Managing the New Customer Experience with PureCloud^SM

Everything about the customer experience is changing, continually, and at a faster pace than many companies can keep up with. It’s Gen X, Y, Z and Millennial. It’s mobile, social and global. It’s more interaction channels to choose from, Big Data to gauge consumer behaviors, and tools like faceted searches that make online experiences easier and more enjoyable. And like it or not, the whole experience must be instant.

The trick for businesses, then, is managing it all to engage customers completely, on their terms.

Managing the “new” customer experience is the approach Interactive Intelligence has taken with its PureCloud suite of enterprise-grade cloud services. In using the power and breadth of Amazon Web Services, PureCloud delivers just about everything a business needs for effective communications, collaboration, and customer engagement. But what makes PureCloud’s collective services so different is the way they’re aimed at today’s consumers, and what they want their experience to be.

Multiple Channels of Interaction

PureCloud allows organizations to handle all channels of customer engagement in one integrated service: inbound calls, outbound calls, email interactions, web chats, text messages, instant messages, social media, and faxes. Organizations can easily engage customers in whatever way suits them, while tracking all interactions centrally. PureCloud also offers strong integration to popular social media services, making it easy to monitor your organization’s Facebook page and the Twitter stream and quickly respond as needed.

Contact Center

The PureCloud Contact Center automation service handles every aspect of customer interaction. Speech-enabled voice self-service (IVR). Automatic call distribution (ACD). Skills-based queuing and routing of phone calls, emails, web chats, text messages, and video interactions. Recording and archival of all interaction types. Real-time monitoring and supervision, insightful data analytics, speech analytics, and more.

Mobility

For customers, incorporate customer service into existing mobile apps, or create new apps. Customers can then access self-help services and request callbacks or other customer service interactions. For employees, PureCloud provides native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8. These apps enable workers to access the corporate directory, instant message other employees, manage phone calls, search and view corporate documents, and complete workflow assignments. In effect, employees are able to manage work, along with any associated customer service functions, from anywhere.

Social Media

PureCloud Social Customer Service is a unique way to provide VIP or concierge-level service to your best customers. It allows these customers to see photos of and information about your agents and then to choose the agent with whom they’d prefer to interact. You control what information you expose for each agent. Customer interaction requests are queued and routed just like an incoming phone call or other type of interaction. Customers can access Social Customer Service from a web page or from their mobile devices, and choose to interact by phone call, email, web chat, or video.

Case Management

Handling customer interactions in contact centers is only the first step in providing an exceptional customer experience. Case management allows organizations to pull customer interactions of all types together into a single, integrated view of the customer experience. For example, your organization might send an email generating a phone call from the customer. This might later lead to a web chat from the customer on the same topic, followed by a call to the customer from your organization. Without an overarching case management solution, there’s no way to tie all these interactions together to understand the customer’s experience and how well your organization achieved the customer’s original goal. PureCloud Case Management provides this bird’s-eye view, allowing you to optimize into customer experience results. Case Management works in conjunction with PureCloud Contact Center, Content Management, and Workflow to offer a level of insight not possible with less capable services.

Customer Portal

The PureCloud Customer Portal is the ultimate destination for customer engagement. With this service, organizations easily create a customizable customer engagement platform accessible via standard web browsers and directly from mobile devices. The Customer Portal leverages the latest in social media and gamification techniques and provides:

• Registration and login for customers requiring authentication with integration to your CRM system.
• FAQs that allow customers to search for answers to frequently asked questions.
• Knowledgebases and collections of content including documents and videos.
• Direct access to customer service representatives with PureCloud Social Customer Service available as a configurable widget. This provides a dynamic view of the agents currently available who meet the customer’s requirements, with configurable display of agents’ names (or pseudonyms), photos, skills, and other selected background information.
• Direct access to PureCloud Case Management as a configurable widget from which customers can open and manage trouble tickets and other types of cases.
• A complete social media interface for employees, affiliates, and even expert customers. Topics of interest (product lines, etc.) can be configured with comment threads, attached documents, and so on.

Interaction Recording

Monitoring customer interactions for quality these days requires a business to record all interactions across all channels, yet still be able to choose exactly which interactions are to be recorded. PureCloud provides these capabilities. Organizations can record voice calls, web chats, text messages, instant messages, and social media interactions. As importantly, an organization can configure policies to determine whether (and which) interactions are stored in the Amazon cloud or on-premises. Cloud storage can take advantage of Amazon Glacier to store recordings and keep them available for years at low cost. All recordings are encrypted for maximum security.

Speech Analytics

A newer aspect of monitoring customer interactions for quality and customer sentiment is speech analytics. PureCloud provides built-in real-time speech analytics that automatically send alerts when various words and phrases are detected during a customer service interaction. Alerts can be triggered differently for utterances detected on the customer side of a call or the agent side. Speech analytics results are stored with recordings, and are usable for searching or data analytics. PureCloud’s speech analytics capabilities are available for a variety of languages, meaning they can be used for consumer markets globally.

Big Data Analytics

Businesses require powerful data analytics capabilities to spot customer trends and unlock value in the masses of data they collect. PureCloud logs every facet of customer interactions, plus critical information for document access and cross-company workflow. Organizations can additionally use visualization technologies and analytic tools such as Hadoop and Google Analytics to make sense of valuable information, and even to make predications based on it.

Faceted Search

If you’ve used Amazon.com, you’re familiar with faceted search whether you know the term or not. Faceted search allows you to quickly cull through a large set of search results by clicking on various attributes to dynamically narrow the results. For your online customers, they may only be interested in results that apply to a particular product line, a certain timeframe, or even an individual employee. PureCloud employs faceted search throughout its suite of services in order to provide a consistent customer experience, and to make sure your business derives value from all the data it collects.

Knowledge Management

Collecting knowledge and making it available to customers and employees is increasingly a requirement for the customer experience. PureCloud Content Management allows you to automatically create and maintain knowledge management services in the form of intelligent search and FAQs. This knowledge can be selectively made available to customers, partners, and other third parties for self-help, and for the creation of social communities.

Distributed Content Management

PureCloud provides an optional content management service that provides a centralized, cloud-based index of important documents spread throughout the enterprise. Organizations also get support for Amazon-based storage of selected documents in the cloud, with rapid access from anywhere in the world, and with document encryption for maximum security. PureCloud further provides the ability to store documents on local file servers or storage networks, or in existing systems such as SharePoint or FileNet, while still taking advantage of centralized management and searching.

Workflow

Recall that today’s customers come from generations in which technology has made everything “instant.” Automating key business processes helps keep that pace. PureCloud Workflow is a powerful means of visually laying out business processes and then automatically pushing work to employees throughout the organization. PureCloud Workflow uses the same advanced queuing and routing technology available in PureCloud Contact Center to choose the employee to whom a given task is assigned based on skills and availability. Employees can automatically be alerted to assigned work, and then complete many assignments even from mobile devices. PureCloud Workflow operates synergistically with other PureCloud services such as Content Management to provide a comprehensive solution for process automation. 

This article is adapted from the PureCloud white paper by Don Brown, CEO of Interactive Intelligence, Inc. Note that the white paper, as well as this article, are forward-looking narratives intended to help the reader understand the vision for Interactive Intelligence PureCloud. Neither narrative makes the attempt to differentiate those services and features currently available in PureCloud from those that are still under development.

Download the full PureCloud white paper at www.inin.com.