By Manish Mishra – Head, Middle East & Africa, Freshworks
Across industries, post-pandemic, we would hear discussions about the demanding nature of the digital-native consumer. Impatient, demanding, vocal. Impatient for things to be done quickly and correctly, first time, every time. Demanding flexibility at every touchpoint and expecting to engage with a brand at any hour, from anywhere in the world, through whatever digital channel they choose. And vocal on social platforms and review pages if they do not have an optimal experience.
Across the Middle East, such discussions on the customer experience were simmering gently. And then Covid-19 emerged. People retreated to their homes to live their lives online. And the pot boiled over.
The Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry reported that e-commerce was 8% of the UAE retail market in 2020, reaching US$3.9 billion – a 53% year-on-year increase. By November of 2020, Mastercard had surveyed UAE consumers to find that 73% of them were shopping more online because of the pandemic, and a parallel Mastercard study found the same to be true of 77% of consumers in Saudi Arabia.
The CX discussion was no longer a murmur. It was a roar, as demand surged, and disruptive new players joined the fray. In a 2021 report, the Dubai Chamber cited data from the UAE National Economic Register that said May 2020 held the record for the issuance of ecommerce licences in the country – 196 in a single month. Businesses coped by innovating wherever they could. Covid had already driven them to the cloud, so they started evaluating new ways of serving the demanding customers before them, whose numbers were rapidly escalating. Contact-centre technology improved at a similar pace, and here we look at the top trends in its evolution that allow businesses to serve customers more astutely.
The data lakes held by businesses are more actionable than they have ever been. The region’s contact centres can tap these information reservoirs more effectively with the latest analytics tools. The cloud has made the homogenisation and centralisation of data easier, and this knowledge-rich environment has enormous value to contribute to businesses that are trying to stay ahead of their markets.
The new competitive edge goes far beyond mechanical issues, such as productivity and performance tracking. The operational health of the call centre is important, and trends in call volume, for example, must be monitored. But modern technology can tell stakeholders so much more. By recording information about each interaction, they can get a clear picture of the quality of conversations – and hence, customer experience – and how to improve them. They can integrate conversational analytics into dashboards by leveraging current tools to examine the number of call transfers, wait times, talk times, and a host of other metrics.
No matter where a native customer is – in the office, on a commute, at home, in a mall – they are attached to their smartphone. This is especially true of the GCC where smartphone penetration rates are some of the world’s largest. When these digital-savvy consumers choose to interact with brands, they do so through their phones. And they get to dictate how this interaction occurs.
Omnichannel experiences are critical. Social, email, live chat, or voice – all need to be accommodated, as do any future channels. Integrated into a single platform, these tools help agents work through their tickets efficiently, switching between channels and analysing workflows to have a customer interaction that benefits both parties. And no matter the channel, modern contact-centre tools can capture the essence of each communication, to keep reporting accurate and to ensure continuity and individualised service for the demanding customer.
Phone systems now live in the cloud. Traditional telephony hardware is no longer required, which represents a significant reduction in cost and labour. CTI (cloud telephony integration) allows phone systems to become apps. And the pandemic popularised them immensely, given the need for agents to work from home but keep customers connected to the brand. Inbound and outbound calls, and other telephony functions, as well as all the data they generate, now live in the cloud, along with all the security and up-time guarantees that implies.
Recording each communication is a critical part of monitoring performance and enhancing CX. This is particularly important when recording longer-running queries, to allow stakeholders to identify complexities in their workflow and mitigate or eliminate them. Modern technology solutions are capable of remarkable accuracy when converting human speech into text. And this capability is critical for optimal CX, as reviewing a previous contact in detail is more quickly done by scan-reading text than listening to an audio file.
The chatbot stands as the single greatest tool for empowering agents. Dialogues begin with bots and are transferred to human agents only if the customer demands it or the complexity of the query requires it. A review of airlines and retailers by Forrester, suggested live contacts with human agents can cost up to 48 times that of an automated interaction. But, again, the biggest gain is in CX, where those consumers attended to by a human agent are served by someone who is at their best – supported by an informative dashboard and not overworked by trivial queries.
Bots are becoming more popular across the region, having proved themselves capable of fielding high volumes of queries and attaining high customer-satisfaction scores. A good example is Dubai Electricity and Water Authority’s Rammas service.
To keep the region’s digital consumers engaged and happy, business leaders will need every advantage they can find. Luckily the cloud is a toolbox full of advantages. While focussing on cutting down costs might be of interest for businesses, customers want better standards of service and quicker responses.
Tech that aids in elevating customer experience wins at the end of the day.
