Focus on team and customers creates memorable experiences

The customer is king is an often-repeated mantra in business – but it only tells half the story. While focusing on their customers’ experiences, brands today should place equal value on the experiences of their people. Anish Sharma, Datacom’s lead customer experience technology architect, says technology can help achieve both goals.

“We now talk more about total experience,” he explains. “We look at the whole ecosystem and develop products designed to enhance the overall experience of both customers and employees.”

These products span a wide range of solutions that make it easier for customers to engage with a brand, and that free up employees’ time to engage in more meaningful customer experience (CX) delivery.

Carefully balancing your CX technology with your human resources is important and a lot of it comes down to your readiness for change, notes Anish. New technology looks good on the surface, but when you deploy it without thinking of the flow-on impact, problems can arise.

“If you’re pushing a technology on your people and their acceptance is low, the deployment may fail. Getting the balance right must come from the change-management process and ascertaining whether your business is really ready for that piece of technology or functionality.”

For example, you may want to introduce a digital channel, such as WhatsApp, to your contact centre. While you’ve improved your customer experience with more ways to interact with your brand, your staff are now dealing with both phone calls and WhatsApp queries – their workload has increased, and their job satisfaction has deteriorated.

“We have to look at all the consequences of introducing a new channel. It may mean you have to hire more people to get the balance right or introduce self-service components as part of the solution. Understanding the implications is something our team can help with.”

Customers have more choice than ever, and the online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, which makes it essential to get the right experience technology. It’s all about changing the mindset, Anish says. Creating frictionless services leads to improved customer loyalty, additional new customers, and happier contact centre staff.

Anish has worked in the tech industry since 1999 and his experience encompasses presales, support, development, implementation and architecture. His current focus is on creating solutions to help Datacom customers gain efficiencies and reduce costs through improvements to their contact centre technology.

“Effective CX technology will improve your bottom line,” he says. “But it’s vital to get the right advice or you can end up with a piece of tech that either has too many bells and whistles and your people struggle to use it, or it can’t do what your business needs it to because you didn’t investigate its functionality properly.”

For Anish and his team, right-sizing technology for organisations is a priority. They do this by analysing an organisation’s business drivers, ascertaining its success criteria (KPIs), balancing automation with human resources, and helping companies understand their audience and how to use technology in the right way.

“We can help businesses understand different channels, their limitations, and how to work with them. With that knowledge comes increased adoption, employees are less stressed about change, and everyone is happier.”

“Typically when you get a product, it’s just a bunch of tools. How you use those tools is important. We try to look for imaginative ways to go beyond what the product was designed for and come up with use cases where we can add efficiency to the whole ecosystem. As an example, we have been looking at using gamification which has typically been used for reward and recognition programs and overlaying it with speech topic modelling technologies to provide real time feedback to agents with respect to compliance.”

As an organisation that helps make an impact for local companies and public sector organisations, Anish says Datacom offers solutions that create great tailored experiences for customers.

“I like the fact that my work is making a meaningful impact to people who need to engage with brands in a frictionless way. I’m mostly behind the scenes, doing the design and proof of concept before I hand off to another team to deploy the solution and interface with the customer, so when I get positive feedback, it’s great.

“At Datacom there’s so much we can do for customers. We’re in the unique position that we run our own contact centres and do contact centres for different businesses and verticals, so we have a lot of experience and we can use that to guide our customers to succeed. This is the value we bring at Datacom, we want people to succeed.”