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The cloud environment today offers many options and facilitates innovation and agility. Nevertheless, to respond to the concerns of IT and the business, which combine performance, security, cost control and innovation, cloud contact center solutions have many advantages.

As companies embark on their digital transformation, they need to offer their businesses high-performance, agile and scalable tools, and IT needs to be able to control the security of data and flows.

The Cloud responds to these challenges by offering an easier implementation of business applications and a portfolio of service levels and customization.

The Contact Center is no exception and is part of this evolution. Research firm MarketsandMarkets has valued the current global cloud-based contact center market at $11.5 billion and expects it to reach $36.1 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 25.8%.

Market analysis | Why move to the Cloud Contact Center?

Today’s world is accustomed to having “everything, right away” and the contact center is no exception to this trend of immediacy and the brand promise must meet the expectations of customers who want more personalization, service, responsiveness, choice and simplicity.

The new generation of solutions tends towards an omnichannel approach that is certainly more accomplished, but above all more intuitive, simpler and more in line with customer and agent usage.

This results in streamlined processes while optimizing efficiency and providing a better customer experience.

An improved customer and employee experience

The Cloud Contact Center is both customer-centric and more adaptable to the way consultants work and respond to customer requests.

Consumers have a more positive perception of the brand and recommend it when they are able to contact it through their preferred channel, access the desired service quickly and have relevant information readily available.

With this type of solution, agents receive notifications via the app and can respond to various customer requests, whether they come from chat, WhatsApp, a call or an email. This more dynamic method of interaction is more advantageous, more harmonious even, and reduces response times. It also makes it easier to choose the channel they feel most comfortable with, the channel of preference.

Seamless and complete integration

These solutions seamlessly integrate customer experience channels into a unified platform. This enables interactions to be routed to the right agent via intelligent routing (by skill, by team or by queue) and to better manage periods of high call volumes, seasonality, and call peaks related to a specific activity.

Integration is native with the various CRMs on the market for improved management within the customer’s business applications. Some providers also offer enhanced integration with collaboration tools, which makes it much easier to use. As a result, companies only need internet access to access their telephony/contact center environment.

Moving contact center infrastructure to the cloud makes it easy to adopt new features and technologies, including the latest tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Access to intuitive, cutting-edge technologies also enables self-care and fully automated actions, eliminating or reducing repetitive, low-value tasks and speeding up the resolution of customer issues, for example.

Significant cost reductions

In this cloud model, the contact center hardware and software is hosted and managed by a third-party provider. This eliminates the need for upfront investment in infrastructure and maintenance for regular upgrades.

This can result in the redistribution of IT skills within a team or a reduction of IT staff dedicated to the operational maintenance of equipment and limits the risk of downtime.

In addition, the Cloud Contact Center allows organizations to move from a capital expense to an operational expense, allowing the customer to budget for a variable monthly cost and to best adjust to usage.

An evolving technology

Cloud-native, the solutions are based on a microservices architecture and are highly scalable (continuous updates avoiding version upgrades/migrations, proven reliability due to the independence of the mircoservices, on-demand scaling without hardware limitations, remote working without the need for VPN access, …)

They accelerate the deployment of new solutions whenever necessary and remove them just as easily.

More information

The Contact Center Cloud Platforms have been greatly enriched with functional modules to meet the expanded needs of customer service, support, HR, marketing, IT, data, etc. In addition, customer knowledge and experience, customer and employee engagement, scheduling, and record automation have been added to the workflow functionality to provide a complete, holistic solution that includes customer journey data analysis, customer reviews, and statistical reporting.

These functions allow you to optimize and personalize customer service to deliver measurable improvements and result in increased levels of productivity, performance, engagement and satisfaction.

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Making a success of your project – getting your teams on board and leading the change

Companies no longer wish to invest in projects lasting several months with significant material costs and an abysmal involvement of their teams.

This is why our dual technological and business expertise and our in-depth knowledge of remote customer relations legitimizes us to address these transformation and evolution projects towards the Cloud and to propose our successful and proven methodology of project management.

The hybrid approach

Responsibilities are now shared between 3 actors: The end customer, the Cloud Contact Center solution provider and the integrator.

The supplier provides support throughout the project to ensure that the needs are well understood, that the solution’s functional depth is appropriate, that the installation is compliant, that the solution is adopted and, later, that the platform is optimized to meet the changing needs and practices.

The discovery phase is crucial in this type of project because it first allows us to understand the business and the issues at stake, then to have a global vision of the customer’s organization (business and IT actors), the precise needs related to the activity and the resources, and to understand the set objectives and the roadmap.

During the workshop phases, an essential step that will allow us to develop proximity, intimacy and to “settle” in the place of the customer and the agent, expectations are important.

The workshop in “exploratory” mode has three objectives:

• Better understand our customers’ objectives and facilitate the alignment between them and the solution’s functionalities
• Identify and share the full potential of the solution to exploit its value and bring innovation
• Agree on a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will facilitate the monitoring and progress of actions, decision making and corrective actions

The workshop must be prepared (expectations, contents, representative teams of the organization, restitution, agenda,…), take place in collaborative mode to increase interactivity and challenge the existing.

Making a success of your project, optimizing usage

Once we are familiar with the client’s environment, we can initiate the project and conduct the first sprints in agility with the various actors identified.

Our approach is collaborative in co-construction mode and allows us to optimize costs and facilitate the appropriation of solutions during the specification and co-development phases.

We will not cease to insist: a strong involvement of the customer with identified and representative actors is key for a good progress and the success of the project.

Activeo’s approach is differentiated by its double technological and business expertise. A mixed project team, experienced knowing how to speak technical, functional and business will be able to decipher very precisely the need and to propose the best method and the good practices.

Activeo also helps you in the choice of the operator, the appropriate telephony and the useful solutions for the good functioning of the system without forgetting the integration to the business applications and CRM leaders of the market including the realization of specific developments (App, Cloud to Cloud, integration to specific IT environments).

Once the various iterations of sprints have been completed, the final delivery is carried out and a complete support system is implemented, including communication, training and coaching of business teams.

At the end of the project, a feedback (REX) / Balance sheet is proposed and recommended with the various stakeholders for a point by point analysis of the organization, including the technical and financial aspects. This allows us to identify areas for improvement and positive measures to be reused in future projects or to be extended to other entities/teams. This meeting is also the object of an introduction of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to continue the accompaniment of the customer during the RUN phase. The RUN, which at Activeo will be offered to you as a support, Managed Services 24/7 if needed, will orchestrate a precise follow-up of the contractual commitments and will bring you advice and monitoring to optimize the existing and increase the value of the investment in the long run.

For several years now, the customer experience has been at the heart of the concerns of the vast majority of companies and organizations, regardless of their sector of activity, their field of intervention or their size.

This challenge has given rise to real transformation projects, aimed at placing the customer and the employee interacting with the customer at the center of all concerns.

Moreover, today and even more so tomorrow, when a customer decides to contact a consultant, it is because he or she feels the desire and need to interact with a human being and is looking for what characterizes a human relationship with added value, namely empathy and emotion.

Consequently, the awnser provided by the advisor must be in line with these new expectations and evolve towards more personalization and emotional intelligence (i.e. understanding the other without necessarily verbalizing it)

It is from this more “customer-centric” vision that certain Customer Relationship Quality certifications, such as NF 365 or ISO 18 295, have been inspired. They now include a strong customer dimension, illustrated in particular by an evolution of the themes to be evaluated during interactions.

The quality delivered is therefore undergoing a significant change in its history. The evaluation grids that were once very structured and mainly evaluated the process vision, with a rather binary measurement, are tending to be replaced by shorter forms that integrate the customer vision.

Evaluate few criteria but the right ones, and include various more subjective notions such as taking into account the customer’s situation! This is the key word today.

Thus, measuring and monitoring customer orientation, the quality and efficiency of interactions between customers and customer service representatives is becoming a major challenge for any company that is transforming itself through the customer experience and the employee experience.

It is precisely this challenge that the deployment of a Quality Monitoring (QM) solution addresses.

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What benefits can you expect from a Quality Monitoring solution?

The Quality Monitoring of a customer service consists of listening to and evaluating the interactions between a customer and a consultant. This provides a “global vision” of the quality and performance of the customer service, as well as an “individual vision”, allowing the definition of support actions to be carried out with each employee.

Business Benefits:

• Reduce the time and low value-added tasks related to the evaluation of interactions.
• Centralize evaluations, coaching and employee support actions in a single tool.
• Ensure clear and factual reporting allowing the implementation of action plans for the company (e.g.: improvement of an offer, a service, a process, etc.) and for support functions such as quality and training departments.

Benefits for employees:

• Engage and empower advisors more easily in their development (through access to their evaluations, the possibility of self-assessment).
• Strengthen the coaching posture of managers by allowing them to become “talent developers” rather than simply “controllers/evaluators”.
• Allows for a programmed follow-up of the agents’ skills development over time.

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More and more functionally rich solutions

A certain number of solutions on the Quality Monitoring market today offer advanced functionalities, responding either to a need to evaluate all customer interactions or to a need for advanced targeting of the interactions to be evaluated.

• Automatic QM allows for the fully automated evaluation of all customer interactions. Nevertheless, these interactions remain for the moment limited to items that are simple to evaluate and for which a “binary” answer can be given.
  
• The correlation with Speech Analytics engines allows us to target the evaluations to be carried out according to what the customers or employees say. This makes it possible to combine a “sampling” approach with a “targeted” approach.

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How to give yourself every chance to succeed in your Quality Monitoring project?

As with any project, certain key success factors must be taken into account at the start of the initiative:

• Challenge the existing:
  Challenge the quality process, the target organization, the roles and responsibilities of each person, the evaluation grids & associated reference systems, the sampling rules, the frequency of evaluations, without forgetting the organization of calibration sessions.
  
• Accompany the changes… because a Quality Monitoring project is above all a “business” project:
  Accompanying changes, from consultants to site managers, via support functions, without forgetting the players in the social dialogue. This is achieved by using all the levers of support, without limiting ourselves to training!
  
• Accompany employees over the long term:
  Ensure a transition from the project teams to the production teams, ensure the improvement of the teams on the solution and on the evaluation methods, without forgetting to train the new employees!

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For 25 years, the Activeo group has been accompanying companies in France and abroad towards relational excellence.

The complementarity of our three businesses (consulting, integration and application development) allows us to respond to 4 major challenges facing companies

• Simplify and enrich the multi-channel customer experience
• Improve the operational performance of companies
• Capitalize on the voice of the customer
• Develop new means of collaboration within companies

Activeo has been a member of the AFNOR “NF345 – Customer Relations” brand committee for many years, as well as the ISO “Service Excellence” standardization committee.

Activeo is also a member of the LimeBridge International Alliance.

Aiming at “customer delight” for each interaction with its customers has become a priority objective for companies wishing to differentiate themselves on their market through customer experience.

This is the purpose of the new ISO standard “Service Excellence”, currently being developed at the international level, in which Activeo is actively participating as a member of the Afnor standardization committee.

Its scope will aim at accompanying companies from “customer satisfaction” to “service excellence”.

This new standard will enable direct action on economic performance via :

• Developing customer loyalty, recommendation and reputation
• Strengthening employee commitment
• While waiting for the finalization of the ISO standardization committee’s work, companies can enter into a “labeling” process for service excellence.

Why should you start a Customer Relations certification process (NF345 or ISO 18295) or a service excellence labeling process?

The benefits of a certification process are multiple. We can distinguish them in two categories. On the one hand, the direct benefits for your customers, whether they are final consumers or principals, and on the other hand the internal benefits for your customer service and more broadly for your entire company.

Benefits for your customers:

• Demonstrate a high level of quality in your customer relations
• Show that the customer experience is at the heart of your concerns
• Strengthen your company’s brand image and build trust through a recognized certification

Benefits for your company and/or your Customer Service :

• Differentiate yourself in a competitive market to win new business
• Create added value by allowing you to promote the certification obtained
• Unite your teams around a common project and a rewarding process
• Structure your Customer Relations in a logic of continuous improvement of your operational performance

Zoom on the Customer Relations certification (NF 345 and ISO 18295)

Revised in 2018, the NF Service Relation Client certification is based on the international standards ISO 18295-1 & 2. Designed as a best practice guide, it takes into account new customer expectations and strengthens the link with internal and external Customer Services in order to guarantee a quality customer service regardless of the contact channel.

It aims to certify a number of commitments and services, taking into account market standards, including

• Ensuring the availability and accessibility of the various contact points
• Respecting the announced deadlines
• Providing relevant and accessible answers for customers
• Accompanying customers during interactions
• Integrate customer satisfaction and perception
• Analyze and take into account customer complaints
• Regularly ensure that employees are committed to the company and its missions

Focus on the “Service Excellence” label

The Service Excellence label is designed to recognize companies that do everything possible to promote customer delight by constantly developing remarkable and memorable experiences.

It integrates the three dimensions of service excellence: relational, operational and managerial.

It recognizes and values the degree of maturity of the organization in its transformation. It is based on an evaluation of transformation strategies, the implementation of systems and the collection of customer perceptions on a given experience.

The label is based on the European Service Excellence standard (NF EN 16880). It is awarded for a period of two years and is aimed at both private and public companies that have chosen to differentiate themselves through the personalization and emotional dimension of the customer experience and that believe that placing the customer at the heart of their strategy is a lever for their economic performance.

The label evaluates customer experiences or journeys that may concern all or part of the customer segments.

It assesses the company’s maturity in its transformation towards Service Excellence through 10 components:

• Customer experience modeling
• Deployment of a culture of service excellence
• Development of the relationship and management model
• Development of a Service Excellence strategy
• Development of leadership through service
• Employee engagement and experience
• The search for service excellence through human capital management
• The development of a collaborative and partnership approach
• Developing and sharing customer understanding and intimacy
• Innovation in the service experience

The success factors of a quality approach

As with any project that can generate organizational but also and above all cultural transformations, it must be supported by the company’s management committee.

Employees interacting with customers and their direct management being in the front line of such a project, they must imperatively be involved in the adventure. Beyond being actors of the changes and not being subjected to them, involving the employees in such a project from the beginning allows them to appropriate the associated stakes and to facilitate the support of the changes.

Nevertheless, such a project has an impact well beyond the only actors interacting with customers. This is why it is imperative to federate all the teams (operational, marketing, support) around this company project.

Finally, the normative requirements can sometimes seem abstract or lack operational application. It is therefore often necessary to be accompanied by actors who have experience in such projects, and who have a perfect command of the expectations of the certification bodies, in order to avoid going the wrong way, spreading themselves too thinly or spending energy on details.

Activeo’s support approach

Activeo accompanies you throughout your certification or labeling project, from the definition of the scope to the pre-admission audit.

Our ability to accompany you successfully in such a process is based on 3 pillars:

• Our knowledge “of the background”:
  Activeo is a member of the NF345 Customer Relationship brand committee, participated in the drafting of ISO 18295-1 & 2 and is an active member of the ISO TC 312 Service Excellence standardization commission.

• Our experience in certification processes
  For more than 15 years, Activeo has been supporting companies in their certification projects. All the companies we have accompanied have obtained their certification at the first filing.

• Our expertise in the transformation of companies through customer experience
  The positioning of Activeo for 25 years is to accompany companies towards relational excellence through its three businesses of Consulting, Integration and Application Development. In addition, Activeo is a member of the LimeBridge International Alliance. As such, we have access to best practices in terms of service excellence.

Whether you are in Customer Relations, Marketing, Digital, IT or Communication, you have not been able to escape either the sudden and generalized rush of these applications or the abundance of actors and initiatives in this field.
To go beyond the buzz, we propose to understand this manifestation of digital disruption from all angles….

Like many people, to varying degrees, you may be wondering about the scope, relevance and conditions for implementing a conversational agent (also called a bot) within your organization:

What are the contributions and promises, the deadlines to be expected, who are the publishers, for which uses, the good practices,…
It is also possible that among the wealth of information at your disposal, you do not necessarily know where or how to start!

We tell you (almost) everything, it’s here!

From science fiction to reality

Who would have believed 10 or 20 years ago that such a technological revolution was possible?
While Artificial Intelligence is more than half a century old, its applications related to optimization and automation in customer relations are still more recent.

Studies speak for themselves: 85% of Customer-Brand interactions will involve the use of Chatbot in 2022*.

It is true that conversational robots have been on the rise for several years now. Time optimization, service improvement and brand image enhancement are the main added values of innovation in the interaction between the customer, the user and the brand.

But how to explain such a craze?

• First of all, the rise of AI allowing a much better personalization of exchanges (natural/human language understanding, contextualization, machine learning…)

• Also the modification of customer uses and behaviors (digitalization, social networks & instant messaging, …)
  Examples: Search for your train schedule, track your package, check the latest health instructions, etc., now possible at any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• Benefits appreciated by brands (automation of responses to the most recurrent and/or non-value-added requests, cost reduction, unclogging of pending contacts, etc.)
  
• And finally, the grail, increasing customer satisfaction by responding to the need for immediacy and autonomy.

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Conversational robots arrive to reinforce human interaction

Or how the bots responded during this health crisis Covid-19

When the first national containment came into effect on March 17, many of us were wondering about the pandemic and its impact on our lives.

Faced with this crisis context, some companies, public organizations or even media, have gone in search of the best adapted solution to answer all our questions in emergency.

This is how the TF1 group launched its Chatbot in record time (less than a week), integrated in the full page of the LCI news channel’s website (Clustaar solution). With a capacity of more than 70 Questions-Answers, it allowed to cover the vast Covid-19 subjects worrying the Internet users and this, in a fast, precise and relevant way.

The content has continued to evolve and adapt to the changing times we live in.

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Also, other initiatives are emerging involving the advent of intelligent instant messaging to closely match new uses.

Again with the support of the editor Clustaar, the French Government provides citizens with two “Messaging bot” on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, available 24/24h and 7/7d.

This project, which involves the publication of official information and health measures to be respected, has helped to limit the spread of “fake news”.

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Less widespread but increasingly popular like the other channels, we find conversational agents also deployed in the form of “Callbot“.

This is the case of the Ministry of Solidarity and Health which, in co-construction with the editor Zaion, was able to satisfy the high demand arriving on their Covid-19 telephone line, providing answers to the most frequent FAQ type questions.

The objective of leaving no citizen unanswered was achieved with a deployment in less than 36 hours, while offering the possibility to speak to a human if needed!

In short, conversational agents have proven their efficiency and speed of deployment!
Fortunately, it’s not always about emergencies and pandemics.

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Others took the plunge long before the crisis…

Mister Auto (PSA Group), a leader in the sale of automotive parts, is setting up a call bot called Matt, which can handle 30% of incoming calls to the customer service department, including order tracking.

This new generation conversational agent, powered by the AI of the ILIBOT by Viavoo platform, is able to understand and interpret the words of a person on the phone and provide answers or carry out related actions.

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As the third largest electricity and gas operator in France, Total Direct Energie, a pioneer in innovation in customer relations, deployed a Chatbot named Jo in 2016, in addition to the LiveChat already online on the website since 2014.

In 5 years, Jo has gone from 300 to 2000 conversations per day in 2020, thanks in particular to a continuous optimization of its skills.

It can give text answers integrating content in some cases (images, video, tutorial …), redirect to pages, edit invoices and even transfer the conversation to a human agent via Livechat.

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What will make your virtual agent successful

It’s simple: the Chat/Call or Voicebot that keeps all its promises is the one that gets the support of its end users, i.e. your customers or your employees (for internal use). In practice, we observe that the combination of human expertise and the performance of virtual agents with artificial intelligence guarantees a simplified customer experience and a unified path. The value proposition of hybridizing human and technology goes far beyond usage by widely impacting the entire organization, processes and businesses.

But then you will say to me, how to guarantee the success of such a project?
It is above all the good practices, the methodology used, the governance and the technology that will ensure the success of your project.

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Here are some expert tips and questions to ask yourself:

Do not neglect the reflection phases before any start-up, a real guarantee of success if they have been well framed!

The framing phase will also have its importance in favor of co-creation and agility:

• How to compose your project team and involve participants? (business, operational, IT customer service, marketing, …)

• Definition of expectations, KPI’s, budget & timing

• Specification & choice of the best adapted technological solution, while keeping in mind the scalability of the solution

• Collaborative creative workshops, for a committed and efficient business team: What are your customer journeys? Which use cases should the virtual assistant focus on? What identity to give it (find a name, a graphic, a footprint,)

Change management & digital transition to take care of:

• Training & Coaching of users and physical agents
• Accompany its launch and enhance its benefits for the customer and for the teams.

Monitoring for continuous improvement:

• Feed it with data, collect it regularly as it goes along, state it, label it, correct it so that the robot continues to learn and progress!

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Of course, this list is still long and can be adapted to each project context, but the main thing to remember is that the deployment of a bot requires a few prerequisites! That’s why you should not hesitate to get help for one or all of these steps and thus have the best assets.

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*(Source : Gartner (2018) cité dans Building the AI-powered customer center of the future by Customer Think (June 2018))