There is a fundamental shift underway in how consumers interact with businesses. According to research from Ovum on consumer preferences for customer service, the use of email, Web chat, Web self-service, social media, mobile and SMS for customer service has more than doubled in the past two years. At the same time, consumers still rely upon picking up the telephone to call an agent to resolve the same issue.
Companies need to meet the needs of cross-channel customers that often seek resolution online, and then jump to traditional channels when their initial needs are not met. Cloud-based contact center solutions are giving companies of all sizes a tremendous amount of flexibility to engage customers across voice, Web, social and mobile channels. Here are five tips, identified by Genesys, for deploying a social and multichannel cloud contact center.
Click through for five tips for deploying a social and multichannel cloud contact center, as identified by Genesys.
Most companies initially invested in their voice contact centers, which is still the bread and butter of most customer relationships. However, it is necessary to make sure voice customer interactions can now cross Web, mobile and social interaction channels, creating personalized experiences through continuous customer conversations. Finally, these interactions should seem like they are managed by one, not multiple, organizations.
With the growth of multichannel journeys, customer paths and interactions have become too complicated to evaluate based on simplistic metrics like average call time, average resolution time or the number of sales made. Big Data analytics can help customer service agents analyze how different messages, variables, options and demographics can impact interactions, and determine which cases are most successful. Companies can then create metrics that truly evaluate the effect of a channel on the customer experience as well as their own efficiency. Analytics + insights = great cross-channel management in the cloud.
It’s not enough to just be where the customers are. Companies need to manage the experience through every touchpoint, be it over the phone, via SMS, chat, mobile, email, etc. With so many interaction points, it is easy for an experience to become mismanaged. A cloud contact center delivery model means that you have the flexibility to integrate your voice and non-voice channels into a seamless customer conversation that includes context, history and all customer data. The best brands do this well.
If the customer experience was a good one, ask the customer to share it on their social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. With Yelp and the like, reviews play a huge part in generating new business and nothing will help your brand more than when a customer shares their experience on social media.
Companies need to rapidly bolster their existing contact center infrastructures to support and complement emerging Web, mobile and social channels. Using a cloud-based contact center gives companies a tremendous amount of flexibility when it comes to fine-tuning customer support strategies across multiple channels. As companies integrate more channels into the cloud, it is important to ensure that the new cloud contact center can leverage best practices from similar businesses and other experiences implementing cloud systems internally.