Identify your organization's goals - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Identify your organization's goals

The customer experience should align with your overall business objectives and outcomes. These might be long-term objectives that are directed by senior leadership, or short-term initiatives that are driven by individual teams or business units. These goals should align with improving the overall customer experience.

Recommendation: Start by working with relevant stakeholders in the organization to discover their top short-term and long-term priorities. Gather data from all relevant departments, and identify patterns and trends. Prioritize these initiatives, and assign reasonable timelines to each goal.

The following list provides sample business goals. These could be categorized as short-term or long-term based on your organization's needs.

  • Improve containment within the IVR

    This means improving capabilities within the IVR system to allow customers to manage simple tasks themselves, and leaving agents to handle more complex issues. This could include automating frequently asked questions, simple status queries (such as status of ticket, flight, claim, or order), balance inquiries, password resets, and customer authentication.

  • Drive sales and revenue

    Contact centers can help drive sales and revenue for companies. An effective IVR design and an efficient agent desktop experience can help with upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Example: proactively offering an upgrade to a customer who recently bought an airline ticket.

  • Personalize customer experience

    Companies often deliver monotonous self-service experiences that do not drive any engagement from their customers. Customers are treated with the same template of options, and callers quickly end up seeking an agent instead of looking for self-service opportunities. These poor experiences can also impact customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Personalization can go a long way in changing customer sentiment. Positively identifying the customer is a prerequisite to delivering personalization. Example: greeting customers by name or offering custom IVR menu options based on their user history.

  • Reduce abandoned calls

    Lack of self-service options or personalization can often lead to longer wait times, which might lead to abandoned calls and poor CSAT scores. This can also mean a loss of revenue, especially for a sales contact center. Effective IVR design can help mitigate this problem in several ways, such as automating frequently asked questions, checking queue status, and offering alternate interaction options.

  • Improve first contact resolution (FCR)

    The ability to resolve the customer's issue the very first time they get in touch with the contact center is known as first contact resolution. Multiple factors can help improve this metric, but the right IVR options and design are key. Example: identification of caller on the IVR, identification of caller intent, and context-based routing to an appropriately skilled agent.

  • Reduce average handling time (AHT)

    Average handling time refers to the average time spent by an agent with a customer in a live conversation. Companies generally want to reduce this time so that they can resolve customer queries faster, reduce customer wait time in the queue, and improve overall CSAT scores. An intelligent IVR that gathers the customer information in advance helps reduce AHT by enabling the agent to get to the resolution more quickly. Example: automating customer authentication, customer triage, and data gathering or lookup.