Their unique experiences mean that each person instinctively delivers the kind of approach that would resonate with them, rather than for the person they’re trying to help, and when attempting to deliver a specific service such as customer advice, this chaotic mix of solutions can be quite harmful, often delivering inconsistent and incoherent support.
Even in a structured environment, advisors can struggle. Everyone has their own tricks and techniques for delivering the best service they can, but if each advisor interaction can lead to different results then how does the caller know they are getting the best advice? How can we be sure that the answers and the advice given is accurate and personalised? That it is precisely what each individual caller requires?
By arming the advisor with the best possible source of information. A system that not only delivers a holistic view of the caller's personal details and history, but can deliver bespoke, personalised content based on their specific needs. A system that can anticipate the needs of the caller and one that is flexible enough to allow the advisor to use their experience and judgement.
Overall goals
Even though the goals of each system may be different, the overall goals for implementing a structure like this are universal.
Our primary focus will be to enhance the customer experience, working to increase overall customer happiness by delivering fast and satisfying resolutions, while paying particular attention to helping vulnerable customers.
Alongside this are overall cost reductions, implementing strategies that focus on streamlining internal processes and lowering the cost per call.
While process improvement forms another cornerstone of this approach, adding flexible, customer-led guided flows that remove ambiguity and ensure that the advisor is only interacting with the information that matters.
Our process
To hit these targets, we need to understand a few things:
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The organisation and their goals
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The staff and their current processes
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The goals of the callers
Once we have a grasp of all of these, we can begin to see patterns and inefficiencies within their day-to-day interactions, and move to design solutions. This, coupled with an in-depth technical understanding of where the information is stored and how it is accessed, means that we can put ourselves in the shoes of both the advisors and the callers to produce a solution that delivers exceptional performance for both.
The advisor experience
So, what does this look like in practice? The examples below show the customer and advisor-centric designs that were delivered as part of an internal transformation project for a London-based water provider and showcases some of the different ways in which we worked with the advisor staff to anticipate their needs and the goals of their callers, translating their requirements into an intuitive and responsive solution that surfaces information from multiple sources into a single platform.
Overview
This structure follows this pattern throughout all caller interactions, with the key sections being:
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Customer details panel
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Advisor interaction panel
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Additional information panel
Customer details panel - ‘Who am I talking to?’
Here we ensure that the advisor is able to view and interact with the user's personal and account information at any time. The advisor can use this component to ensure that they have a current view of the callers details and, as these sections are self contained, it means that any updates performed here will not impact the core customer journey.
Advisor interaction panel - ‘What do I need to do?’
This panel displays the content that drives the direction of each call. It contains a specific script which the advisor can use verbatim or paraphrase, a navigation element that allows the advisor to skip back to previously completed processes seamlessly and bespoke data collection options. As shown in the examples below, this data collection can be a linear process, or take advantage of branching paths to deliver a flexible, easy to understand and structured call experience.
Advisor information panel - ‘What key information should I be aware of?’
This panel is used solely to display important, contextual information. In fact, it only displays when there is related content and hides itself when there isn’t anything we want to make the advisor aware of. The alternative approach would have been to have a permanent panel which would display generic customer or account content, but through testing we found that in most cases, this was ignored by the advisors who correctly assumed that the information inside it wasn’t relevant to their current task. The result of using this targeted approach meant the panel had a high probability of being viewed and used correctly as the advisors were aware of the value of the contextual content within.
The output of this project was a platform that gives the advisors the best opportunity to deliver the best possible service by arming them with the most up-to-date general and contextual information, as well as an internal decision engine which drives the customer flows in the right direction.
