With presentations by AO.com, Ovo Energy, Emite & acrinax, covering the Customer Journey, Social Media Management, Dashboard Analytics & Artificial Intelligence in Contact Centres.
With an idea to create an intimate/open atmosphere & enable the attendees to learn from the speakers on a truly empathetic level & share their own experiences, creating a great way for us all to learn.
Beginning the day with a wide selection of tasty foods, the guests arrived to the Shard, floor 24. The sun shined on London & the horizon was opened up, creating the backdrop for a relaxing afternoon.
The first presentation was our own David Baughan, acrinax’s Client Service Director, the event was his brainchild and so we suggested he go first. Presenting research & client case studies, he dived into the behaviour and preferences of Millenials & Centennials, making a compelling case & the need to understand a company’s individual customer base is a challenge not to be ignored.
The contrast in preferred channels of communications between generations widens & is forcing companies to acknowledge the importance in building their own Customer Experience strategy; one that aligns with their customer’s preferences. Not every customer wants to have a phone call, nor do they want to reach out on social media. More than ever it has become the businesses prerogative in deciding how they want their customers to communicate with them. However, the customer journey doesn’t start & end at the customer. Inversely affecting the customer experience is the employee journey.
A stand out point you notice when visiting Ovo & AO’s offices, is the persistence to continuously develop their culture & engage employees in their roles, to support the highest levels of customer service & to be supported by their employees in an open & fun environment. OVO Energy’s presentation on how they managed an increase of 1000% customer contact with no additional headcount was hugely impressive.
George Frost & Darran Crook shared how following the acquisitions of Spark & Economy Energy, Ovo, being notified at 11:45pm (yes in the night, these guys are very committed) were poised and ready to deploy their new tactic the next day. Darran Crook & George Frost – Ovo Energy Ovo explained how acrinax, who’ve been working with OVO since 2013, had integrated Gnatta’s social media management tool into Genesys a few months earlier, & this combination created best in class routing and queuing with outstanding automation and reporting, which meant Ovo were able to handle the massive increase.
The easy to use interface meant Ovo could keep track of every message, automate responses, route the urgent ones to the right agent & have context whilst quickly training additional agents as a backup. Ovo demonstrated with the correct staff culture, commitment and management foresight accompanied by well deployed technology; nothing is impossible. Soon enough the queries were answered, trolls silenced and grumbles decreased.
All the while Ovo maintained their high levels of service, retained the trust of their current customers & gained the respect of their many new ones. This achievement didn’t happen overnight by installing new technology, acrinax and OVO have been working on a CX technology transformation for almost a year, made possible because OVO have an incredible culture, ethos & relationships to empower their employees 100%. Next up, eMite. Employee engagement can be sought through many avenues, eMite’s gamification of their real time analytical dashboards allows contact centres to display competitive charts in a custom made aesthetically pleasing fashion. For instance they demonstrated how data can be presented from many different sources, an example of how it can be utilised was using pizzas for their pie charts in a very unique, engaging manner.
Highlighting agents that are performing well in real time (and who don’t love pizza). However, with all it’s niceties the driving force behind the platform is it’s capability to pull data from multiple systems, including Genesys Purecloud, Pureconnect and many other ACD’s, CRM’s including Salesforce, Dynamics, Kana & billing engines to track performance i.e call handling time, calls to sales made, alerts & full KPI’s. Giving you a real time visual performance of the contact centre with no IT skills required. Yup, none. Taking a short break to refresh & more openly converse with our peers about the challenges faced we had plenty of time to enjoy more food, drinks and ask the presenters our personal questions.
Up next was a highly anticipated presentation, delivered by Neil Hunter, Head of Contact Centre Technology at AO.com, to a room full of people with a great deal of questions. acrinax have been working with AO since 2011 when we installed Genesys and Neil has always been pushing the capabilities of the platform to its limits.
The topic of presentation was around the Customer Journey, highlighting how over three years AO has split its customer journey into twelve stages (from only seven stages initially), from this AO can understand where each customer sits on that path during contact. AO has designed a personalised, proactive journey which means for instance, if a customer is calling the contact centres on the day of delivery, pre-delivery it is more than likely that person wants to know the time of the arrival of their fridge freezer, as opposed to a customer calling on the day of delivery, post-delivery, they probably have an issue with the product/delivery that needs resolving.
Knowing this information AO can quickly route the call without the customer having to make a decision. In the case of pre-delivery, the customer is automatically advised by the Genesys IVR when the delivery will be there, with an option to speak to the co-driver of their delivery van. They are then automatically transferred without speaking to anyone in the contact centres. Awesome service all round.
David Buaghan, acrinax & Neil Hunter, AO.com A point emphasised and related closely to their culture was the need to do things right and the rest will follow. It sounds simple, because it is, and very effective. AO knows that every element of the business has an impact on their contact centre. If a department isn’t working well, for instance logistics, there will be an increase in the amount of calls to rectify delivery issues, putting strain on the contact centre.
They take a formal, fast and frank communication approach to highlighting these errors within the company, openly to everyone, giving all departments a chance to buy in to improving the service to customers. This is the AO magic. True accountability. After putting Neil in the spotlight for an extra 40 minutes of in-depth questions it was down to the final presentation of the afternoon, back to acrinax. Adam Loniewski from our tech team kindly put together a very impressive live demonstration of how artificial intelligence can work in an omni-channel contact centre. Using the dev environment of a live banking application, it was an engaging view of how this emerging and often misunderstood technology can be applied to deliver effortless customer service 24 hours a day.
Adam ran through banking credentials, retrieving his balance, points score & recommendations on how to save money whilst speaking to an artificial agent, over both voice and webchat, demonstrating how the same AI should work seamlessly across any channel. Even with the projector overheating near the end of the day, Adam delivered a brilliant insight into what the future holds for contact centres world wide. After the event many guests hung around for over an hour to catch up with the speakers and share their thoughts from the day. In summary, I believe everyone in participation was able to learn directly from the presenters and each other. New ideas and points to focus on, the attendees can shake up their industries current expectations and begin to understand the customer from a new perspective. Lastly an enormous thank you to the attendees & guests of honour, Neil Hunter from AO.com, & George Frost & Darran Crook from OVO Energy, without whom the event wouldn’t have been possible.
You’re amazing and demonstrated why we love working with you. About acrinax – we are a contact centre technology systems integrator, a dedicated and enthused Genesys Partner and love working with our customer obsessed clients, including AO, OVO energy, Metrobank, D&G, MYPolicy, Arrow Global to name a few.
If you want to know more about cloud contact centres, artificial intelligence, contact center analytics, or any of the research or topics discussed in this article please contact richard.bird@acrinax.com or call him on 07960285338.
