KantanSkynet is how contact centres can increase operational efficiencies and provide greater customer experience and create greater brand loyalty.
Many years ago, I worked with a software development company. It was a household name and shipped one of the most widely used drawing packages. It had clients in every corner of the world. The customer service unit, as it was then, was located in the basement of the office. It was easily identifiable as a CS, as it had the standard bank of agents, telephones, and standard scripts, and it dealt with 90% of all CS queries. Almost all incoming customer communications at that time where via telephone. There was the occasional email query – but they tended to be the exception. Information gathering from these calls was minimal, and certainly there were little or no analytical expended on trying to understand any customer trends and sentiments. The purpose of CS then was to offer a voice of support, but only in English, and it was cynically seen as a means of dampening down any fires with product issues. It was a minimalist and a dead-end process and it was regarded the poor cousin of all other departments and funded accordingly.
That attitude, which was not uncommon amongst companies, began to change once the communication channels began to multiply. The use of the web, email and multiple social media channels have been added to the telephone as ways of instant communications. Not only immediate, but effectively cost free, ubiquitous, and time unlimited. Add to this dynamic the opening up of the global market via online internet sales platforms and created is a worldwide web of customers with immediate access to a company’s customer service (CS) offering. With these developments it is no wonder that the role of CS has been propelled into that of being a vital customer-facing role.
Companies now see the necessity to bridge customer engagement silos, such as sales and marketing, by developing ‘hubs’ aimed at enhancing and capturing the customer experience (CX). They have done this by introducing a strategised technology ecosystem as a way to harness the power of the client-customer interface, to the benefit of both parties. CS is no longer the poor cousin hidden in the basement of the office. In tandem with the growth of these hubs we have the expansion of data collection and analysis. Companies have woken up to the reality that the CX feedback channel presents a plethora of information they can use to shape the growth and direction of a company and its products.
The physical infrastructure of the cloud and highspeed computer processing has facilitated the hoovering up of vast quantities of invaluable data. These expanded customer service hubs are now providing a tremendous amount of information that is of key importance to all companies. Furthermore, the inflowing intelligence provides data that is personalised and comes from a contextualised customer engagement. As such, it is information that gives a unique insight into a customer’s experience and provides priceless intelligence if captured, interpreted, and acted upon. Today’s technology-driven customer service hubs now bridges all customer touchpoints, enhancing the efforts of marketing, sales, customer services and even production and finance.
The volume of data incoming that allows this is phenomenal. It is no surprise that there has been a proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-driven (AI) products that enables companies to pull data from multiple social media sources such Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify, accounting packages, company mobile phones, CRM software, and remote laptops and to render this information in real time on a company ‘dashboard’. This information, once collected, is electronically collated and sorted in seconds and provides key management with an insight into market movements at a local level, customer sentiments by product, and can generate reports, flag trends and slice and dice the data to whatever analytic level management desires.
With this success, as often is the case, comes a new challenge: the one the hubs are now faced with is how to deal with the proliferation of languages now being encountered by globally focused customer service departments? It is no longer acceptable to have a CS team that can only deal with English language queries. Multiple surveys have demonstrated that most customers are willing to spend more money on products if they are confident of a good customer service backup. One of the requirements these customers now expect is to be able to interact with CS in their own language. As a result, for forward-seeing companies an AI-driven, multilingual customer service hub model makes sense. As more product channels and local markets emerge for these companies, additional scalability and language challenges will be encountered. And grow this markets will: the e-retail spend globally in 2020 is predicted to be 4.2 trillion US dollars. That is forecasted to climb to in excess of six trillion by 2023.
The challenge of this colossal growth will test the flexibility and efficiency of Customer Service Centres and how they can handle a multilingual client base. In truth, it can only be met by employing a robust, scalable, multilingual AI-driven language solution. The more companies can communicate with their customers in their own language and understand their sentiments and expectations, the better they can shape, develop, and create a mutually beneficial customer experience. Consumers are now comfortable transacting online. This has been driven exponentially by the experience of the Covid pandemic. Customers now look to connect with brands that can build a relationship with them. Reports have shown that brand loyalty is crucially important to Millennials and Generation Z. These cohorts are willing to pay more for a brand that delivers an excellent customer experience.
There is a paradigm shift in customer/client communications. The world is getting smaller. The market is now a global one. All corners of the world are seen as sales targets. However, language and cultural self-identity are also important to consumers. This is the language challenge these CX hubs have to overcome. The question is how can these contact centres enable this? The answer is simple: by communicating with their customers in their native language. This is the exact scenario KantanSkynet was developed to deal with. To remove that language barrier and keep the customer-client conversation flowing by allowing:
- Any Agent, Answer Any Ticket, in Any Language
- Improve CSAT, increase FTR and TPH.
- To enable teams of any size to provide comprehensive multilingual support
- To allow companies to hire people for their technological skills and not for scarce and expensive linguistic skills
- To provide a scalable technology platform that provides a multilingual solution in real time on a 24/7/365 basis
In today’s business world, brands are looking to create a memorable user experience. A satisfactory CX has been proven to create a brand loyalty. And a financially viable multilingual solution is now recognised as a prerequisite to a successful CX package. The KantanSkynet platform has been designed to provide innovative companies with that multilingual solution that can deliver any digital content, in any native language, with an always-on, AI-enhanced translation service.
For more information on this solution, please contact Jim Nolan at jimn@kantanmt.com.
KantanMT
KantanMT.com is a pioneer in neural machine translation solutions. Its market leading platform, KantanMT, enables global organisations to customise, improve and deploy neural MT solutions at scale. Their KantanSkynet platform enables modern enterprises to deliver digital content in native languages, with always-on, AI-enhanced, crowd-sourced translation services. KantanSkynet combines the speed and cost-benefits of machine translation with the authenticity and precision that only a native speaker can deliver.
KantanMT is part of the Keywords Studios Group, the largest provider of global services to the video games and media and entertainment industries. It has offices in over 50 locations and delivers services to 23 of the top 25 games companies.
KantanMT is based in the INVENT Building, DCU Campus, Dublin 9, Ireland.
Aidan Collins is Marketing Manager at KantanMT.com