Customer experience (CX) is defined as the totality of a customer’s experience with a product, brand, or service, encompassing all interactions pre, during, and post transaction. Communications service providers (CSPs) are faced with myriad opportunities to expand their market share simply by providing good, responsive service, such as responding to customer inquiries in a timely fashion, quickly activating new service orders, and anticipating customer needs. Similarly, bad CX – such as forcing customers to wait in long service queues, not providing updates on out-of-stock equipment, or not resolving billing issues during the first interaction – can quickly drive customers away, as switching costs between CSPs are relatively low.
A recent survey of 3,000 consumers located across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific conducted in the summer of 2021 by Coleman Parkes Research on behalf of Amdocs found that human workers remain a core component for engaging, supporting, and delighting customers. According to those surveyed, the biggest driver of excellent customer service was the quality of service or “getting the basics right.” More than four in five consumers (85%) believe that highly skilled agents who can handle any type of issue are pivotal to excellent customer experience. In addition, consumers indicated that a knowledgeable staff (71%), a quick resolution (70%), 24/7 access (64%), and easy access to the agents are the most desirable factors when interacting with a company.
One such tool that clearly is suited to address these needs is Amdocs Customer Engagement, which was announced in recently. Amdocs Customer Engagement takes a customer-centric care approach to align people, processes, and engagement channels via a unified, intuitive interface, and can be deployed seamlessly across the contact center, retail environment, and back office.
Related Article: Alchemer’s Customer Feedback Platform Finds Favor with Amdocs
Telecommunications industry insights and experience
Amdocs Customer Engagement’s powerful and flexible feature set, workflow support architecture, and interface design reflect the company’s years of experience serving telecommunications providers. The platform includes industry-specific tools and features that ensure the specific functional and CX needs of operators are met, including billing care, commerce, case management, and interactions.
Built using an open and modular architecture, Amdocs Customer Engagement offers CSPs a powerful, easy to deploy, intuitive, and flexible platform that can accommodate customer growth and the expansion of products, services, and processes. Built on the Amdocs Low-Code Experience Platform, Amdocs Customer Engagement provides business users with the power to rapidly design, control and launch new experiences quickly. Furthermore, the application’s embedded Amdocs-developed AI capabilities allow contextualized agent workflows, automates routine agent tasks, and can be used to anticipate a customer’s intent and then provide appropriate responses or actions.
A unified front end, powered by a robust integration of back-end data sources
Amdocs Customer Engagement stands apart from the crowd of customer engagement solutions on the market, leveraging its unified interface, support for seamless switching between engagement channels, and its ability to provide a contextual agent experience for each user profile, regardless of channel.
This single-screen, unified front end provides workers with data pulled in and integrated from a variety of silos that are commonly used in telecommunications environments. Real-time data from purchasing, accounts, billing, case management, and technical support can be integrated into a single workspace that allows workers to see contextual data that helps them quickly understand a customer’s issue, see relevant supporting information, and view previous interactions with the customer. Whether located in a contact center or within a retail environment, a worker can quickly access existing knowledge management systems, enabling them to use contextual searching to quickly find the most relevant information to provide a solution, instead of making customers wait in a physical or virtual queue.
Related White Paper: Amdocs Customer Engagement Solution Profile
Amdocs’ Customer Engagement offers a comprehensive solution to both drive customer engagement and support contact center, retail store, and back office workers
Another key issue facing CSPs—talent acquisition and retention – also is addressed by Amdocs Customer Engagement. Many customer-facing workers are faced with trying to master myriad systems, including ordering, billing, provisioning, and scheduling, and that can negatively impact both the efficiency of their work, as well as the agent’s job satisfaction. Further, both retail store and contact center agents are measured based on how fast they resolve issues, but are forced to navigate manual processes (such as switching between different systems, or referring to a separate knowledge base) that eat up valuable time and attention.
Amdocs Customer Engagement’s agent workspace addresses this issue via a cleanly designed and streamlined interface that provides retail, contact center, and back-office workers with the contextual interaction data they need to allow them to build relationships with customers, instead of wasting time navigating between a mishmash of disparate applications across several screens. The single-screen interface pulls in data from disparate back-end systems, and can display customer information, agent assistance tools, unified messaging inbox, federated search tools, customer journey information, customer intent data, and agent performance KPIs. All made easily editable and configurable with Amdocs Low-code Experience Platform
The field of vendors providing CX software is both wide and deep. Amdocs is leading the market by incorporating the key features required by both retail and contact center workers that allow CSPs to effectively deliver CX to customers in a seamless, integrated fashion. Similarly, the company’s focus on worker job satisfaction should not be overlooked, given the current and future challenges of attracting and retaining frontline workers within the telecommunications space.
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
