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The Future of Customer Experience With Next Generation Contact Center Solutions

by Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern - September 18, 2013

The Future of Customer Experience With Next Generation Contact Center Solutions

Some seven years on from the launch of Twitter, we still routinely hear reports of corporate America doing much less than they could be doing to listen and respond to customers via social media channels. This, even as research shows that companies are consciously and deliberately trying to engage their customers across multiple channels.

For example, an Aberdeen Group study from just this past summer reported that financial services firms are commonly using no fewer than eight channels to engage their customers, including social media, call centers (inbound and outbound voice and interactive voice response), e-mail, websites, online video and more. Is it really still too hard to integrate these channels to provide a superior customer experience?

It’s about to get easier as the cloud-based contact center evolves and adoption increases. In the United States, cloud-based call center technology, as used for inbound routing and queuing of live calls, enjoys a respectable, but plenty-of-room-to-grow 3.5 percent penetration rate. With the next generation of cloud-based contact center technology, customer experience should improve as penetration increases.

Here’s what I mean. Any state-of-the-art contact center platform supports multi-channel end-user engagement across voice, online and social avenues and aims to treat them equally. For example, a web chat, for monitoring, audit, analysis, agent grading and historical reporting purposes, should look just like a traditional voice call.

Handling all channels on a common cloud platform provides a unified, 360-degree, view of all customer interactions from a single vantage point. Early cloud call center offerings that relied on CRM integrations for multi-channel support are yielding to comprehensive solutions that natively support multiple customer engagement channels.

Interestingly, it’s the migration of voice from on-premise TDM-based solutions to cloud-based VOIP platforms that is the key enabler. It’s difficult to impossible to back-fit support for modern online channels to legacy TDM equipment. Not so long ago, the television advertising industry realized a similar migration as video distribution shifted to Internet technologies, allowing the cross-application of Internet advertising precision targeting and measurement capabilities.

Practically Speaking

So what does this new contact center model look like, in practical terms? It means the ability for contact center agents to gracefully switch back and forth between online and voice channels. It’s the ability for an agent to easily escalate a web chat with a customer to live voice call. It means social media listening that ties positive or negative tweets or other social comments back to their contact center record, and alerts agents immediately, so they might respond with a voice call to a customer’s complaint on Twitter.

That same Aberdeen Group report noted that financial services firms struggle with the quality of their customer experience management data, and that many have a hard time distinguishing more profitable clients from less profitable clients. These problems impact them in two ways: difficulty in improving the customer experience overall, beyond just individual transactions, and difficulty in monetizing the data, to be able to better target offers to higher-value clients.

This is where a unified platform in the contact center can help. When online and social customer engagement channels are handled just like traditional voice calls, data and reporting across all channels becomes normalized. It becomes easier to measure, and improve, key performance indicators. Standardized data is easier to merge with other business intelligence data using “big data” tools, to be able to glean insights, and surface those higher-value clients.

A separate Aberdeen Group report this year that studied how 374 firms translated data into superior customer experiences found that the best-in-class performers enjoyed an 88% customer retention rate, an 18% average year-of-year improvement in customer satisfaction, and a 19% year-over-year improvement in annual company revenue. The vast majority of those performers – more than 80% – use customer relationship management, business intelligence and data quality/integration tools. Over half take advantage of real-time reporting and alerting. (At the bottom end, the laggards saw annual declines in revenue and customer satisfaction.)

Of course, customer relationship management takes place, and data originates, within the contact center. It is incumbent on contact center technology vendors to look downstream and consider how the data is being analyzed, and take every step possible to standardize it across customer engagement channels, format it so that it’s easily ingested by business intelligence and other analysis tools, and expose it for real-time analysis, alerting and searching. Those that do will be positioned to share in the rewards that Aberdeen Group reports.

Conclusion

Advanced cloud-based technology continues to be a key enabler for enterprises looking to improve the customer experience, and the bottom line. Ongoing studies show that top corporate performers, as measured by customer satisfaction and revenue growth, begin at the contact center, and strive to unify their view of customer engagements across an increasing number of channels. Companies that are slow to adopt suffer higher churn rates and face lower revenues, and decreased customer satisfaction. Contact center technologies that enable this unified, 360-degree view, and standardize data output, are emerging and enjoying increased adoption rates.





Author:

Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern
+1 650-529-4099
Konstantin.Kishinksy@brightpattern.com

Konstantin has a strong background leading engineering and advanced application development teams. Konstantin has served in key management roles including Director of Engineering at Genesys Telecommunication Laboratories, Inc. (Alcatel since 2000), VP of Product Development at FrontRange, and Founder and CEO of Cayo Communications, Inc. Konstantin attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, earning a Master’s in Engineering Physics. He holds six patents and has published seven scientific articles.

 
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