How contact centers grow customer trust

Customer trust depends on the ability to consistently prove to your customers that they can rely on your brand, products, and people. Every engagement with your customers is a chance to build or break trust. That journey is a bumpy road. So, how do you build customer trust and ensure that it withstands time?

After working time and time again with our customers, I’ve learned that trust is earned by consistently providing fast personalized service when customers need it, or even before customers know they need it. This is where your contact center becomes critical. In this blog, I share what I have learned about building and keeping customer trust, how Amazon Connect can help, and how Fujitsu addresses customer trust.

Earning trust with your contact center

Your contact center is a central point that manages customer engagements across various channels, and is where you create valuable relationships between your customers and brand. However, as a direct result of COVID-19, our customers have expressed administrative challenges that came with their legacy contact center solutions. Both the stability and agility of their contact center were constricting their ability to handle increased volume.

Contact center stability is the cornerstone of customer trust, ensuring customers always have access to needed support. However, many companies struggle to keep their contact center available for their customers through peak hours. Legacy solutions often go down and are interrupted by network and connectivity issues. These challenges are often out of supervisors’ hands, and they have to spend valuable time servicing trouble tickets and working with their provider to go back online. According to a Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester, “Most interviewed organizations faced frequent, severe outages with their legacy contact center solutions. These outages damaged CX, wasted labor for agents and system admins, and ultimately drove a potent form of change.”

Just as important for customer trust is your ability to stay agile and make quick modifications to your contact center. If you’ve added a new line of business or if there’s an event that affects your customers, is your contact center prepared to handle additional volume or onboard new agents quickly? Your customer experience is dynamic, and needs to constantly change to reflect shifts in customer need. However, contact center managers often lack the tools to stay agile and make updates on the fly with legacy solutions. When faced with increased contact volume, any necessary changes to contact flows require weeks to months and multiple vendors. In the meantime, contact centers are challenged with long queues, inaccurate information, and unproductive agents; these interactions are frustrating for both the customer and agent.

Our customers have been using Amazon Connect to combat these challenges and earn customer trust through consistent, delightful experiences. According to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report, Amazon Connect delivers 99.998% to 100% uptime performance, compared with 99.6% to 99.95% in legacy solutions. Customers won’t have to worry whether they will get disconnected or hear a busy tone. Making changes with Amazon Connect is also quick and easy. Its intuitive UI allows you to create voice and chat contact flows without any coding, rather than requiring custom development that can take months and cost millions of dollars. Amazon Connect provides a reliable, innovative contact center and can support quick development of new feature designs.

The benefits of creating a trusted relationship with your customers are endless, from lower costs to increased revenue by creating true advocates for your company. Salesforce, who names Amazon Connect as their preferred contact center partner, published a study showing 95% of customers are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust.

How Fujitsu uses Amazon Connect to support customer trust

One customer I have seen center customer trust around their contact center exceptionally well is Fujitsu. Fujitsu Global Delivery Centers provide specialized technology services to support their customers’ digital transformation and maintenance for systems in hospitals, banks, factories, shops, and offices. Strategically located, they support customers in over 100 countries, using over 40 languages, 24/7, 365 days a year. In order to achieve this level of partnership with customers, Fujitsu builds trust at every opportunity and prioritizes the success of their high-quality, multi-lingual, service desk to provide the support customers need.

However, Fujitsu relied on their old contact center infrastructure to provide critical technical support for their customers. They had to deal with managing over 4,500 contact flows for more than 90 different countries. Their previous provider witnessed frequent outages, was costly to maintain, and involved a great deal of manual intervention when updating contact flows, leading to delays. These issues challenged their Global Delivery strategy, which focuses on ‘getting the basics right’ first – aiming to deepen customer relationships by adding value with a mix of rock-solid delivery, innovation and collaboration.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Fujitsu was well equipped to help customers navigate a critical shift in their infrastructure. With customers around the world relying on Fujitsu to help them migrate to the cloud and move employees to a remote environment, Fujitsu saw a 48% increase in call minutes. When faced with an unexpected spike in contacts, it was critical to Fujitsu that they seamlessly handle customer requests, equating to over 387,000 contacts a month. They knew it boiled down to their service desk being both available 24/7 for their customers and being able to quickly accommodate for changing business conditions. Amazon Connect proved reliable, easily scaling to meet demand without a minute of downtime, even when rapidly onboarding 4,000 agents to the service.

Amazon Connect also allowed Fujitsu to become agile and make changes to their contact flows in minutes, as opposed to days spent on the phone with multiple vendors. This became increasingly more valuable as customers from over 100 different countries became affected by the pandemic. Now, if there is an important message that customers need to hear, Fujitsu can automate text to speech across more than 15 languages; a task that previously took Fujitsu up to an entire day. In a couple of days, Fujitsu even helped a customer move 4500 call queues to less than 400 by tagging call attributes, simplifying their IVR. Lastly, at the start of the pandemic, Fujitsu was able to quickly offer customers integrated self-serve and call-back options during peak hours, and equip 95% of their agents with the right tools to work from home.

Fujitsu’s contact center operations were able thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide the much-needed support for customers facing new challenges. Ultimately, Amazon Connect enabled Fujitsu to reduce up to 75% of the amount of call flows that are needed for one single account. This reduced the time taken to onboard customers from a couple of months to only a couple of weeks. By relying on the right technology, they were able to provide consistency for customers in a time of uncertainty, and were able to play a part in reimagining the future of work. Fujitsu’s contact centers – with their passionate and enabled teams – proved indispensable in helping to support customers and build trust throughout this uniquely challenging period.

Conclusion

A stable, agile contact center with happy, passionate agents lays the foundation of customer experience and brand loyalty. For Fujitsu, this meant implementing Amazon Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence capabilities to help them build a better, richer customer experience. Fleur Copping, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Fujitsu, agreed “With Amazon Connect’s automated call recording, sentiment analysis, and integrated call-back features, we were able to help customers faster, while simultaneously improving service quality. Moreover, with Connect’s in-built automation handling laborious tasks, we were able to be more agile and focus resources on building customer trust.” Get started today by visiting the Amazon Connect website.

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