Welcome to the New Customer Service Era

With organisations accelerating digitalisation across their businesses, many now look to invest in solutions which improve how they interact with their customers, making it easier and faster to resolve customer enquiries.

The growth of new technologies – mobile, social media and cloud – merged with changing business models forces organisations to transform their customer engagement processes while also maintaining more traditional forms of communication such as the telephone.

Increasingly well-informed and sophisticated customers expect organisations to provide multiple interaction channels, around the clock. They require a personalised experience, first contact resolution and real-time fulfilment. As a result, many organisations look to change their customer interaction focus from ‘isolated transactions’ to long-term relationships.

With a complete end-to-end view of customer information meeting changing demands becomes achievable. This requires not only a great user experience but also an overhaul of business processes. Front- and back-office systems need to be integrated in order for those services at the forefront, the contact centre, to deliver improved customer experiences.

The role of technology in this transformation involves evolution not revolution, to deliver a contact centre that aligns and supports your goals.

Get the basics right
A focus on customer engagement is not about improving customer experience alone. It’s about bringing efficiencies and cost savings. Despite the emergence of new technology, 87% of people still turn to traditional journeys such as telephone and email to make enquiries. The many systems that collate contact information are often ‘bolted’ together, bringing about productivity challenges and making offering a streamlined customer experience challenging.

Embrace new channels, optimise data and processes
New contact channels such as web chat and social media are now heavily involved in the contact centre. Traditionally this information feeds into your CRM system; however, different systems handle each channel and the flow of information becomes disjointed and systems no longer ‘talk’ to each other. Using business process management technology to link data and processes, you can display relevant information to agents, instead of jumping manually through multiple applications to find information. Providing a single view of the customer and their previous interactions improves first contact resolution and reduces average handling times and call-abandonment rates.

Are you ready for transformation?
By aligning your customer experience with your corporate goals you can provide a single point of access and seamless experience no matter how customers contact you – any location, any device, any channel. Customers enter a ‘universal queue’ that enables managers to effectively allocate skilled agents and monitor progress in real time, giving visibility, control and the ability to respond rapidly to changes in demand.

Agents work within one familiar interface and quickly move between workspaces to their assigned queues, regardless of channel. Responses are captured centrally and are immediately visible for review. Using tactics such as a customer portal to proactively inform customers about important information avoids unnecessary inbound interactions into the contact centre.

In today’s world, customers are in charge and it can be challenging to keep up with their demands. Their expectations are high but their experience can be very different.