Five competitive advantages of an omnichannel experience
An omnichannel is a business communication strategy that focuses on giving customers the power to choose how they want to contact you. Whether through a chatbot, email, phone call, or text message, an omnichannel is designed in a way to provide a seamless experience no matter which method of communication customers choose. Research has shown younger-generation customers prefer messaging-based communication over phone calls and emails due to the lack of disruptions. Customers want to receive assistance while performing their daily activities without having to put their lives on hold, but a personalized experience is not the only advantage of an omnichannel. Here are four other benefits.
1. Less agent effort needed
Many call centers are the culprit of high turnover rates. Employees are overworked. Dealing with frustrated customers is not easy. Nothing is more demotivating than doing repetitive tasks all year long. Agents are not always recognized for their efforts. A call center job is not your typical 9-5. These are just a few of the downsides of a call center. With an omnichannel, requests are distributed across multiple channels, giving employees more time to focus on more rewarding tasks without overextending themselves.
2. Improves and enhances customer experience
The modern customer does not want to be restricted to a single channel when reaching out. They want to get in touch with you whenever and wherever they want, without it disrupting their lives. An omnichannel does just that. It provides customers with a stream of seamless communication with the same high quality level of service across every channel.
3. Cost effective and efficient
Expect a significant reduction in costs when you opt for sending messages to your customer’s channel of choice compared to when you overwhelm them through every outlet possible.
4. Centralizes data
Due to the shift in technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation, data is now seen as an essential asset to how organizations can improve their efficiency. What was once a step that required information-gathering before serving a customer is now readily available for agents. Employees from different departments within a company can access real-time customer data from a single place. This means call center agents no longer have to gather all the customer’s information before serving them, saving more employee time and effort and dissolving any customer frustrations. Unifying your database can also help identify patterns in customer behavior and deliver valuable insight to improve a customer’s overall experience.
5. Deflects calls
Calls are deflected when your points of contact are distributed across multiple channels. For example, customers can opt for other means of assistance like chat or email, where they are not required to pick up their phone. Customers can even start or stop a service, send complaints, enroll in recommendation programs, and personalize their Customers can self-serve and be more efficient to solve any issues they face on their own.
Looking to adopt an omnichannel business strategy? Let us handle it from start to finish. Book a demo with us today and reap the benefits of an omnichannel.
Top Four Digital Agent Myths Busted
Today, more and more companies are keeping up with the latest digital trends in an effort to build a future-ready workforce. Some are looking up to digital agents. However, the majority of companies resort to human labor-based business process outsourcing (BPO) for back and front-office operations. This is in the hopes of a high return on investment. But there is a major downside that companies seem to overlook with this decision.
Human-based BPO has a lifeline of up to five to ten years. This makes it a non-sustainable solution for companies seeking future-proof solutions. Aside from that, BPO fails to measure valuable insight on user-experience, creating a ripple effect of endless consequences. Overall, companies begin to suffer financially from high customer churn and investment failure. On the bright side, digital agents are the future workforce, and they are already here. However, just like anything else, they are no exception to being a target of criticism and misconceptions. Let’s tackle them one by one.
1. Robotic sounding voice based conversational agents are not fluent in enough languages
While this may be true, covering enough languages fluently and localization go hand in hand. Artificial intelligence, the technology responsible for conversational agents, adapts through progressive learning algorithms when given new data. AI can recognize and extract structure and regularities in data and convert them into algorithms to learn a certain skill. The quality of voice and human-like interaction increases in maturity the more conversational AI is used through its evolving capabilities. This means companies can improve the capability of these services the more they use them.
2. Intent and context need to be updated every now and then
Natural Language Processing is a self-sufficient technique that is capable of independently performing a syntax and semantic analysis to better understand the user’s inquiry through a digital agent.
Tedious exceptions can be automated so that employees doing menial tasks are trained into higher caliber professionals. Exception management is one example of a job that requires problem-solving as the main skill to solve high priority cases. A human agent is expected to monitor digital agents to ensure the digital workforce is running smoothly. In the case of an exception, these agents are trained to intervene and solve the issue accordingly. When human agents are coupled with an empowered digital workforce, more than half of process time is reduced altogether. Employees become more efficient and customers become more satisfied – a win-win situation for everyone involved.
4. You can never automate 100% of the interactions
With proper segmentation engines, targeted personas, rules, tolerance, and approval limits, anything and everything can be automated. Through data mining and tribal knowledge, you can automate up to 80% of human-to-human interaction and business processes. Although some argue that the “human factor” would be missed from customer interactions, customers just want to be served and served efficiently. Additionally, digital agents can only execute requests that are within their approved limits, leaving critical tasks to the human workforce. Through collaborative intelligence, digital and human agents can serve customers efficiently.
In a world where technology is ever-changing, companies that outsource business processes must evolve and seek ways to ensure a future-ready workforce. Avertra is a digital experience company with an ongoing mission to simplify customer and employee experiences. With a decade worth of experience in various industries, we help automate businesses, even those that outsource business processes with a different solution provider.
With its proven track record of many successful and fruitful partnerships, Avertra has proven that not only can their digital agents handle complex business process executions such as start and stop service, and resolve high bill complaints, complex billing outsorts, and correcting asset placement and more, but all of these complex processes are executed without involving a single human and wasting their valuable time. In result, agents are repurposed for more meaningful tasks in need of human skill.
Book a demo today with Avertra for a chance to be part of the digital revolution and expect a high return on investment
The Future of Work: Intelligent Process Automation
Companies that want to reap the benefits of digital transformation need to be prepared for some change. But change isn’t necessarily bad, especially when it can improve efficiency, employee satisfaction, and customer journeys. This is where Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) comes into play – the phenomenon defining the future of work.
In an interview with Bashir Bseirani, CEO & CTO at Avertra Corp., we delve into how companies can innovate, enhance operational excellence, and most of all, create people-driven organizations.
With a myriad of learning, reasoning, and contextual decision-making capabilities, IPA executes repetitive tasks without the need for human intervention. This reduces the reliance on manual processes while still sustaining the human touch that is essential to many businesses.
Let’s dive deeper into Bashir’s take.
How does IPA unify user experiences?
Bseirani: As consumers, we expect things to happen now. Silicon Valley enterprises, like Facebook, Uber, Amazon made us reliant on instant services. With the rising demand in customer expectations, they now expect quick responses to complaints and personalized experiences. IPA alone has the ability to connect systems and processes to each other to ensure an end-to-end experience with a people-first approach. For example, in the utility industry, starting your electricity service is automated without the need for an agent to intervene. This then automatically integrates the start service into the field services system and sends a direct confirmation to the client, completing the full cycle of the job.
Investing in systems that can talk to each other allows for smoother interactions between humans. Self-service and automation together allow employees to remove low value purpose tasks while increasing customer satisfaction. For example, let’s say a user has a complaint or request, through IPA, a virtual agent can handle this request via the customer’s channel of choice without the need to contact a human agent. Automation allows you to go to a human only if necessary based on the context and the extremity of the request, which you can set tolerances for. This streamlines the relationship between human interactions and evaluates the best use of employees because their time is of value.
How does IPA support workforce empowerment?
Bseirani: Reducing manual touchpoints for employees means that you are reducing the overall number of steps to complete a single request or process. This opens up space for employees to really focus on the problem at hand and make productive decisions instead of wasting time navigating between screens, checklists, governance, and all different types of tedious tasks that come with process management. The main benefit of automation is enabling employees to work on more complex, high value tasks and quality output. Through enhanced work-life balance, employees are given the freedom to innovate and cultivate skills for their personal and professional growth.
At Avertra, we practice what we preach. Our team is automating the entire employee lifecycle for our Human Resources department from onboarding, recommended health plans, performance management, career development, and beyond. This will lead to not only a great internal employee experience for us, but it will also provide detailed visibility into our employee lifecycle as a whole. There are many different use cases internally and externally for IPA that can support organizational efficiency and scalability.
What are some of the benefits of IPA?
Bseirani: In a world where companies want to bring out the best of their employees and optimize internal processes, IPA is an effortless way to do both and has the power to build a polished business environment while also enabling businesses to reap these benefits:
Save employees hours: There is no longer a need to waste time on paper-based manual tasks. IPA can handle the bulk repetitive tasks for you. This will save thousands of employee hours a month, resulting in enabled and empowered teams.
Reduce operational costs: With high cost labor markets being a big financial burden on organizations, there is now an opportunity to reduce the overall costs of staffing, sustaining resources, and the human labor costs of executing processes.
Reduce human error: Humans make mistakes, it’s inevitable. Whether it’s the process of giving a discount or making a modification to a document, there is always a possibility for subjective error. This will have a downstream impact across the organization. With IPA, there isn’t a limit. IPA can read a document, understand an image and text, and most importantly, learn and understand contexts to make logical and optimized decisions. With a proper flow, training, and technology stack as the foundation, organizations can reduce reliance on human judgment to make logical decisions.
What can you automate?
Bseirani: The question should be what can’t you automate? You can automate any system-to-system interaction, human-to-system interaction, and in some cases, up to 80% of human-to-human interaction.
With our experience at Avertra, we’ve been able to work with enterprises such as utilities, banking, telecommunications, and Internet Service Providers to automate complex business processes of all kinds. This includes start and stop service, exception management and resolution, bill complaints, asset replacement, and beyond.
What role does the employee experience play in achieving an overall great customer experience and how does IPA fit in?
Bseirani: As ironic as it sounds, IPA has the ability to create a people-driven organization. If you don’t focus on the overall well-being of your team, customers will suffer from a poor customer experience in various forms. To name a few, delayed responses and unresolved issues are some issues that customers will face. IPA can make internal teams happier by giving them the tools to solve their own problems in a quick and efficient manner. The higher the work quality is, the happier the employee is, leading to a great customer experience.
Intelligent process automation is one of those things that can be hard to wrap your head around at first. But once you do, you’ll see the endless possibilities: imagine having a virtual agent that can handle all the tedious work for you so you can focus on what’s really important. Imagine having a system that knows exactly what needs to be done and does it without any human intervention — delivering it in a form that’s ready for consumption by your customers or employees. Imagine being able to track every step of each process, so if something goes wrong, you know exactly where to look for the cause of the problem.
Automation will stop being just a buzzword in the market and become more central for businesses to implement. Now is the moment to take strategic steps to ensure not only your survival in such a competitive landscape, but lead to greater creativity and innovation across your business, employees, and customers simultaneously.
8 strategies from a customer success expert
In the United States, 59% of people will walk away from a company after several bad experiences, and 17% after just one bad experience. This means, one big error, or unforeseen disaster, could lead to losing many of your customers. As digital transformation continues to reshape the world of customers, organizations are constantly hunting for the latest technologies and processes in the market that can potentially reform their business and provide exceptional customer service. Considering its cross-functional approach and multipurpose, customer success has become an essential ingredient in the digital transformation journey of any business.
So what exactly is it and how does the term apply to an organization as a whole?
Customer success is a mindset
Today’s most successful emerging companies have already invested in customer success. Without a doubt, these companies were 21% more likely than their stagnant counterparts to prioritize customer success. Although some may argue otherwise, customer success is much more than simply a department within a company. It is a mindset that can be practiced across an entire organization to enhance your customer’s overall experience. It is a cross-functional approach that requires strong teamwork to achieve higher quality products and services.
As a company, your success is directly tied to how well your customer’s needs and expectations are met or exceeded. So how do we do this?
1. Build a strong team of leaders
From the founder of the company to the last hired employee, customer success is everyone’s responsibility. When hiring, reach out to people who understand your vision and the importance of placing customers at the forefront of the company’s values goes a long way. As a matter of fact, those who understand the connection between customer satisfaction and success leads to greater innovation and productivity.
2. Innovate with your end user in mind
Some customers are inevitably going to face issues during the process of setting up their account. By focusing on improving the experience of end users through interactive tutorials, you help guide them towards becoming more self-sufficient. In fact, building customers to become more independent will build more loyalty and trust towards your brand, and a greater customer experience overall.
3. Onboard customers and engage them all the way through
A great onboarding process that covers all aspects of your product or service will help set a great first impression. Getting them acquainted through the necessary tools, training, resources, and knowledge is the first and foremost step in building loyal customers. Answering questions, providing step-by-step tutorials, offering unlimited one-on-one guidance from representatives, and celebrating whenever a customer uses your product correctly are all ways you can better connect.
The second step is involving your customers throughout the entire development process to understand and match their vision. Keeping them in the loop will let them know exactly what to expect, while your team responds to their needs and expectations. All too often, companies force their own ideas, and forget to take the time to understand what their customers truly want and need. Not doing enough research to gather the pain points of your end-user is the recipe for failure.
Keep in mind that once you’ve passed the implementation phase, being proactive shouldn’t be understated. Providing useful recommendations and the needed maintenance and support during all phases will bring more positive feedback in return.
4. Develop a customer success strategy
A defined process and plan will help you meet your business vision effectively. It starts with the most basic building blocks such as getting to know your customer to developing a strategy around your target persona.
5. Empower customers with intuitive tools
When you support your end-user with a user-friendly and intuitive interface, they become self-reliant. This will make them more familiar with your product, making them less likely to seek alternatives to your service.
6. Ask for feedback
Not only should you survey your customers before ideation, but providing a follow-up survey six months later goes a long way. Utilizing feedback will help you map and identify potential roadblocks, and address them accordingly. Doing so will also pave the way towards an upsell or cross-sell of a product.
7. Streamline communication
Optimizing your communication responding quickly will build a stronger relationship with your customers. For example, around-the-clock customer service and various channels of communication is one way you can enhance their experience.
8. Provide real value
Ask yourself, what do end users benefit from your product or service? Will it make them happier? If it doesn’t change their life or provide real value, it’s easier for them to forget it.
Customer success is a competitive differentiator, and digital transformation has made it more important than ever. Cultivating customer success as a mindset across your organization will build a stronger relationship with your customers while also being the catalyst for better end-user experiences. Stay up to date with the latest industry-related news by checking out our resources page.
Women in Tech: How Avertra Empowers Women
Women will occupy 33% of Information and Communications Technology jobs globally in 2022 and at least 24% of them are leadership positions. Although tech is known to be a male dominated industry, Avertra is doing its due diligence to shift that narrative. With plans to bridge the gender gap and employ more women in the workforce, the company aims to empower women in positions that are typically male-dominated.
This article will highlight and provide a platform for four women in tech and within the company to share their experiences with Avertra.
What were your key achievements during your time at Avertra?
Dalia Abu Zeid (Chief of Staff, Jordan): Where do I begin? For starters, I oversaw the launch of the marketing team and recruited a wonderful team of women that empower and bring the best out of one another. I also gained more confidence as a professional dealing with C-Level executives. This led me to my first promotion where I am taking on more strategic roles and responsibilities.
Jyotsna Gupta (SAP Senior Technology Consultant, India): From being a member of the team to becoming a technical lead, it has been a wonderful journey of growth, and exploring new roles and responsibilities. I have advanced my knowledge by consecutive trainings and earned two certifications:
AWS Partner: Accreditation (Technical)
AWS Partner: Cloud Economics Accreditation
Mireille Bseirani (Director of Operations, USA): I am proud of the contributions I’ve made to help build, maintain, and enrich the company culture our leadership envisioned. I have been able to unify and globalize our Human Resources department, while continuously striving to streamline our processes without compromising personal connections with Avertra’s greatest assets, our employees.
Rahaf Alshannaq (Quality Assurance Lead, Jordan): Being recognized for my hard work as a team lead gives me the strength to gain the necessary knowledge and experience within the industry. I perform my tasks with utmost diligence and confidently overcome the challenges I face on a daily basis to deliver the highest level of work possible.
Do you feel like you face any hardships as a woman working in your industry?
Dalia Abu Zeid (Chief of Staff, Jordan): I’ve been fortunate enough to work under the leadership of strong and supportive women for almost my entire career. At the moment, I’m working with a great leader who is especially vocal about his support for women at Avertra.
When it comes to hardships, thankfully, I have never experienced any firsthand. However, I do believe it’s important to keep in mind that while I have not faced any problems, many women across different organizations and industries do face discrimination on a daily basis simply because of their gender.
Jyotsna Gupta (SAP Senior Technology Consultant, India): The foremost challenge is that most of the people in any given organization are men. With that being said, it may become difficult as our society still remains a male-dominant one. However, this creates an opportunity for women to stand out and create a long-lasting impression from the off. Also, women can often be perceived as more emotional and less decisive than men. Yet, women bring more diverse mental and emotional experiences to the workplace.
Mireille Bseirani (Director of Operations, USA): Thankfully, no. While it may appear to be a male-dominated industry, there are a tremendous amount of talented women in tech at the table, especially at Avertra. Our company culture has zero tolerance for gender bias and I am fortunate to work among professionals who embrace diversity and respect everyone’s contributions.
Rahaf Alshannaq (Quality Assurance Lead, Jordan): Avertra is an institution that empowers women in tech in leadership roles, which was a key factor that brought the leadership qualities within me to light. I am proud to have had the opportunity to water the seeds of the powerful woman that I am today. So personally, I never faced any challenges as a woman in a leadership role for Avertra.
How has Avertra empowered you as a woman?
Dalia Abu Zeid (Chief of Staff, Jordan): Avertra always encourages us to speak up, take the reins, and step outside of our comfort zones. It may be intimidating at first, but its a step towards personal and professional growth. Avertra aims to realize equity and reach more inclusion at the workplace with an end goal of reaching an equal ratio of men and women in tech.
Jyotsna Gupta (SAP Senior Technology Consultant, India): Avertra helped me with unique transformational ideas, and fresh new outlooks and perspectives at personal and professional grounds.
Mireille Bseirani (Director of Operations, USA): One of the most impactful ways Avertra has empowered me was through their continuous support and recognition of all my efforts. At the same time, I am constantly being challenged and encouraged to achieve my long-term goals.
Management is keenly aware that women from some cultures may not be comfortable with voicing themselves, or aggressively pursuing their goals. However, they encourage you to get you out of your comfort zone and enable you to achieve things you never thought were possible. I’m grateful for that.
Rahaf Alshannaq (Quality Assurance Lead, Jordan): Avertra creates a significant ripple effect that influences every single one of us. I feel confident enough to trust my own voice and express my ideas. This in return, helps me motivate my team better and provide them with the right direction and support for success.
Why do we need more women in leadership?
Dalia Abu Zeid (Chief of Staff, Jordan): Good question! I believe that women in tech can offer organizations an empathetic and creative perspective, as well as great leadership. Women in tech and leadership positions is also inspiring for young women who are just starting their careers and looking for mentorship that is more relatable to them.
From my own personal experience, it meant a great deal to be able to learn from my female leaders who made a great impact at their organizations. Gender diversity has also been proven to increase productivity, profitability, as well as boosting overall morale.
Jyotsna Gupta (SAP Senior Technology Consultant, India): While every leader’s style is unique, women are more likely to display qualities needed by modern leaders. Women bring skills, different perspectives, as well as structural and cultural diversity to drive effective solutions.
Mireille Bseirani (Director of Operations, USA): We need to break down preconceived ideas of who can be a leader and achieve a better balance overall. I’m not referring to diversity quotas, but rather redefining what a leader looks like and valuing innate qualities women bring to the table.
Some notable traits of the women in leadership roles at Avertra are mindfulness, empathy, effective communicators, and great multitaskers, all of which have a positive impact on their teams and business as a whole. These leaders are in a unique position to mentor and empower the next generation of leaders, irrespective of gender, while redefining what a leader is. More importantly, this necessary change of perception increases exponentially when employees engage with others and move on to the next journey in their career.
Rahaf Alshannaq (Quality Assurance Lead, Jordan): Women are able to wear many hats. They can balance careers, households, and parental tasks, which give them the ability to make wise decisions as leaders and boost teamwork across an environment that is less authoritative and more cooperative. This brings a team of family, and implements a new culture within the business.
The tech industry has undergone a major shift in terms of gender diversity. Women in tech should be fearless and seize the opportunity to create positive change in what used to be a male-dominated industry. Companies like Avertra are empowering women and encouraging its male employees to continue being supportive of their female coworkers. While women reshape the narrative at Avertra, the company continues to work towards its primary goal: employing an equal number of women and men at the company.
Five tips and tricks to make the most out of your workday
If you’re anything like most professionals, your job takes up most of your time than anything else. “Work smarter not harder” is an ever-popular saying that has been used to describe more efficient means of work. But what does it really mean? More importantly, how can you achieve this skill and make the most out of your workday? While it may seem counterintuitive, with the right tips, you can learn how to work less for more. Read more to find out how.
1. Make a to-do list
As soon as you get to work, you may find yourself bombarded with requests and urgent tasks from the morning. On top of that, there are probably a million other things on your mind to distract you from getting any real work done. To-do lists are essential if you plan on beating work overload. But when you don’t use them effectively, your coworkers might think you’re unreliable. Needless to say, when we write things down, we create accountability for ourselves. This is why, before starting your day, take a few minutes to write down everything you need to do in one place so you don’t miss anything important. This way, you’ll have a clearer idea of what tasks need to be prioritized and the order you’ll do them in. Instead of piling up all your work responsibilities and losing focus on the important things, you’ll have a clearer idea of what tasks need to be completed with a to-do list.
2. Plan the next day in advance
This tip may seem obvious, but the majority skip it entirely. Knowing what’s coming up in advance helps us prioritize and plan our day better. When you set a specific time frame to work on certain tasks, you are more likely to commit to it, be productive, and complete them on time. Whether you use a notebook and pen, or an online calendar, make sure you get down any appointments or meetings you have throughout the day. This will help you prioritize and plan your day efficiently so that you can set more time on what matters the most to you.
3. Set and commit to a deadline
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with work, set a deadline to make sure the task is complete on time. Delaying tasks will only induce stress. Setting deadlines will give you a sense of urgency and prevent the risk of putting things off for too long or finishing everything all at once.
4. Take a break
Although taking short breaks may not sound as enticing as a holiday, research has found significant benefits. As work becomes more intense and demanding, burnout can be your brain’s way of saying it needs a break. Taking a break can simply mean eating a healthy meal to recharge your batteries, or going for a walk for a change of scenery. This way, you can return back to work fully refreshed and focused. In fact, studies have found that taking a break can make you more creative and help you complete tasks more accurately. When learning something new, it can also help you absorb new information much faster. Don’t let other responsibilities get in the way of recognizing when you should prioritize your well-being.
5. Overcome your procrastination
No one is born with self discipline. In fact, it’s a learned skill that takes years to master. The first step to adapting a new habit is understanding where you fall short. If you find yourself constantly putting things off until the last minute, take a moment to dig deeper. When you find yourself delaying tasks, you may want to ask yourself: what’s stopping me from starting this task? Is it a lack of understanding of the task? Is it the fear of failure? Although procrastination is commonly mistaken for laziness, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In actuality, it is a way of coping with difficult emotions triggered by certain tasks. For example, a fear of failure may cause you to postpone completing a task to avoid facing these negative emotions. Understanding and resolving these emotions first can bring you one step closer to overcoming the most stubborn types of procrastination.
We often think that hard work always has promising results. Although this may be true, it usually comes at the cost of your own well-being. With the right tips and tricks, you can make the most out of your workday without losing yourself. Not only does work become more enjoyable and fulfilling when you work smarter, but success becomes easier to achieve. This is why it’s important to form healthy habits and routines to help you make the most out of your workday.
