Standard Focus Transforms CX with Avaya Experience Platform

An Unimpeded Customer Journey

The fulfilment industry is time critical, with expiry on product offerings driving customers to complete their transactions within a certain timeframe. This means Standard Focus’s primary CX goal is to enable its customers to go through their transaction journey unimpeded, without the need to
make contact.

“Our primary goal is to make sure customers don’t need to contact Standard Focus in the first place. Good CX is our customers being pleased that they don’t have to get in touch,” says Nigel Mansfield, Contact Centre Strategic Lead at Standard Focus.

The Solution

Most contact centers aim to solve customer calls quickly and efficiently. Standard Focus, however, would like zero engagements with its contact center, because that would show that the company is doing the best possible job it can with no issues for its customers to report.

The major barrier to reaching this goal was that it did not know what was causing the problems that led to a customer call. However, with Avaya Experience Platform, Standard Focus was able to modernize its customer experience by gaining that additional insight. The solution also meant it could incorporate cloud capabilities like digital channels and AI, to gain actionable insights that reveal why a customer journey has broken and then fix it, so it did not happen again.

Standard Focus has now completed over 250 different automation changes in the backend. In its own way, each one has impacted on improving the customer journey, reducing the reasons why customers might have to call in to the contact center.

Power of Insights

The ability to integrate AI capabilities into Avaya Experience Platform is helping Standard Focus transform its CX with real-time speech recognition and data analysis. This enables Standard Focus to learn in real time, across all touchpoints, if its customers are reporting on a specific part of the tech stack that has gone wrong. Previously, issues were only discovered the next day and Standard Focus only had insight into its chat interactions. Now it can tap into all of its different media streams – chat, email, voice or social – and analyze them to discover where and why a customer journey breaks-off. It then proactively fixes those customer pain points so that there is no longer any need for calls about that issue.

“We now know what our customers are telling us in real time, and we know which part of our technology stack has gone wrong because we’re picking-up what they are saying about a specific problem in the streams from voice, chat, or emails they’ve sent us. We can then react fast to minimize the number of contacts that are happening due to this problem,” explains Nigel Mansfield. “It’s the Avaya Experience Platform architecture that allows us to pass parameters and conversations through to the AI engine and allows us to make decisions in a very tidy and clear way.”

Standard Focus also analyzes its historical data to examine past customer journeys, identify trends over time, work out what’s been going wrong, and what can be fixed and improved upon, to help eliminate those reasons to call.

“Call handling time is down 50% over the last three years and the abandon-rate, most months, is under 1%,” said Nigel Mansfield. “We are also enjoying a 50% enhancement in efficiency through cost reduction. We are heading in the right direction.”

What to Look For

Avaya Experience Platform enables Standard Focus to benefit from intelligent, attribute-based routing to contextualize interactions.

“Attribute-based routing is key as it has an adjunct-routing step so we can understand what a customer has been experiencing on their journey,” explains Nigel Mansfield. “It enables us to look up details that help contextualize that customer and what their journey is. This means we can understand what the customer’s been through, for example, in the last hour on our website. We can see they had a problem 10 minutes ago and what that problem was. So, when they come into the contact center, we can then address them about that problem specifically. Rather than saying, “Hello, who are you? Can you authenticate yourself and tell me what your problem is?” We’re able to provide the agent with the information needed to answer the customer’s question as they come in, dealing with their problem straight away so they’re able to get in and out, and are dealt with cleanly.”

Having an open cloud-based platform has also allowed Standard Focus to build some of its own solutions quickly. For example, when the contact center was challenged by a massive explosion in voice, it was able to build voice bots in three different languages in just four weeks, to help alleviate call volumes.

“We’re now in a fully blended contact center, dealing with all media types, and we’re blending that with bots, so both chatbots and voice bots are blended in together. It’s just a new way of thinking about how contacts are being answered.” said Nigel Mansfield.

New AI Engine

Standard Focus would like to maintain current agent levels whilst its customer-base continues to grow so is working to enable Avaya Experience Platform to assist with efficient ways to answer queries. A new AI engine will rely on unsupervised learning and facilitate the use of suggested text that will be pushed to agents, speeding up interactions and improving quality due to greater accuracy.

Agents are currently supported using knowledge articles, but with the new AI engine, they will be guided in real time through interactions using suggested text. For example, when specific regulations must be complied with, agents can be prompted to tick off on a checklist all the steps required from requesting the correct document, to when the information has been provided.

“The suggested text will not just tell an agent what to say to a customer, but actually tell them specifically the status of their problem, or the balance of their account, for example. Avaya Experience Platform can look-up that contextual information and provide it along within the suggested text so that the agents can deal quickly with those queries,” said Nigel Mansfield. “We’re also working on initiatives that will initiate the changes required to fulfill a particular requirement of the customer, rather than waiting for the customer to come and contact us.”