#contactcenterworld, @brightpatternus
Customers want effortless, personal customer service across all channels including digital channels like in-app and social messengers, but according to IQPC and Gartner, only 5–10% of companies are providing a true omnichannel experience. Forrester’s 2015–2018 contact center report stated that customer experience is no longer improving despite improvement and innovation with vendor technology.
As a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), it may be easy to think small budgets and small teams make it impossible to invest in innovative omnichannel software and provide customer service as well as the larger competitors. But in this week’s webinar, Bright Pattern’s SVP of Marketing, Ted Hunting, and IQPC CCW Digital’s Brian Canton, shared tips on how small and midsize companies can compete and win the cloud customer service game.
TIP #1: Get Your Top Two Channels Working as One
The hardest part of creating an omnichannel contact center for SMBs can be adding a second channel to their voice operations. Many contact centers are looking to add web chat as an additional channel. Hunting recommended getting the channel working seamlessly with voice, where if a customer starts in a web chat, they can easily move to voice or escalate the interaction directly from the web chat window. It is always okay to start small and add additional channels later, but this will be difficult if you don’t set up your second most important channel in an omnichannel environment.
TIP 2: Give Employees the Ability to See Each Step in the Service Journey - Across All Channels
Part of the benefit of having an omnichannel contact center is allowing agents to have access to all customer data from all channels. For example, if a customer is calling in, the agent could see that the customer had emailed a few days ago and had sent a web chat earlier that morning, before calling into the center. Better omnichannel technology with more access to customer insights means a more empowered and engaged team of agents. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams achieve, on average, a 10% increase in customer ratings and a 20% increase in sales. For more information on how omnichannel technology increases agent empowerment read our e-book.
TIP #3: Employees and Customers Use Their Preferred Channel
Customers want to speak with companies the same way they speak with their friends and family. Digital channels are becoming more widely used among all generations and has caused consumers to demand more from companies. As you think about which channels to add to your omnichannel contact center, consider your target market and what channels are most important to them. Also consider how different types of inquiries are better for certain channels depending on complexity, emotional input, and urgency.
TIP #4: Give Agents Help with AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer available to large enterprises only. SMBs can partner with cloud contact center vendors with AI capabilities in a cost-effective way that helps agents perform even better! Small and midsize companies can start with bots to collect basic information and escalate interactions to live agents when needed. Bots and agents can work seamlessly as one channel, letting bots handle easier interactions and ask introductory questions in order to route interactions and continue to learn. AI for midsize companies can also be used to assist agents by providing suggestions to chats, SMS, or emails via Natural Language Processing (NLP) built into the platform.
What to Look for When Selecting a Cloud Contact Center Provider
#contactcenterworld, @brightpatternus
About Bright Pattern Inc:
Bright Pattern is an effective cloud contact center software which helps businesses to simplify multichannel service.
Bright Pattern’s solution features enterprise-grade architecture that offers non-disruptive maintenance with on the fly upgrades and scales from 5 to 10,000 concurrent agents with a measured 99.99% uptime. Bright Pattern’s out-of-the-box CRM integrations increase agent productivity with integrated UI, click to call, screen pop, and activity history, automatically saved with the ticket.
Bright Pattern’s solution has usability that is second to none with a new intuitive desktop for managing omnichannel experiences, a unified interface to set-up and modify workflows, and a monitoring, reporting, and quality management for and across all channels.
Published: Monday, November 26, 2018
I am checking out all the amazing and daily updated content on ContactCenterWorld.com and networking with professionals worldwide
Send To Friends Post On My Wall