Customers have a voice in the digital world and they use it
When customers make contact with a company, they don’t necessarily set out to build an ongoing relationship. They usually just want guidance, or information on your products or services. They don’t expect the contact to be drawn out, and frustrating but, too often, they find that it is. If your contact centre people face challenges around accessing the right customer data at the right time, spending too much time toggling between systems to find customer histories, or find their average handle times (AHT) increasing, you’re definitely not alone. Microsoft Contact Centre has harnessed the increasing sophistication of AI to make issues like these easy to put an end to.
In an Accenture survey, ‘Customer service on the brink’, 87% of respondents said that ‘just a single bad customer service experience can completely deter them from a brand’. The report also found that nearly two-thirds of people were left feeling frustrated or annoyed after at least one recent service interaction. The missed opportunity this finding represents is that with each contact, a business can sow the seeds of an ongoing relationship. If it achieves this, a company’s reputation improves and customer loyalty is strengthened. Efficient contact handling creates goodwill, happy customers, and motivated contact centre staff.
If the contact centre interaction is handled quickly, efficiently, and productively, the customer is somewhere between satisfied and delighted. Falling down on any of these fronts leaves customers less than impressed. Some will take to social media with their dissatisfaction, possibly triggering responses from others who share the same opinions. As the Accenture survey found, customers are likely to consider alternative options.
The idea and the value of an ongoing relationship is far more important to the business than it is to the customer. It’s key to sustained business growth, revenue improvement and competitive advantage. The contact centre is where relationships are sealed and nurtured, or fractured.
The efficient contact centre
Bringing true efficiency into the contact centre isn’t just a case of avoiding the negative; it’s a baseline requirement in an increasingly digital world. It’s the key to accessing the lifetime value of each customer. It can be achieved by making sure that every experience offered to every customer through every channel is first class. This is how five-star reviews are born or, rather, how they’re inspired. Their birthplace is in your data, and this is where AI plays a truly facilitative role, at the heart of the Microsoft digital contact centre platform.
Faster, smarter, and more personalised service across every channel with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre
The core benefit of the Microsoft contact centre solution is that it brings both generative and agentic AI to every customer engagement channel, enabling you to provide a unified experience to your customers. What it doesn’t do is present your contact centre staff with a barrage of new technology to learn about, since it shares the same user interface as they’re accustomed to except that it has a richer back-end.
Due to the solution’s customer-data-first approach, the moment staff receive a call, they’ll be informed and ready to provide the help, guidance, reassurance and overall impressive service the customer is looking for.
With Microsoft Contact Centre you’ll be able to put an end to those exhausting journeys through automated menus, long wait times, and multiple transfers between departments to resolve customer issues. Responses like this all impact net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and affect an organisation’s standing when measured against KPIs such as average handling time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR). They’re bad news for the customer, and a negative scenario for the business.
To gain access to relevant data for any customer, staff will no longer have to jump from app to app to understand a customer. A unified desktop shows a 360° view of the customer and their entire history; recent orders, previous contact and resolutions, recent emails, and messages delivered via voice, chat, SMS, Microsoft Teams, and social media.
The customer benefits, your NPS and CSAT improve, and the contact centre’s productivity increases while its costs reduce. Microsoft has found that the cost per contact goes down 25-40% when AI is introduced to a contact centre. While it integrates with D365 Customer Service, Microsoft Contact Centre also operates with any CRM system, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.
Quantifiable, bottom-line results with AI
Here are some proven outcomes based on data from Microsoft’s Business Value Insights (BVI):
- Making every interaction count – up to 25% lower case resolution time with AI-powered support
- Elevating team impact – up to 66% reduction in service rep attrition through improved experience
- Operating smarter – up to $20m potential revenue lift through better CSAT and NPS
AI and humans in harmony
Bringing AI-driven automation and intelligence into your contact centre isn’t about replacing humans, it’s about complementing their skills and abilities, and working with them. This is the basis of the Microsoft contact centre solution; bringing agents, Copilot and humans together as one. Humans set the direction while AI agents run entire business processes and workflows, enabling humans to focus on personal interaction with customers and giving more to the relationship, and receiving more back in return.
The Accenture report1 highlights the value of these interactions: “People, in droves, say they prefer dealing with people. More than three-quarters (78%) of customers...prefer direct interaction with a customer service agent; 33% of respondents even said that dealing with a human employee is essential to resolve any problem effectively.”
You can read more about businesses can create incremental business value through AI in our recent article.
The fast track to exceptional customer experiences at scale
Deciding to transform your contact centre operations is one thing, making it happen can be slightly more complicated. The last thing any business wants is to become bogged down in systems integration challenges, timelines that stretch out longer than expected, and disruptions to daily operations. On two fronts, Columbus can help you avoid the problems you might encounter:
- Microsoft partnership
We’ve been a Microsoft Solutions Partner and Inner Circle member for over 20 years. We understand the Microsoft stack inside-out and have helped ease adoption for customers in manufacturing, food and beverage, retail and distribution, and life sciences. Bring this together and it means we combine deep technical knowledge with a strong understanding of business needs.
- A proven way of doing things
We have a proven methodology for delivering business critical solutions, which we call OnTarget. Through iterative demonstrations of the solution as it unfolds, OnTarget offers the flexibility to take new demands on board, refine project pace, launch new projects in parallel, and adjust phase duration. Predictability is key throughout every component of OnTarget. This relies on honesty, consistency and creating time upfront to make sure KPIs are linked closely to your mission, vision and strategy.
The days of contact centre frustration are coming to an end
Within the next few years this entire area of commercial services operations will change. Gartner predicts the shift being widespread by 2028, saying: “60% of customer service and support organisations undergoing transformation projects will opt for a unified customer service and support suite, up from less than 5% today.”
Transforming your contact centre will soon become less about staying ahead, and more about not falling behind. Get in touch if you want to find out how we can help you make your next move.
