Page 12 - EngineerIT March 2022

ICT – DIGITAL EXPERTS

In the fight for excellent customer

service, companies need to go

digital first

By Ryan Falkenberg, co-CEO of CLEVVA

xcellent customer service, particularly excellent digital customer service, has been
catapulted into the spotlight with the rapid uptake of online services and commerce.
EMany businesses need to move their customer service and support from a ‘people
plus technology’ approach to a digital first approach. But where do you start?
Many companies start with chatbots and digitising their FAQs. They try to put their
most common and easily answerable questions online in the hope this will slow down the
volume of queries coming into their contact centres, but all it does is create more friction.
Customer service queries can broadly be divided into three categories: informational
- tell me more about something; transactional - I want to buy a new data bundle; and
advisory - which solution is best for me?
Businesses tend to start with chatbots, answering generic informational queries. Over
time they may try to upgrade their chatbot’s capability to handle basic transactional queries.
Typically, that is where it ends, and everything else gets handled by an agent using live chat.
The reason is that most chatbots are designed to be question/answer machines. They
try to understand your question or query, and then search their knowledge base for the
right answer. With customer service queries, there is seldom a straightforward answer. To
get to the answer, you first need to clarify their question and diagnose their need, situation
or the root cause of their problem before trying to work out the right answer. Plus, you
need to do this in line with a range of business and regulatory rules, with a detailed record Ryan Falkenberg
to prove it.
As a result, chatbots have often created more customer friction than benefit. Who wants From the customer’s perspective, the
to engage with a chatbot when you know they are not up to the job? You would rather go transition feels seamless. Where most
directly to a human. For many companies, this reality has made them very cautious about queries initially get resolved by a human
embracing digital self-service, but this is before digital experts arrived on the scene. agent via live chat, over time they find
“The benefit with digital experts is that you can get your digital self-service offering up their queries handled first touch by the
and running pretty quickly. Step one is to get your digital expert simply playing the role of digital expert. All that changes is that more
‘customer service triage’. This means whenever a customer types in a request or query, the and more queries get resolved quicker,
digital expert makes sure their request is properly understood. with less waiting. This approach to slowly
It does this by asking the questions needed to accurately classify the request or query, shifting more query resolution from
in context. Once the request is clearly understood, the digital expert can then ensure that live agents to a digital expert makes the
the query, with all the additional context, is passed through to a live agent for immediate adoption of digital less daunting. You don’t
resolution. put all your eggs into one basket. You
You simply start by getting the digital expert to better understand the details of every simply hand less across to a live agent, and
request and query. This insight is critical for step two - the targeted automation of the high get more done digitally.
impact/high volume queries. Research conducted by the chat
This step involves you ‘training’ your digital expert to resolve prioritised queries commerce company Clickatell shows (for
without having to hand over to an agent. This means that within the first few weeks, inbound averages) that the total cost to
your digital expert resolves say ten of the identified 200 query types, while handing the service using a call centre agent ranges
remaining 190 across to a live agent to resolve. Then gradually over the next few months, between R20 - R50 per query. Deflecting
your digital expert resolves more and more of the prioritised queries alone, until most more calls away from agents to digital
queries coming into your digital channels are handled unassisted. experts not only means a dramatic

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