For several months now, many of us have been required to shelter in place and work from home. In light of the pandemic, the importance and demand for eCommerce and home delivery skyrocketed. These services almost instantly graduated from convenient and nice-to-have to absolutely essential lifelines to keep food in the pantry and other household essentials replenished (toilet paper hoarders, you know who you are…). The sudden dependence on these services has not been without hiccups! Early in the lockdown, most of what was needed was available, though it certainly took a lot more patience for when an item would be delivered and far more flexibility in terms of what product would actually fulfill the need! The pandemic has acted like a massive adrenaline shot to the digital shopping side of retail. The shoppers’ expectations for their digital experience shifted instantly, yet brands have not always been able to keep up.
There have been some surprises as we witness this accelerated transformation of the importance of the online shopping experience. Digital behemoths like Amazon have noticeably struggled to keep up with the sudden onslaught of customers shopping for everyday staples. Same-day delivery, once the belle of the ball, is no longer even an option. At the same time, there are many examples of traditional brands benefiting from innovation investments and adapting very quickly to the new reality. Kroger is a good example of a retailer that is getting products to customers quicker and safer than ever by executing excellently in both the home delivery and curbside-pickup areas of their business. Even so, for every Kroger story, there are many brands still clinging to their old habits resulting in inertia and inaction even when the possible extinction of their business is staring them in the face.
One big pain point for the transition to digital shopping is when the need for any type of customer care is required. Many companies continue to offer only voice or email as an option to contact them when help is needed. This might have been good enough in the past but the bloom is off the rose when the customer experience is examined under today’s conditions. Traditional contact methods seem to be universally overwhelmed and glacially slow. The knee-jerk reaction is to ramp up the customer service agent headcount and throw them at the call and email queues, which in turn are growing faster than agents can be onboarded to service them. It should not be surprising that single tasking contact methods are often delivering experiences that fall far short of customer expectations. There is a huge opportunity to innovate a better experience for the customer and a better platform for the agents assisting them.
Live chat, messaging and modern chatbot technology is a combination that can be applied to this problem quickly. Using chat and messaging instantly turns customer care agents into multithreaded multi-taskers who can easily tackle more conversations with better capabilities than with email or voice only. Add bot-assisted capabilities to the mix, and productivity and speed to resolution will increase even further. Automation with bots can be used to tackle mundane issues that have cookie cutter resolutions saving agents for complex problems or conversations that require a human touch.
This approach can be applied beyond just retail. For example, the myriad of governmental agencies that find themselves trying to serve 1000x more customer service requests than they were pre-pandemic desperately need a better way to handle the loads they are seeing.
The perfect solution needs to be cloud-based and allow for low/no-touch deployment if possible. It should easily support work-from-home agents – and agents should work from home both in our current shelter in place world and can continue to do so to reduce operating costs when the crisis subsides. It should allow for 100% automated conversations but also provide bot-assist capabilities to give your live chat agents the superpower to handle multiple chats efficiently and with great customer service.
This technology exists today and is easily obtainable so there is no excuse for continuing to only offer Monday-Friday, 9-5 voice-only customer care. Stop treating your digital customers like strangers and start treating them like humans that you value. Leverage live chat and messaging to deliver a better experience to more of them at a lower cost!
