A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the Customer Service & Experience Europe conference. Surely the most exciting part to me was exchanging knowledge with customer service managers from all over the world. Since this edition’s key discussion topics covered automation and customer service agents skill gap, I’m sharing some related insights including a special video from this amazing conference!

Automation and digitalization are skill gap drivers 

I’ve kicked off day 1 moderating a discussion about how organization can  move from a ‘we should do that’ to ‘how can we do that‘ approach. The three speakers involved shared their own first-hand experience working for major companies.

• Eloise Boezak, Head of CX at African Bank has explained their 18-month journey that let them become a truly customer-centric organization. They’ve developed their plan int three steps: 1. Working internally conducting an ad hoc Customer Service Maturity review and externally, mapping the customer journey. 2. Afterwards they’ve focussed on understanding their customers, which was a cultural important shift. 3. Then finally they looked internally engaged theirpeople (customer service / experience staff processes and procedures).
• Guil Rodrigues, CX and Design Lead at Abu Dhabi Bank has explained how they’ve leveraged automation and design thinking to improve overall customer experience. To them, the turning was leveraging service design to build a bridge between involved business areas (e.g. they engaged Customer Service letting them share their top 5 common issues). That enabled all of them to get a clear, common perspective on how to deliver consistent excellent customer experiences.
• Sadia Khuram, VP Market & Products at Jazz shared her marketing standpoint having developed CX transformation on behalf of their clients. Sadia pointed out that successful digital Customer Experience processes are those who were able to engage different departments / managers, bringing them together on the same page. On how to achieve that becomes crucial understanding each role for transformation. and getting them properly equipped either with tools and skills.

Bridging the customer service skill gap is a common need for more and more organizations. In fact, as reported in a recent McKinsey study, the shift from physical and manual skills requirements towards less tangible is shapening present and future of our businesses.

[VIDEO] Up-skilling: Turn your agents into Digital Customer Service Personas© 

When it comes to Digital Customer Service even the most seasoned agents need to get upskilled to successfully manage support over social media, live chat or messaging. Moreover such digital channels have different engagement rules and tone fo voice one another. So how can organizations can upskill their customer service agents? How smart one have already done it? What results were able to achieve? I’ve answered these three crucial questions in my keynote speech since turning agents into digital specialists have become paramount to deliver consistent top-notch customer experiences. That’s why I’m glad to share this video with you where you’ll:

1. Get a quick overview on how customer’s expectations and behaviors gave dramatically changed and why taking care of digital conversations in details has become paramount

2. Dive into the Digital Customer Service Personas©, the first skill set model that we’ve delivered early this year after successfully applying it with from various industries and countries.

3. Last but not least I’ll show you a Digital Customer Service case study highlighting main results that the client have achieved.

Credit image: Unsplash.com