67% of customer interactions will be managed by intelligent machines
After sharing our thoughts on What future for customer relationship management?3 key issues to understand, let's now look at how to integrate these new challenges into the transformation of Customer Relations Centers.
The study "Experience 2030: The Future of Customer Experience", published by Futurum Research, indicates that by 2030, 67% of customer interactions will be managed by intelligent machines.
With the rise of self-care devices, voice bots and chatbots, the majority of simple customer requests will be automated. So what does the future hold for Customer Relations Centers (CRCs), and how should they adapt?
While most interactions will be automated, the remaining human interactions will have to be characterized by their excellence, since they will involve dealing with key moments and issues that are more complex, longer and more emotionally charged. Companies therefore need to ensure that their teams develop their skills and nurture these exchanges withempathy andemotion, to ensure customer satisfaction.
That's why it's just as important to invest in transforming Customer Relations Centers as it is in deploying AI and selfcare. One cannot be achieved without the other, and the right balance needs to be struck.
10 principles for successfully transforming Customer Relations Centers
1. Qualify customer requests as early as possible
Qualify the reason for contact to direct the customer to the most appropriate solution.
This can be achieved by using AI (semantic analysis of written or spoken requests) to detect the reason for the request, its urgency, the emotion experienced by the customer... Customer requests can be directed towards self-care solutions or handled by an advisor with the right skills (in the case of a highly emotional customer or a key moment in a customer's life, for example).
51% of consumers appreciate that the analysis of their question enables them to be redirected to the right advisor (source: Botnation).
Zoom on : Emailtree.ai
Based on semantic analysis, the Emailtree.ai solution facilitates the orientation of e-mails and automates part of the response process. Email management costs can be reduced by up to 60%. RPA (process automation) can then be used to automate certain back-office actions: updating addresses, transferring to level 2, sending quotes/documentation, etc.
Advisors, for their part, need easy access to customer data, context (web page visited, contract, orders in progress...) and the entire contact history to quickly understand what is at stake in the request. The once & done (first contact resolution rate) can also be improved by analyzing the reasons for repeat contacts, and by ensuring at each contact that the customer's request has been fully processed...
2. Enriching the customer experience
Optimal flow prediction, the use of reminder systems and the implementation of cross-channel paths - still insufficiently used today (telephone to SMS, web to video, etc.) - can drastically reduce customer waiting times.
43% of customers say they will continue to use video calls to contact companies after the health crisis (source: Webhelp).
3. Increasing the room for maneuver of Customer Relations Center advisors
Advisors need to be given more prerogatives and responsibilities to handle complex requests from start to finish (back-office processing, follow-up, call-back, etc.), quickly find solutions to customer problems, retain at-risk customers and personalize request processing.
For example, some companies give their customer advisors annual budgets to carry out sales actions, particularly in the area of claims management.
The versatility of advisors needs to be developed, and new organizational methods can be envisaged, such as alternating between more complex back-office activities and front-office activities...
4. Enhance the value and services offered to customers by the Customer Relations Center.
New value-added missions can be offered in the Customer Relations Centre, such as :
- Personalized, "attentive" support for new customers (especially in B2B) or premium customers: getting started with or demonstrating services, monitoring the first few days to ensure that the service has got off to a good start, personalized assessment of the first few months, proactive or "hugging" calls to resolve customer irritants, etc.
- Proactive information and advice actions: identification and proposal of appropriate advice, offers or services (based on analysis of external data such as weather, or internal data such as consumption, complaints, etc.).
- Use of video to accompany customers in their environment and better understand them
5. Develop the sales appetite and skills of customer relations teams
Zoom on : Cogneed
To focus training efforts on sales efficiency and less on acquiring product knowledge and procedures, real-time response tools are a major asset.
Startup Cogneed offers a real-time virtual assistant for customer advisors:
- Automatic detection of key words in the conversation and dynamic display of relevant information for the advisor
- Automatic suggestion of the "next best question" based on the conversation
- Proposal for CR to be historized in CRM
This tool enables the advisor to focus more on listening to the customer, and less on what he or she has to say or how much knowledge he or she needs, because the advisor has access to a real-time, high-quality response aid.
The sales role of the customer service department is vital. It is on the front line in identifying customer needs and promoting the company's offers.
To achieve this, we need to review our recruitment criteria to ensure that they include a sales mindset, offer long-term training in sales techniques, and make this role an integral part of the CRC's day-to-day work (KPI monitoring, inclusion in performance analysis criteria, dedicated training, team coaching, etc.).
6. And beyond skills, develop employees' interpersonal attitudes too
In addition to the substance of the response provided, the form and therefore the attitudes of the employee are crucial to the customer's experience. We therefore need to identify important relational attitudes, describe them in the form of behaviors perceptible to the customer, encourage teams to appropriate and personalize these behaviors, train them (dedicated bootcamps with simulated situations, serious training games, etc.) and train employees to interact with "sensitive" personalities...
58% of customers want more empathetic customer service agents (Source: Zendesk)
7. Shift the managerial model towards more local support
Supporting employees is essential if they are to develop their skills. To achieve this, it is necessary to increase the number of supervisors by integrating coaches or business referents to support local management (1 supervisor per team, 1 coach for 2 to 3 teams...), to define and deploy managerial positions and rituals adapted to close support, to move from a "super advisor" manager profile to a "coach" profile... This is a necessary investment to support employees' skills development.
8. Optimize the transformation of leads transmitted to the Customer Relations Center.
A range of complementary levers can be used to optimize lead processing: designing multi-channel lead nurturing and follow-up systems, scoring leads to prioritize their processing...
9. Embodying the voice of the customer internally through selected, synthetic feedback.
Focus on :
Speech analytics tools (AlloMedia's The Scribr, Verint...) can be used to transcribe and analyze telephone conversations, drawing out key lessons for customer service and the company in general: detect recurring themes of exchange, analyze weak signals, capture at-risk customers, identify cross-selling or upsell opportunities...
Other solutions, such as Cobbaï, work in a similar way on the "written" voice of the customer: incoming emails, as well as the results of satisfaction surveys or posts on social networks, are captured and consolidated in a single platform that extracts trends thanks to AI. These insights can guide the customer service department's actions: prioritizing the backlog, adapting the sales pitch... but they can also be of interest to the company's other departments in improving their practices.
In daily contact with customers, the customer service department must know how to listen, analyze and synthesize customer expectations and irritants. The few key points to remember can then be highlighted and disseminated within the company to feed the continuous improvement process...
10. Manage the operational and economic performance of customer relations through a selection of relevant indicators.
Providing teams with reliable, high-quality reporting is a prerequisite for improving performance:
- Select relevant performance indicators (pick-up rate, average processing time, average lead processing time, conversion rate, first contact resolution rate, customer satisfaction/NPS/CES, customer-perceived quality of service, etc.).
- Measure them regularly
- Specifically manage multi-channel lead transformation tunnels and compare the performance of different types of leads / detection channels...
Focus on : AlloMedia
AlloMedia's "Voice Cookie" solution reconciles web journeys and telephone calls.
How can iQo help you?
iQo is a new player in the consulting sector, whose mission is to "unleash collective genius to co-construct desirable futures".
Our firm offers a unique approach to co-construction with our customers ...
- We advocate the hybridization of skills and know-how
- We offer you small, agile teams (squads) that are sincerely committed to working alongside you, as an extension of your teams.
- We are "makers" and offer concrete, results-oriented solutions tailored to your specific needs.
...and committed: we are a company with a mission, ISO 14001 certified and soon to be B-corp certified (audit scheduled before summer 2021), and have co-constructed 23 positive-impact commitments with our employees.
Our Marketing & Customer Experience offer is structured around 5 themes: Customer Strategy, Customer Experience Innovation, Marketing & Sales Effectiveness, Customer Relationship Effectiveness and Customer-Oriented Transformation. We have developed specific expertise in CRC optimization (organization, outsourcing of part of the activities, managerial models, team training, development of relational attitudes, etc.).
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