The following life cycle is a classic for companies: a start-up company distinguishes itself by its excellent quality of service and its outstanding customer support, which creates a strong relationship between the start-up and its first customers. Word-of-mouth and marketing development allow the company to grow its customer portfolio. As the company accelerates, its efforts focus more and more on acquiring new customers until the day when the quality of customer care, which was at the root of the company’s initial success, finally suffers, because it is no longer manageable on a human scale. Users then feel that they have lost the strong relationship they thought they had with the company and the distance grows.

The strength of large companies is also their Achilles heel: their size. It gives them a consistent strike force, often very effective for marketing. But when it comes to making the newly converted prospect feel like he is not just a number, things get tougher. The challenge is to continue to offer the customer a personalized follow-up regardless of the size of the company.

The task has become even more complicated in recent years, as multi-modal interactions intensify: it is not uncommon to offer brand users contact points by phone, email, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The user sees the history of his interactions with a brand as a continuum, while successive requests may be handled by different agents, each of whom handles dozens of cases per day. The challenge for the company is to succeed in having this global vision of all interactions with the customer, in order to be able to offer him a real close relationship.

The answers to this problem are developing. Far from the historical customer files and CRM, solutions such as Odigo, a rising player in the field of contact centers as a service, now offer software assistance to customer relations. This is often referred to as the augmented advisor. The scope of the assistance offered by Odigo’s solution ranges from the automation of time-consuming and repetitive tasks to the enrichment of customer information. For example, Odigo’s intelligent email routing system is one of the highest ROI tasks for artificial intelligence to date, freeing up internal resources, reducing processing time and improving customer satisfaction. In addition, more advanced features are also offered, such as speech analysis based on Deep Learning, to gather information about customers and improve communication.

This type of solution is not intended to replace advisors, but to allow them to focus on tasks that are more fulfilling for them and of greater added value for the company, such as truly listening to the customer and processing his or her request. The mistake would be to think that the software layer is leading us towards a cold and sterile customer relationship, whereas on the contrary, it offers an abstraction of the technical complexity of the customer relationship for the company and puts human exchanges at the centre of the relationship between a service and its users: isn’t it more pleasant and rewarding to be greeted by name by a telephone contact who has our file open in front of him and can therefore offer us a personalised service, rather than having to identify oneself by a number and having to call back X number of reference files to obtain satisfaction?

Ultimately, these new contact center solutions in the cloud allow large companies to improve the quality of their customer relations without any investment. This gives companies that choose to implement them an undeniable competitive advantage, given that customer retention is much less costly than acquiring new customers, and is therefore a positive part of a short, medium and long-term strategy.

Translated from Les centres de contact as a service : le gage d’une relation client personnalisée