couldn’t pick-up where he left-off which extended his time to resolution even more.
• Many customer issues similar to John’s are being left unaddressed and unresolved as the system has no indicator or alert of an unfinished customer journey.

Harvesting the full potential of multi-channel

How do you reach the full potential of having a multi-channel offering without letting it do the opposite effect?

Roojoom AI Resolution Center

The Roojoom AI Resolution Center orchestrates end-to-end personalized multi-channel customer service journeys. It ensures issue resolution in the most effective way through AI driven troubleshooting flows, channel optimization and personalization as well as proactive engagement with customers throughout their journey.

The solution’s main capabilities are as follows:

• Continuous customer journeys from issue to resolution, persistent across channels and sessions
• AI-based personal resolution engines with prediction capabilities for faster and higher FTR (First Time Right) rates
• Personalized journeys across service channels

How can service providers and their customers benefit from the solution?

Let’s go back to our friend John. How could his experience be improved once implementing the AI Resolution Center solution?

1. Instead of multiple attempts through different, sub-optimized channels, John would have been approached by the AI Resolution Center upon his first (incomplete or unresolved) attempt. 
2. As long as his issue was not deemed resolved, the Resolution Center would have continued to reach out to John while directing him to the best channel that could address his problem and drive the flow to resolve it the quickest.
3. John’s issue would have been resolved faster, consuming less channels and interactions, thus improving FTR rates and John’s overall experience.

Roojoom AI Resolution Center- less channels, more self-service 

The Roojoom AI Resolution Center can perform as the primary customer-service gateway of the organization, orchestrating, routing and optimizing all self-service and agent-assisted interactions. It can also integrate with existing channels as any chat or IVR function and leverage its data and routing capabilities. 

The next step in the multi-channel customer service evolution is enhancing its power by adding robust journey orchestration systems.

For service providers this means only two things: immediate improvement in customer satisfaction and significant cost-reduction. A duo that is hard to beat.