SWZD anticipates that big changes will brew up in IT due to the pandemic. Overall, IT budgets are expected to decline slightly year-over-year in 2021, but 80% of businesses still anticipate tech spending to stay the same or increase.
Life without technology has become increasingly difficult in the digital era. Whether you are struggling with implementing a new solution or facing a glitch, contact channels like FAQs, self-service portals, online brand communities, virtual assistants, IVR systems, etc., have got you covered. The solution to your tech issues is technology only — how ironic!
Support organizations are further adopting cutting-edge technologies to optimize digital interactions and historical data at each of these channels to deliver stellar customer experiences. After all, CX is among the most influential drivers of successful businesses. However, a survey by Bain & Company revealed that 80% of businesses think they provide ‘superior’ customer service. But only 8% of customers believe that they have experienced superior support.
So, is it a tech problem and should you stick to the traditional ways of interacting? Well, NO. This blog post explains how the old adage, ‘the more the merrier’ doesn’t go well with technology. In fact, a unified cognitive platform can serve as a one-stop solution to all your tech problems.
The Perils of Adding Multiple Solutions to Your Tech Stack
The choice of wrong technology does more harm than good. Furthermore, adding multiple solutions to your tech stack is followed by its own set of challenges. Let’s see how:
1. Amplification of Resource Requirements
As you add more solutions to your support organization, you also need more resources because every technology demands a certain degree of resources for its optimal utilization.
2. Creation of Siloed Infrastructures
There is no denying the fact that technology helps you stay ahead of the curve by bringing in operational efficiencies and cost-effective modus operandi. However, think of the bigger picture — with each addition to your tech stack, you end up creating an additional infrastructural silo. The relevance of your search results is dubious when these silos are not integrated. By and large, all your best intentions go out the window when your siloed tech kills customer service.
3. Ownership for Support ROI
Improving support ROI is one of the biggest driving parameters of implementing technology and automation. However, when you add multiple solutions to your tech stack, it becomes increasingly challenging to define which technology must be held accountable for maximizing the support ROI or which solution has the maximum contribution otherwise.
4. Overwhelming Training Processes
A certain degree of training is required to fully embrace any technology. As a result, support mavens are bombarded with a number of training processes when multiple technologies are adopted. Rushed training processes are as good as nothing because agents are still clueless at the end of the training.
5. Lack of Human Intelligence
With centuries of technological advancements, machines still lack the cognition to be an equal counterpart of human ability. For example, support leaders invest in IVR systems to augment case sentiment analysis. However, these systems struggle with poor voice recognition, which demands customers to repeat information multiple times, leading to higher dissatisfaction. Support leaders also invest heavily in escalation management software. But due to complex phone trees and decision matrices, customer calls often don’t get routed to the best fit.
Overcoming the Everyday Agent Challenges
If tech is killing your customer service, then sorry to burst your bubble — you don’t have the RIGHT solution in place. All you need is a technology that integrates your fragmented silos and provides you with a 360-degree view of enterprise knowledge. A technology that can disambiguate the ambiguous meanings of words by understanding the context behind them. A technology that empowers your support mavens to self-train every time any new feature is introduced to save them from the hassle of overwhelming training processes.
By and large, you need a technology that reflects humanlike intelligence. TSIA and SearchUnify have certainly identified the magical technology. Want to know more? Then, register for their upcoming webinar titled Building the Ultimate Agent Desktop and learn how you can smash the everyday agent challenges with a unified cognitive platform.
