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Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug 22, 2022 -- Customer service and overall experience are now among the most important factors in business growth, yet many organisations are still battling to get insights that enable them to live up to changing customer expectations.

This emerged during a webinar on customer service of the future, hosted by Synthesis, AWS and Salesforce, in partnership with ITWeb.

Archana Arakkal, Practice Lead: Intelligent Data Engineering at Synthesis, said: "End-users and customers don’t want to struggle, while brands want to provide better CX and extract more information from customer engagements."

Julie Barlow, Service Cloud Account executive at Salesforce, said: "Customer expectations today have changed dramatically: today they rely on digital first experiences, and our research shows that 70% expect experiences to be seamless, no matter what channel they are on."

She noted that the fourth edition of the global Salesforce Research "State of Service" report found that 91% of respondents said good customer service made them more likely to make another service, and 80% said the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

The answer is to have a unified view of the customer and all their engagements, to serve them better. However, achieving this can be difficult, she said.

"It’s very difficult to have a unified view of the customer across many business units. Another challenge is understanding what a customer wants in real-time. To get the unified view of the customer isn’t an easy task, it doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires a data strategy transformation to get it right," she said.

"You need to be able to identify the customer using one unique identifier across disparate systems, and identify all the customer’s touch points. You also need to be able to align insights with business strategy – for example, if your strategy is to prevent churn, you may need data on retention rates and customer satisfaction. Without the data, you have nothing, so you need to ensure you have the right, quality data needed to derive the insights needed," Arakkal explained.

Arakkal also outlined why data needed to be available in real-time: "We have so much information coming through about our customers – in a minute you might get 20 data touch points about a customer – so we need real-time capability in order to properly utilise the information, process and action it fast enough to provide value and be able to service a customer."

For personalisation, organisations needed three metrics: the right channel, right customer and right time, she said.

"AWS and Salesforce are making it quite easy to get a single view of the customer and personalise their engagements. AWS Connect and Salesforce together, by providing agents with the right personalised data, are giving them the power to deliver a good customer experience."

Roark Raman, Amazon Connect Specialist at AWS, said: "AWS and Salesforce offer synergies that revolutionise the contact centre. Salesforce as a driving force in the customer centre, integrated with AWS Connect, gives agents a single pane of glass for insight and toolbars for less distraction and less real estate to navigate. A happy agent is a happy customer, so giving the agent all the tools he needs embedded into a single interface is a very effective way to improve the customer experience."

He noted that AWS Connect is uniquely simple: "You need a connection, a browser and a headset to use it. It’s a zero footprint technology, with no hardware or software needed, and you only pay for what you use across the ecosystem of services."

He added: "Where companies want to focus on their core business or don’t have the resources to implement these tools, I suggest using a partner like Synthesis to help you stay ahead of the curve."

#contactcenterworld

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: https://www.itweb.co.za

Date Posted: Tuesday, August 23, 2022