Avaya research indicates that only 14% of back offices are fully automated and tracked against SLAs, yet 'back office' operations such as delivery are among the top five considerations when it comes to repeat purchases and customer satisfaction.
Speaking at the Johannesburg leg of the international Experience Avaya 2019 roadshow on Tuesday, Natalie Keightley, Solutions Marketing Director at Avaya International, said: "Customer experience technology has been slow to integrate into the back office and slow to support workers. When companies have adopted customer experience technologies, they often focus purely on the customer-facing technology. So they may enable the text channel for the customer to speak to the organisation, but fail to consider how this connects to the back office."
She notes that many organisations see marketing and the contact centre as the customer experience enablers, but that functions such as manufacturing and operations are also aligned to enabling the customer experience.
"Now people are starting to realise that customer experience technology could - and maybe should - be applied across the organisation. In fact, consumers in our research said they wanted to be able to talk directly to the delivery drivers. Organisations need to start thinking about these things differently, and asking 'What is happening to enable the customer journey?'" she said. "The delivery driver, for example, is part of the brand - sometimes the face of the brand - and contributes to overall customer experience."
"The principles of customer experience need to be expanded across the organisation. Companies need to understand when they don't action that piece of troubleshooting, it impacts the customer's perception of the organisation. Technology makes it easy to find the right experts in the organisation to resolve the customer query, and if the back office is resolving the query while the customer is engaged with the contact centre, this directly improves first contact resolution and customer experience, and also allows for improved tracking reporting and operational planning."
Through the convergence of contact centre technologies and unified communications, seamless transitions can be made between customer-facing employees and internal teams, supporting 'super service', Avaya said.
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