For 85% Of Consumers, Positive CX Includes A Human Touch

Despite digitalization and unassisted self-service channels, decision-makers at CSPs see agents as pivotal to sales growth and brand success

The vast majority (85%) of consumers still rate highly-skilled and knowledgeable contact center and retail store agents as key to an excellent customer experience from Communications Service Providers (CSPs), according to new research commissioned by Amdocs, provider of software and services to communications and media companies.

The Give the Agents Wings report, based on research carried out for Amdocs by Coleman Parkes Research, reveals that despite digitalization and the growing role of AI and unassisted self-service channels, decision-makers at CSPs see agents as pivotal to sales growth and brand success.

Agents themselves, however, are often too overwhelmed to provide the “wow” moments that today’s savvy, demanding, empowered consumer expects. They say they are being held back by challenges including the growing number of services on offer (73%), the need to be knowledgeable across multiple products, platforms and technologies (62%) and the increase in customer interactions (51%).

Of the 3,000 consumers surveyed for Amdocs across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, 70% said they would likely switch brands if they were offered better customer service by another provider.

The publication of the report comes as Amdocs launches a new cloud-native application designed to enable CSPs’ customer service agents to provide omnichannel, personalized, streamlined and efficient support tailored to individual needs.

Amdocs Customer Engagement has been designed with the complex and multi-tasking nature of today and tomorrow’s agent role in mind. It allows contact center and retail store agents to manage all care and commerce aspects of the customer relationship.

Embedded with telco-specific AI/ML capabilities and enhanced automation, the single, unified and modular application facilitates key aspects of the customer service agent’s complex and varied role. It includes speech-to-text tools, enables multi-topic interactions and multi-channel sessions and helps anticipate customer needs, identifying the best solution to a query and exceeding customers’ expectations.

Built on the Amdocs Low-Code Experience Platform to enable easy customization of the agent experience, the Amdocs Customer Engagement open architecture integrates with any system and partner, as well as any internal or external data source. It is also pre-integrated with Amdocs Commerce & Care Suite and Amdocs Customer Experience Suite.

“Technology increasingly underpins customer experiences across the telecom industry, but we cannot discount the power of human interaction,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, Group President of Technology and Head of Strategy at Amdocs. “It’s vital that agents, facing a more diverse set of customer needs, are able to understand, empathize and deliver personalized solutions that act as a powerful sales driver and customer experience differentiator. That’s why we’re so excited to make customer experiences seamless with the launch of Amdocs Customer Engagement.”