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The Potential Benefits of Real-Time Support

computerDespite the growing success of customer support divisions, keeping up with consumer demand has never been greater. Today, would leave a brand without warning if they received poor treatment. The stakes are high. As the mounting pressure to attract and retain customers keeps leaders up at night, customer experience (CX) teams increasingly lean on technology advancements and digital-first tools to improve service interactions, with real-time support at the center of these adoption efforts.

The industry has been notoriously slow to adopt real-time support, causing a lack of contextual feedback in sessions between supervisors and agents. Historically, call feedback would often take hours or days to receive after calls, making it unhelpful for agent teams to pivot and implement tactics to improve interactions with their customer base. With artificial intelligence (AI) being at the forefront of the real-time revolution, many wonder how brands can adopt technological solutions to ensure they’re setting all stakeholders up for success. Done successfully, real-time AI support has profitable benefits for the overall organization, employee wellness, and customer experience – making it a win-win-win for any brand.

Benefiting the Organization

Training and onboarding or reskilling and upskilling all require time and financial investments. At the organizational level, real-time AI support may ensure that companies can identify and report which agents are doing well and those employees who may need support. For instance, real-time dashboards can enable supervisors to monitor their workforce by measuring customer experience and agent interactions. Supervisors are instantly notified when a customer may be having a poor experience on a call. From this point, supervisors can proactively listen to the live calls, so they have the correct context regarding a specific situation to determine the most effective solution.

These capabilities are especially crucial for guiding hybrid teams. Supervisors aren’t always able to proactively connect with employees in-person, but can virtually “walk the floor” with these real-time dashboards. In gaining access to this information, supervisors can better support their employee base by mitigating future conflicts with customers, and ensuring their customers are receiving nothing short of the utmost service. Research has revealed that 84% of companies that work to improve customer experience report increased revenue.

Impacting the Employee Experience

Ensuring contact center operations are constantly evolving and improving may be able to significantly impact agent well-being and reduce burnout. AI can help companies understand and generate human-aware data. Knowing that your employee may be exhausted and distressed when taking a call provides more actionable insights for supporting them, possibly giving them a break from calls to rest and reset. Digital transformation capabilities are essential, as they enable businesses to gather data directly around the voice of the customer, providing real-time insights for employees that make it easier and more efficient for them to complete their job.

Revolutionizing Customer Experience

To ensure they’re adequately fulfilling customers' requests, organizations should consider offering real-time experience. In doing so, they may help to establish brand loyalty and improve agents’ success rates in the long run. The implementation of real-time capabilities, including notifications and data-driven dashboards, is expected to increase adoption as organizations focus on improving customer engagement and ROI. When businesses center their efforts on meeting customer demand through leveraging these real-time tactics, they may ensure better interactions, happier employees, quality customer service, and greater brand connection for the long haul.

Mark has more than 25 years of experience operating and selling large contact center solutions. Mark has proven success in building, inspiring and motivating teams. These teams have been responsible for delivering exceptional outcomes and exceptional experiences to customers. To make this happen requires an enterprise wide adoption of processes and metrics focused on the health of the customer along their journey. As EVP at Interactions, Mark was responsible for executive sales and cross-functional leadership of Interactions’ global Fortune 100 customers.