July 14, 2023
In our latest article we outline how to retain customers with an integrated Digital Contact Center solution that will boost your digital brand presence, increase your Net Promoter Score and improve customer experience. The latest technology can complement your existing Contact Centre solutions to drive agent efficiency and keep you way ahead of your competition.
Is your Contact Centre fully Digital Ready?
It feels like a phrase that has been with us for decades, “Digital Ready”, and that’s because it has, something you may have associated more with television sets when most countries in Europe were making the switch to digital terrestrial transmissions in 2006. So where does the term warrant its place in the context of today’s Contact Centre operations? The telephone and email have been the core methods through which product and service organisations have provided support to their customers, but the way those customers communicate in both their personal and professional lives has changed rapidly over the last decade.
We are not just talking here about Generation Z, the new generation of consumers who have used the Internet since a young age and are comfortable with technology and social media. Almost everybody who uses a mobile phone communicates with friends and family through one or more of an ever growing list of Omni-channel capable applications.
These applications such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Skype offer a choice of text, voice, video and image based communications with a conversation history that is maintained somewhere out in the cloud. It therefore comes as no surprise that consumers are expecting service providers to offer support through their preferred social channels and are highly favouring those who do so.
We are not just talking here about Generation Z, the new generation of consumers who have used the Internet since a young age and are comfortable with technology and social media. Almost everybody who uses a mobile phone communicates with friends and family through one or more of an ever growing list of Omni-channel capable applications.
These applications such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Skype offer a choice of text, voice, video and image based communications with a conversation history that is maintained somewhere out in the cloud. It therefore comes as no surprise that consumers are expecting service providers to offer support through their preferred social channels and are highly favouring those who do so.
A Digital Contact Centre solution can work alongside and integrate with your existing Contact Centre solutions allowing you to maximise your customer service investments
If you run a Contact Centre service today you may have already branched out into the digital realm offering a level of communications through one or more of the well-established platforms such as SMS or through a Facebook page. If you are a larger organisation you may have invested in a mobile app that provides customers with service functions. The very latest Digital Contact Centre solutions can operate as a standalone solution complementing any existing contact centre systems you may have eliminating the need for you to upgrade or replace existing investments.
How do you manage social channels efficiently and determine customer social identity?
Even with the advent of chat bots and artificial intelligence (AI) the bottom line is that generally one of your service agents will need to interact with the customer to provide a resolution to their service ticket through their chosen digital channel. In the modern Contact Centre it is common practice that agents supporting voice calls work separately from those maintaining non-voice channels, but the key to excellent customer service and experience is ensuring the end-to-end customer engagement path is chronologically maintained regardless of which medium they have decided to communicate upon.
This presents us with several challenges. Firstly we need a system that can aggregate all of our digital channels into a single Omni-channel service interface that allows our agents to manage their time efficiently without having to swap between screens or applications. The system should provide centralised management of interactions and customer data across all channels with the ability to link the history of voice based contacts through agent case notes and call recordings to any subsequent digital channel communications with each customer.
It is here where things can get a little trickier. Verifying a voice caller through a series of security questions is usually a reliable way to determine identity. With digital channels a customer may have a professional identity through channels such as a business email, LinkedIn and Twitter, a personal identity through Facebook and personal email along with a social identity through channels such as Instagram and YouTube. Of course we are not looking to conduct interactions of a confidential nature over these digital channels but in order to complete the picture of our end-to-end customer service interaction we need to correlate our customers against a unified profile that captures all of their social and digital identities.
This is where AI can assist us with building a unified customer profile that will ultimately allow us to deliver far greater personalisation, which in turn can lead to a much better customer experience. In addition, Digital Contact Centre solutions with self-learning capabilities can improve results based on contact patterns, facilitate skills based routing and provide smart suggestions to agents during interactions.
All of this may seem a daunting task, but the current state of the art in Digital Contact Centre solutions should be able to handle all of the above and more besides.
This presents us with several challenges. Firstly we need a system that can aggregate all of our digital channels into a single Omni-channel service interface that allows our agents to manage their time efficiently without having to swap between screens or applications. The system should provide centralised management of interactions and customer data across all channels with the ability to link the history of voice based contacts through agent case notes and call recordings to any subsequent digital channel communications with each customer.
It is here where things can get a little trickier. Verifying a voice caller through a series of security questions is usually a reliable way to determine identity. With digital channels a customer may have a professional identity through channels such as a business email, LinkedIn and Twitter, a personal identity through Facebook and personal email along with a social identity through channels such as Instagram and YouTube. Of course we are not looking to conduct interactions of a confidential nature over these digital channels but in order to complete the picture of our end-to-end customer service interaction we need to correlate our customers against a unified profile that captures all of their social and digital identities.
This is where AI can assist us with building a unified customer profile that will ultimately allow us to deliver far greater personalisation, which in turn can lead to a much better customer experience. In addition, Digital Contact Centre solutions with self-learning capabilities can improve results based on contact patterns, facilitate skills based routing and provide smart suggestions to agents during interactions.
All of this may seem a daunting task, but the current state of the art in Digital Contact Centre solutions should be able to handle all of the above and more besides.
How do you keep pace with the latest social channels and integrate them with your business process applications?
Certainly social channels drop in and out of fashion and are also open to mergers and acquisitions so keeping pace with those that are most relevant for your customer demographic is a tough task. The key here is in choosing a Digital Contact Centre solution that provides a seamless and easy approach to digital channel additions through an open API based platform. This approach works both ways in allowing integration with your key business process applications such as CRM, PSA, ERP or any other application that is vital to your business. Choosing a Digital Contact Centre provider that offers the bulk of today’s relevant digital channels out of the box but is also agile enough to add new channels quickly will help you to stay one step ahead or your competition.
Why is Social and Digital Channel Contact Centre interaction so important?
With this move towards social and digital channel proliferation your digital presence is a key component of your brand identity so it is vitally important that the customer support you provide though online channels upholds the core values that underpin your brand.
In the word of business management there are countless indictors of customer satisfaction but one popular measure of customer loyalty is the Net Promoter Score® (NPS). Studies have shown a direct link between NPS and the number of digital channels that a service provider offers for customer contact. The key finding of these studies is that the most significant gains in NPS are found with companies offering upwards of 8 digital channels. In fact the typical NPS of a company offering just one or two channels is 30% rising to 70% or higher when eight or more channels are offered.
In the word of business management there are countless indictors of customer satisfaction but one popular measure of customer loyalty is the Net Promoter Score® (NPS). Studies have shown a direct link between NPS and the number of digital channels that a service provider offers for customer contact. The key finding of these studies is that the most significant gains in NPS are found with companies offering upwards of 8 digital channels. In fact the typical NPS of a company offering just one or two channels is 30% rising to 70% or higher when eight or more channels are offered.
How do I learn more about the latest in Digital Contact Centre Solutions?
The team here at Plexus Communications constantly review the market for Contact Centre solutions and can help you to identify the optimum Digital Contact Centre solution for your business. Please contact us for an informal chat or to arrange a demo of one of today’s most advanced Digital Contact Centre solutions.
We are here to help.
We are here to help.