From Customer Service to Contact Centers, Private Companies and Public Administration are increasingly aiming for a fast, timely, personalized user experience
We often understand the Collaboration market in terms of Unified Communication for communication between colleagues or with clients, but it can also be much more.
Here’s what Alessandro Catalano, country manager of Avaya, a major player in this industry, told us about the topic.
The inspiration for this article was a recent text by Alessandro Catalano on the topic of Customer Experience, obviously from the point of view of a company that has a technology DNA and offers collaboration solutions. It is a topic that concerns companies of all sizes and markets, including PA, as they engage in dialogue with hundreds of people every day. And we know that users have become demanding in terms of responsiveness and quality of customer response.
After some time has passed, we wanted to talk with the author again both to explore some points in more detail and to see together whether the trends announced at the beginning of the year have been confirmed by a market, that of long-distance communication, in great ferment.
– Let’s get right into it by delving into the cornerstone topic of the article: the concept of Total Experience. What are you referring to?
First, let’s clarify that the term is borrowed from Gartner but is perfectly fitting with respect to Avaya’s goal of providing customers with a communication experience that enables real-time interaction across all channels-digital and voice-at 360 degrees, in an integrated way between back office and front office as well. Let me explain. The pandemic, but especially the massive use by users of digital channels, has made the customer more “demanding”: when we dialogue with a company, small or large, or even with the Public Administration, we expect the interaction to be fast and the experience to be attentive and personalized. This is a goal that any reality can achieve today, even without large investments and relying on the Cloud, and which now also involves the internal organization: the person in charge of the front end may need, and in real time, answers from more experienced colleagues on technical, administrative, etc. aspects of each individual customer. Customer Experience is thus becoming the mission of many companies, which seek harmony, integration and continuity between Customer Experience, MultiExperience, Employee Experience and User Experience.
– In these processes the person plays a key role…
The topic is very dear to me: I am convinced that the Customer Care operator is a true “ambassador,” often the only person with whom the customer interfaces within the company, and that he or she should be trained on the technical side but also on the more specific side of managing the relationship in an empathetic way. For our part, we try to support customers with in-person and remote training programs, supported by our System Integrators for purely technical topics.
McKinsey research* points out that almost all important issues we prefer to handle with a person, and even personal experience tells us that for a problem we consider significant we need someone to give us answers, at which point we pick up the phone. For these processes, Artificial Intelligence can do a lot: become an assistant and answer all the repetitive tasks to make the operator focus and devote himself to the activities with greater added value and personalization: interact qualitatively and promptly with the customer.
– Contact Center as a Service appears to be one of the key trendiest in the Customer Experience
This is a growing model to which Avaya devotes much attention and research. For us, Contact Center as a Service is a Cloud-based, off-the-shelf service that enables companies that want to invest in digital services to be up and running in no time. We can take Whatsapp as an example: its technology is natively on Cloud and thus has lower costs, the other customizable components, such as voice channel management through speech recognition, can be defined and installed at the request of the company.
– However, and I also say this as a user, we find rifts between the digital and physical worlds
It can happen that the customer experience mission stalls in process management, because “the last mile” of a digital process must be physically completed (a signature, a medical file, consulting a medical record, etc.) Avaya aims to address this need, with a consistent customer journey across all channels
– Before we leave, shall we introduce (or reintroduce for those who already know it) Avaya to our readers?
The company has been in Italy for 25 years with 3 offices in Milan, Rome and Ancona.
Globally, we are an ultra-century old historical company that comes from an evolution made of continuous acquisitions and partnerships over the years to ensure the innovation required by changes in the ICT market. In Italy we serve both the private and public sectors in various vertical markets, from territorial companies, to large-scale distribution, to banks and insurance companies, with a significant footprint in central and local public administration. Our sales and technical support network also relies on an extensive network of over 200 partners with 4 ICT-sourced distributors: Asit, Fiore, Westcon Comstor and Itancia. for whom we develop articulated channel programs (Avaya Edge) to support and incentivize their success.
* International management consulting company; http://www.mckinsey.com/it
