Mark Turner introduces how technology can improve the customer journey, with a unique Eurovision twist.
The Eurovision song contest simultaneously unites and divides an entire continent. As local artists shimmy and shake, belting out their anthems, the international audience decides their fate.
Whether or not they make it to number one is highly political, and yet the outrageous glamour and boundary-breaking performances betray the belief that the louder the ‘song and dance’, the better.
Believe it or not, we can learn a few lessons in customer experience from these annual poptastic shindigs.
1. Set Yourself Apart – Deliver an Awesome Customer Experience
The Eurovision song contest certainly takes viewers on a journey, with each artist delivering their own flamboyant trip – some around the bend.
Contact centres can take note: the customer journey is intrinsic to any brand, ultimately setting businesses apart. To create the ultimate experience, much like the ultimate Eurovision act, businesses need to create a memorable customer journey – but this doesn’t mean going bonkers.
To set your contact centre apart, deliver a customer experience that is consistent and scalable, catering to the needs of individuals.
In order to guide your customers through their journey, an omnichannel approach helps provide agents with full visibility and essential insights, enabling them to deliver a truly personalised service.
What’s more, if you’re going ‘continental’, like Eurovision, this approach means businesses can scale their insights across regions and globally.
2. Know Your Audience – Orchestrate the Perfect Customer Experience
No one watches Eurovision to discover the next Pavarotti, so the artists most likely to succeed are the ones that embrace the audience’s anticipation of the ultimate ‘kitsch’ experience. Sadly, appealing to the masses is no mean feat and without the appropriate insights, it is luck of the draw for these hopefuls.
But thanks to optimisation strategies that incorporate voice, speech and text analytics, some contact centres no longer have this problem.
Businesses can gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions across channels, providing insight into agent performance and compliance, with renewed efficiency. This in turn enables businesses to identify hotspots to improve, so they can go on to create targeted system changes that smooth out the customer experience.
3. Easy Listening – Create a Seamless Customer Journey
Eurovision is an annual date in most European calendars because it is one of those predictable and digestible events. Viewers know they will be wowed with the peculiar and the spectacular, which appeals to our innate humanness and indulges our silliness. It’s easy TV!
Contact centres should aim to initiate a similarly ‘easy’ customer journey. That doesn’t mean agents must woo customers with their dulcet tones, but ensuring that continuity is created across the entire customer journey with real-time, contextual insights over all channels.
Leveraging a single customer experience platform that integrates with all your enterprise systems will make this happen.
Knowing your customers and anticipating their needs in order to proactively deliver personalised services consistently across channels is essential when creating a seamless customer journey.
Delivering the experience that customers expect by recognising their intent, history and preferences, and identifying the best action in real time is also a key deliverable of the single customer experience platform. This approach will also empower your agents to deliver the best service with expert knowledge.
4. No Dodgy Lip Syncing – Keep Your Teams Aligned
Eurovision is live, so no dodgy lip syncing allowed. Equally, perception is reality: if you’re out of tune or off-beat, the audience will delight in the cringe factor and you’ll never be forgiven. Outside of the world of entertainment, there is even less leeway for contact centres.
Teams must be aligned and in tune in order to provide a consistent and enhanced service. This will also aid productivity. Ensuring information is distributed across channels, boosting cross-selling and up-selling efforts.
In practical terms, this means synchronising front and back office tasks, leveraging the omnichannel and using automation to establish consistency, boost productivity and increase workforce efficiency.
Who would have thought Eurovision could prove so educational? Ultimately, when dealing with the public, whether you’re a business or an entertainer, the desire is always to check out with the most votes.
Author: Robyn Coppell
Published On: 30th Jun 2017 - Last modified: 5th Jul 2017
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