How to Build Resilient and Reliable Customer Experience

What does Resilient and Reliable Customer Experience Mean?

In essence, reliable customer experience means providing consistently high-quality customer service, at any time, over any channel, and from any location.

Your customers will punish a failure to provide reliable customer experience. 70% of customers reported that a single interaction with a business permanently altered their feelings toward it; both for better and worse.

In tough times, customers are forced to make hard decisions. They’ll be on the hunt for the best deal and prepared to drop those businesses that don’t deliver. If customers remember you only for your frustrating customer service, you’ll be first to go.

Building reliable customer experience should be a priority when preparing for uncertainty. Quality of CX is the single most accurate indicator of business resilience.

How can you ensure resilience within your CX ecosystem?

The First Step to Reliable Customer Experience: Availability

Availability is at the heart of CX. When your customers get in contact, no matter when, where, or how, your organization needs to be accessible. Those organizations that frustrate their customer’s attempts to get in contact will pay the price during periods of uncertainty.

However, availability isn’t always within your control. Indeed, the amount of control you have depends on your cloud provider:

• Public cloud providers host their services on third-party servers, owned by a web services provider.

• This means that when outages occur, they are out of the CX provider’s hands.

• Alternatively, private cloud providers own all their own infrastructure. This means that the CX provider can work to maintain the highest standards of availability for customers.

Your journey toward reliable customer experience, then, begins with a private cloud provider that owns its own infrastructure and can guarantee 99.999%+ availability to your customers.

The Second Step to Reliable Customer Experience: Scalability

The next essential element of reliable customer experience is scalability. This is another advantage afforded by a private cloud provider. Scalability means ensuring that any volume of simultaneous contacts is processed. When demand surges, scalability ensures that your CX systems won’t buckle under the weight and that you’ll remain accessible to your customers.

There are a host of different ways to build scalability in the contact center:

• With a cloud CX solution, new users can be added at the click of a button.

• Contingency licenses can be reserved in advance within the private cloud, letting you activate new users at a fraction of the cost.

• A cloud CX solution is accessed from within the browser. This allows you to bring new agents online from any location when required.

In the recent years, Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly powerful, and offers unprecedented opportunities for scalability.

• Large Language Models (LLMs) empower chatbots to create outstanding dialogue with a human touch.

• During times of peak demand, non-essential inquiries can be redirected to chatbots, taking some of the burden off your agents.

• Every customer inquiry can be answered, without sacrificing quality of service.

The Third Step to Reliable Customer Experience: Integrations

Simply being available to your customers isn’t always enough. You need to ensure that the quality of the service is outstanding.

To support your agents in delivering reliable customer experience, you need to break down data siloes. This means providing customer data screen-pops within the agent interface, providing the agent with all relevant information, interaction history, and knowledge. Information can also be provided to chatbots, speeding up self-service interactions.

• This enables faster resolutions – agents are automatically presented with customer data. The customer isn’t forced to waste time repeating details.

• After-call work is reduced – Customer data, stored in a third-party system of record, can be updated from within the agent interface.

• AI-powered metrics allow for deeper insight into each customer interaction, letting you assess and improve your CX over time.

• A private cloud provider maintains a library of flexible integrations into your existing systems, tying together your CX estate and making the most of customer data.

The Fourth Step to Reliable Customer Experience: Flexibility

Reliable customer experience can’t be stuck in the past. Your organization needs a CX solution that continuously updates, giving you the flexibility to adopt new technologies where necessary.

You need a cloud CX solution built around a modular model, so that you only pay for what you use. When the time comes to expand your functionality, new modules can be brought online, letting you shape your customer journeys to the expectations of your customers.

With technology advancing faster than ever, flexibility has never been more important:

• AI-backed Natural Language Processing can be used to route customers to the best outcome, based on stating intention alone. No more, “press one for…”

• In our increasingly connected world, more and more devices are digitally enabled. Machine Agents should be able to interface with these ‘Internet of Things’ devices, automatically pushing and pulling data from them, with no human intervention required.

• Delighting your customers now will create loyalty later; exceeding customer expectations strengthens business resilience.