Special thank you to Cresta’s Care Squad – Saurabh Misra, Michael Wang, Paul Fredette, Motoki Wu, Navjot Matharu – and Product Designer Amy Lee for building the features highlighted in this release.
At Cresta, our mission is to make everyone 100x more effective at work. Inspired by the recent shift in how customer care teams are driving value, we asked ourselves, what would it take to 100x customer care efforts? Today, we are today introducing features built to help customer care teams work faster, smarter, and accelerate their path to becoming value centers.
The Shift: Customer Care as a Value Center
“We are seeing a shift in the role customer care teams play across the customer journey. Care teams are shepherds of customer experience and are fast becoming the key to unlocking top-line growth.” – Zayd Enam, CEO
Historically, customer care has been measured using cost and efficiency metrics like average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), average wait time, and customer satisfaction (CSAT). But organizations are quickly realizing the scarcity and the importance of virtual customer interactions. To amplify this scarcity, customer expectations have also increased. 58% of customers say COVID-19 has raised their standards for customer service.
This has placed great pressure on customer care teams. Organizations are looking to customer care to drive customer experience and growth, often with limited resources. leading organizations realize customer care teams are the face of their brands. These organizations are finding opportunities to drive growth throughout the customer lifecycle, using metrics like lifetime value, cross-sell performance, and retention rate to guide their care programs.
Moving to this value-based approach requires a new set of skills, tools, and processes, and Cresta’s Summer ‘21 Release is designed to offer just that!
Cresta’s Summer Release focuses on three core capabilities — configurable automated messages, accelerated knowledge search, and retention and cross-sell coaching. Together, these features help care teams improve customer experience and deliver the training needed to become a value center.
Save time on repetitive messages
Too often, we take a binary approach to automating conversations. Either entirely automate a conversation with a bot, or have a conversation manually handled by a representative. However there are parts of a conversation which are repetitive, such as greetings or account verification. Representatives may repeat these parts of a conversation 100s of times a day.
To save teams from having to repeat these parts of a conversation, we’ve created Auto-send. Auto-send allows representatives to configure personalized messages which are automatically sent during repetitive parts of a conversation. Representatives can always cancel Auto-send and take control of the conversation. Auto-send frees representatives to focus on the parts of a conversation that require expertise and a human touch.
Answer customer questions faster
We found that more than 40% of a conversation is spent researching and resolving customer issues. Representatives must wade through product, system, and process knowledge bases all while delivering an empathetic and thoughtful customer experience. No easy task. For this reason, we’re introducing Knowledgebase Suggestions and Knowledgebase Search.
Knowledgebase Suggestions
Knowledgebase Suggestions automatically presents representatives with the perfect knowledgebase article to resolve a customer’s inquiry. Cresta identifies the moments when an agent would search for an article and automatically presents the right article directly to the agent. Representatives can quickly share entire articles or excerpts of articles with customers directly through Cresta interface. No longer do agents need to wade through endless knowledge base articles to find answers. This feature is in limited availability today.
Knowledgebase Search
And for the cases where the knowledgebase article is not automatically surfaced, representatives can quickly search through knowledgebases directly within the Cresta interface. Agents can search using plain english, and Cresta’s superior search algorithm finds the right article and highlights the passage of the article containing the answer. Agents can then easily send the clip with a single click. Being able to quickly search from the Cresta interface saves agents from context-switching between windows, preserving focus.
Drive Value and Better Customer Experience
Taking a value-based approach to care requires new coaching and training. Cresta’s tried-and-true real-time assistance and behavioral coaching continues to be optimized for exceptional customer care. Cresta’s AI-powered real-time coaching and assistance helps representatives identify and effectively navigate retention and cross-sell opportunities.
This coaching is seamlessly tied to Cresta’s performance management and business reporting capabilities. Managers can quickly review team performance, coach, and measure the impact of their growth and retention strategies. By bringing real-time assistance, performance management, and reporting on a common platform, Cresta becomes an end-to-end solution for up-leveling growth-minded customer care organizations.
We are excited for customers to experience our latest and greatest features. Our Summer ‘21 Release is a step towards helping customer care teams be 100x more effective and value-driven. If you’d like to learn more about Cresta or our latest features, please reach out to our team at [email protected].
The Customer Care Performance Gap
Many of these features were inspired by our Performance Gap Report. Our engineers and conversational analysts analyzed over 100,000 conversations to understand how Cresta can help accelerate this shift to Value. We walked way with three key findings related to customer care:
- Verification: Every conversation required some form of customer verification. This consistently took 25% of a conversation.
- Researching a problem: Researching the answer to a problem consistently took 10-20% of a conversation, with top performers being 2x faster at finding solutions than their peers. In some cases, what took top performers 30 seconds took others 4-5 minutes.
- Resolving a customer issue: With the solution identified, there was big variance in resolving customer challenges. Top performing agents were consistently 33% faster at resolving customer inquiries for issues of similar complexity.
