Agencies need to increase their use of metrics and feedback to improve customer experience as they begin to develop and implement CX strategies.
The Food and Drug Administration gave the public and industry through July to comment on its Customer Experience Strategy for boosting satisfaction with its IT solutions by upping their accessibility, streamlining processes, easing adoption, and emphasizing engagement and feedback. The IRS uses negative feedback in particular to identify pain points and determine what is causing the problem.
Citizens, and the federal employees who serve them, expect personalized, seamless experiences interacting with agencies’ contact centers. In fact, most customers expect organizations to have knowledge of their personal information during service interactions, according to a 2022 Gartner press release.
Federal employees are also end users, and they are looking for a coherent, connected journey so they can better assist the people who reach out for their help. A sound CX strategy can mitigate staff burnout and provide efficiencies to relieve employees of repetitive tasks so they can focus on high-level problem-solving.
As data analytics and solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) improve, agencies will be better equipped to act on user feedback to provide a more personalized, smoother experience so that citizens and staff members have better interactions.
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AI Is Changing the CX Personalization Game
Previously, a personalized CX journey might have involved receiving an email in your inbox with deals tailored to your interests. That may still happen today, but the interaction is now informed by more real-time data and analytics. Agencies are striving to connect citizens across platforms, whether their entry point is on social media or on the organization’s website.
Because CX can be tailored to specific customers, a CX strategy should be tailored to an agency’s needs depending on the mission and components that need to be interconnected — such as finance and IT. The ability to leverage data with analytics and AI can transform an agency from just surviving to thriving.
“Even outside the contact center, AI tools can deliver insights that allow [organizations] to provide personalized messaging and interactions that simply were not possible just a few years ago. Sophisticated AI tools trawl information gleaned from thousands of customer interactions — including browsing and purchase history, social media interactions, demographic trends, previous customer service interactions and customer survey data — to target customers with timely, hyper-personalized offers,” a recent CDW white paper notes.
Choosing the Right CX Platform Is Important
As AI continues to interest leaders in all industries, major vendors have been fine-tuning their solutions to better incorporate AI-powered features.
Cisco, for instance, has been testing its AI assistant for Webex in hybrid work and CX. Customer feedback has shown positive expectations for reducing agent response times and providing agents with more context for interactions. Google Cloud is also using generative AI to help with live transcriptions and structured summaries in the contact center.
“A team that is fully engaged and really proud of what they do is likely to engage with customers at a very high level, and customers feel it,” says Ron Thurston, co-founder of retail recruitment agency OSSY, in a blog post for Microsoft.
Sixty-three percent of customers feel that organizations need to be better at listening to feedback, and a majority would buy more if businesses treated them better: “In today’s business environment — where omnichannel interactions are the norm — that can only really be achieved by augmenting human customer service agents with AI,” according to research by Qualtrics.
CX should not be thought of as a burdensome budget item but as a real value add and business opportunity. When agencies can revitalize their CX strategy to the satisfaction of employees and citizens, they’ll find that they’re not only creating customer loyalty but also improving retention in a department that typically experiences high turnover.
Leaning toward CX platforms that are deploying AI in relevant ways to make the journey easier can set up agencies for success. Structured summaries are one way to create a smoother CX journey so that live agents can properly assist citizens from a self-service option. Emerging features that can detect the emotional levels of call center staff can improve agent support by suggesting a break or rerouting calls to another agent.
UP NEXT: Citizens are keeping in touch with agencies via teleconferencing.
