Catering to the needs of happiness centres

Sunaina Rana
EMIRATES BUSINESS

Customer satisfaction is one of the key indicators towards running a successful business. It supports in measuring and maintaining a scoreboard for the work efficiency of the employees, and also helps in improving the output of the organisation. Genesys, a leading provider of omnichannel customer experience, reveals the attributes that could lead to the success of customer happiness centers.
The UAE government has recently renamed all its customer care departments to customer happiness centers. Friedbert Schuh, Senior Vice President of EMEA — Genesys, shares his views with Emirates Business on how omnichannel enables the government to realise the vision to be the happiest city in the world.

Please share your opinion on the Happiness Ministry’s initiative for customer satisfaction.
It is essential that all organisations join the initiative to be in line with Dubai’s vision to be the smartest and happiest city in the world. With local organisations investing in smart and next-generation omnichannel connected customer journeys through artificial intelligence, proactive services and IoT applications, they efficiently deliver mass micro-personalisation at scale. Omnichannel innovation gives customers easier ways to do business and with customers and partners able to experience, discuss and generate positive experiences, you essentially drive the nation forward. A happy nation in turn becomes a productive country.

Launching the Arabic platform, the company has opened doors to wider audience. What impact would it have on the industry?
The Arabic language interface will enable the Genesys customer experience platform to cater to the needs of local organisations and government happiness centres. With this platform, Arabic speakers now have access to an array of capabilities including support for all channels, reporting and analytics, workforce
management, and speech and text analytics. The
capabilities will manage customer interactions across a customer journey and lifecycle and benefit organisations across a range of industries including government, telecommunications and financial services.

What difference do you see in the demands of the customers over the years?
Essentially, companies are experiencing mounting pressure to improve the customer experience and reduce costs at the same time. Customers empowered by the internet, social media and mobile technologies can quickly and easily find and share information on a company’s products, services and pricing whenever they need it. With real-time choices at their fingertips, customers are able to make faster comparisons of competitors, and are thus more demanding of responsiveness from businesses than ever.

What are the main
challenges organisations face with their customer care infrastructure?
Many organisations use disparate systems, including legacy or proprietary technologies, to manage customer interactions throughout the customer journey. This approach proves costly in terms of time and money, and additional risk associated with managing complex environments. It also limits business flexibility with a dependency on too many systems, an overall lack of interoperability, siloed operations, and expensive, slow technology evolutions. The pressure to continually add new touchpoints makes it even more difficult to meet service goals and customer demands. And, it extends into workload and people efficiencies. Offline work items are assigned manually, and managed differently than other interaction channels. Limited insights into team workload, and employee productivity and performance across the enterprise result in frequent backlogs and missed SLAs.
Many companies are unable to leverage employees across the enterprise —whether they are in contact centres, branch offices, back office functions, or remote or home workers. The lack of global, 360 degree visibility and controls amplifies these challenges, especially for companies managing multiple or worldwide contact centre operations, or working with outsourcers.
With Genesys, our customers gain centralised management capabilities to schedule correctly, ensure service levels are being met across their entire operation, and reduce total cost of ownership. They are able to make use of employees across the enterprise, using context and business rules to identify the most knowledgeable people on the team to address specific customer needs. Tasks are streamlined, their employees
are empowered, and
customers receive a seamless experience across their omnichannel journeys.

What has been the
impact of digitalisation on the industry?
Digital innovation has transformed the way we communicate, shop and buy. With unlimited data access and choices, customers today expect instant gratification. They have company and product data at their disposal and demand that businesses know them and deliver exceptional service. Companies must utilise digital networks and all customer interactions online and offline to garner deeper customer understanding. Big data technologies provide companies with the opportunity to leverage new data types and sources that were not feasible before; including digital data.
Today’s digital revolution has fuelled enormous customer engagement expectations. Nowhere is that more clear than in the contact center, where customer engagement models are being rapidly transformed.
The rise of ecommerce, social and mobile has changed how customers engage with brands. Today’s digitally savvy customers expect organisations to keep pace with their shifting preferences. When they need to complete a single task, whether it is buying a product, answering a question, or understanding a bill, they expect seamless, personalised communications across all channels and touchpoints. They want an experience that requires low effort on their part.

How does omnichannel contribute to customer satisfaction?
Omnichannel customer experiences essentially give consumers easier ways to do business, and with customers and partners able to experience, discuss and generate positive experiences, you create a platform for interaction which caters to the needs of the customer. In reality no customer wants to repeat themselves or wait. They want a solution to a problem now and want the world to know they have a problem with your service. With omnichannel platforms, the process of
maintaining customer relationships becomes easier and more effective in turn leading to satisfied
customers.

What is the target that you are looking forward to achieve in the UAE over the next couple of years?
Genesys aims to continue its journey in line with the UAE’s national programme for happiness and positivity by providing even more customer happiness centres, Genesys aims to continue sharing key insights and provide the latest technologies on what drives regular customer engagements to experiences.
Our goal is to ultimately generate long-lasting happy customer relationships for the years to come while catering to the needs of our customers in the UAE.