Omni-Channel Customer Service Demands the Intelligent Contact Center
In today’s digital age, where smartphones, tablets and other devices give people anytime, anywhere access to you and your brand, customer service has also gone digital. Social media, email, Web self-service, live chat and other tools give your customers a host of ways to contact you for help and to help themselves.
Even as new channels of customer engagement emerge, the contact center remains critically important. In response to changing customer-driven trends, the contact center must also evolve from its traditional focus on voice- and email-based customer service into the intelligent contact center – an omni-channel, context-aware customer engagement optimization platform.
New Demands on the Contact Center
One of the consequences of the automation of customer service processes and the drive toward customer self-service is that when a customer issue reaches the contact center, it is typically one that is unpredictable and not easy to solve. As a result, the employee serving the customer must have deeper knowledge and access to a wide variety of business applications to progress the customer issue.
To eliminate the headache of application switching, contact center solutions must act as the consolidation point for the multiple business applications and systems of record used within the organization, allowing the agent or case worker to have a consolidated, holistic view of the issue or case he or she is currently working and the customer being served. In addition, delivering this information to agents in context can reduce process latency and average handling time.
The front door to the contact center is also changing. Customers are taking advantage of mobile apps, social media and live chat sessions to reach customer service agents, or are using a combination of channels (for example, starting with a live chat session then moving to the phone) to get help with difficult issues. As a result, a next-generation contact center strategy needs the right technology to handle this channel shift, along with the knowledge and training to empower your agents to handle it deftly, with consistency and without losing context.
Targeted Queuing
In the intelligent contact center, customers can be routed to the agent that can best handle the customer’s problem and channel of contact. Historically, the next available agent answered the call. Now, the customer can be routed to the agent who is the best person to answer that customer’s specific question. It is a more dynamic, intelligent matching of customer, channel and agent.
Putting it All in Context
This intelligent matching of customer, channel and agent is the product of context — knowing as much about the customer as possible, including contact history, reason for this call and the customer’s preferred channel and contact details.
For the modern contact center to be truly intelligent, it is critical that you provide your agents with knowledge gained from context. Every interaction with your customer is another chance to gain this knowledge. Your customers’ history with you is ripe with information that your agents can use to provide exceptional, personalized service. And, that knowledge should be combined with the events of today, including a customer’s current account information, product or service purchases and knowing which channel or channels the customer uses most often.
What the intelligent contact center can do with this context and knowledge is better plan for the future. Companies can now take everything they already know about the customer to help agents provide proactive service. When a customer buys a new product, for example, your agent can contact the customer with guidance on how to set up or use the product. In addition, you can also, for example, send a text to a customer when a new version of a previously purchased product is available or a complementary product is available for purchase. However, companies need to be careful that proactive service doesn’t turn into endless and relentless sales calls, turning loyal customers into marketing-fatigued ex-customers.
Analytics
The intelligent contact center will be tasked with gathering and processing large amounts of data. When analytics are applied, that data can be turned into useful business information. Speech analytics and social analytics, among other tools, can help you understand more about the customer journey. The more you know about the customer journey, the better you can prepare your agents and plan for what’s ahead.
Conclusion
Through its support for omni-channel customer engagement, elimination of application switching and delivery of context-based knowledge management, the intelligent contact center allows organizations to achieve customer engagement optimization. While the contact center remains a critical component in the customer service ecosystem, its role has changed. The next-generation intelligent contact center is no longer simply a customer data repository. It has now become the critical link between customer engagement systems and the organization’s back office systems of record.
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