Three ways to transform customer experience

What does it take to deliver complex and comprehensive, end-to-end experiences that delight your customers and rejuvenate your workforce?

You need the right data and the ability to transform that data into insights. You need technology platforms that can power your operations and your intelligence at speed and scale. Throughout it all, you need deep industry knowledge of your customers’ intents and the business processes that you handle every day.

Building on a long, successful partnership, Accenture, Microsoft and Avanade continue to innovate in how we help our clients. We’re not just improving but also transforming how they operate. And this week brought the latest example of how we’re innovating together to drive disruptive industry outcomes for the benefit of our clients.

At Inspire—Microsoft’s largest partner event of 2022—Microsoft announced a new product: Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform. This platform is powered by Nuance technologies, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Azure.

The platform helps to provide automated and live personalized omnichannel service engagement across voice and digital channels.

We are excited to be the Customer Experience Transformation Partner for the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform. And, we’re designing our Customer Engagement Solutions to help clients get the most out of the new platform.

Together, Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft offer immense possibility. What follows are three new and powerful levers. Acting on these could help transform your customer and agent experience at speed and scale.

1. Industry journeys at speed and scale

Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform facilitates a 360-degree view of your customers through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide rapid resolution, which streamlines service and increases satisfaction. But it still needs industry-specific resources. They’re key to making it highly relevant to both your organization and your customers.

That’s where Accenture Customer Engagement Solutions can help. Public Service agencies are managing multi-week journeys for unemployment benefits, contact tracing and Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT). Customer journeys in other industries are very different.

We’ve worked with industry experts to create sector-specific customer journeys. Examples include claims in insurance, sales and collections in banking, or membership and enrollment in health.

Our assets cover the crucial “last mile” in your transformation. They provide a foundation for designing industry-specific journeys and allow you to focus on user context, moments that matter, and creating opportunities to delight.

2. Consistent, seamless, proactive conversations

Today’s customers expect conversations that span extended periods and shift smoothly between SMS, chat, voice, social and other channels. In short, they want conversations that are consistent, seamless and proactive.

So, how can you deliver personalized and automated multi-week journeys that guide customers through all the required steps? Examples include the journey from car accident to claim settlement, from order to delivery, or from issue to technician to resolution.

What’s more, how can you give customers informed interactions on their time—24/7? And how can you help ensure that you meet them in their space—that is, the channel(s) they prefer for any given interaction? That’s what today’s customers expect.

Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center Platform helps you meet customers in the channels they use every day, from voice to digital.

Keep that conversation going—whether it’s an interaction with your contact center or communicating through messaging services. Gather data insights from your channel interactions. You can use the data to better predict ways to improve the customer experience and delight customers.

3. Game-changing support for contact center agents

In the battle for talent, it’s more important than ever to offer your agents a compelling employee experience. Better insights and technology platforms would help your agents be more effective and focused on the tasks and outcomes that matter most.

How? First, consider automation opportunities. When you automate routine or repetitive intents, humans can devote more time to complex, nuanced customer requests. Examples of routine intents include bill and balance inquiry, change of address, stop/start/pause service.

Second, consider opportunities to use AI to make your agents “super” human. That might include using AI to route calls to the most appropriate agent. Or it might involve serving up customer-specific insights in real time so an agent can provide service that’s more personalized. Through advanced real-time coaching, you enable all of your agents to perform at the level of your best agents.

Serving up the right level of intelligence to frontline agents at the moment of interaction is key to customer AND agent satisfaction. The Accenture-Microsoft-Avanade partnership can help you transform tech from an obstacle into an advantage—and shape better experiences for everyone.

Let’s continue the conversation. Connect with me via LinkedIn and explore more Customer insights.