Optimising Technology to Solve New Customer Service Challenges

The UK Forefront Executive Council held its latest conference on 30 September, which was hosted at Virgin Media’s Office by Mark Brown, Head of Planning and operated as a ‘hybrid get-together’. The session focused on the essential need to optimise technology as part of an overall strategy of improving efficiency, performance, and customer satisfaction in today’s contact centre operations.

Paul Milloy, Forefront Executive Council Chair opened the conference by recognising the development of the new community this year and reiterated our purpose was to bring together company leaders from financial services, energy, telecoms, insurance, and other sectors for quarterly meetings to share best practices and thought leadership on how automation is revolutionising customer service.

In this session, Matt Rumins facilitated an excellent discussion on how AI-powered Intelligent Automation technology is helping organisations boost efficiency in their contact centre operations and improving the experiences of both agents and customers.

Eoin Power, Planning Director at BT, a leading telecoms company, explained how he felt the timing was right to explore the power of automated technology and how he expected his investment in Intelligent Automation will really help the organisation increase agent engagement and create a positive environment —a critical achievement at a time when the pandemic has made it so difficult to find and retain quality agents. Intelligent Automation will also boost the business’s efficiency with smarter operations providing an improved ability to react to changes, greatly improving their capability to “meet customers where they are” and respond quickly to their demands.

David McGuire, Head of Workforce Planning and Operational Insight at AXA, a major insurance provider, said intraday automation is helping his organisation drive value and efficiency as it implements a hybrid contact centre work environment. Intelligent Automation’s unique ability to identify and leverage pockets of opportunity within the overall flux has enabled the organisation to ensure vital support and training for both remote and in-centre agents during the upheavals caused by the pandemic.

Jo Harris, Household Claims Performance Lead at Direct Line Group, a large insurance provider, talked about the organisation’s focus on operational efficiency and, in particular, keeping ‘After Call Work’ time to a minimum. Thanks to Intelligent Automation’s handle time assistant function, the organisation reports a sustained reduction in call handling time through targeted support and connectivity to team leaders as well as helping to keep on top of multi-channel workstates through effective automated switching of agents between call taking and claims handling.

Gav Murray, Head of Customer Fulfilment Transformation at British Gas, a large national energy & services company, discussed how Intelligent Automation’s monitoring and processing abilities have helped the organisation pair agents and team leaders for training, coaching and other development activities at times when both are free, and without doing harm to service level demands. The system automatically identifies and leverages small chunks of time, accumulating to thousands of hours of productive time which simply went to waste when static, advanced planning was the only option, thus saving time for planners and delivering more time to agents.

The session covered other topics related to technology optimisation as well as an overview of Intradiem’s efforts to help customers meet the new challenges of their markets with innovative AI-powered technology solutions for both front- and back-office operations.

Jennifer Lee, Chief Strategy Officer, discussed Intradiem’s commitment to helping customers increase savings through new use cases, streamline effort through platform enhancements, and expand capabilities across workforces. Jennifer spoke of new products planned for release later this year and next, with particular emphasis on solutions that extend existing front-office capabilities to back-office operations.

Customer service has always been a key touchpoint between brands and their customers. Organisations across all sectors are constantly searching for solutions to help secure brand loyalty by making their customer service operations more responsive and more effective. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, automation was advancing operational efficiency in the contact centre. Today, Intelligent Automation is helping centres continue their progress by removing manual work whilst improving agent support & engagement, all while they navigate a completely transformed post-pandemic business landscape.