Recently, I’ve spent a good amount of time speaking directly with companies about challenges and opportunities with regards to today’s customer experience. It’s surprising that regardless of the industry and even geographical region, most agree that while exceptional customer experience has always been important, it’s never been more difficult to achieve.
This is a fact of doing business in the world which we live in today. Customer experience is rapidly changing by the likes of Uber and Amazon – customers expect everything to work effortlessly and instantly with a single click. “Click” and a car arrives to pick me up…. “Click” and a box is delivered to my doorstep in an hour… It’s magic.
So when it comes to Customer Engagement and Support, it’s not surprising that customers expect the exact same thing. And the expectations of today’s customer makes it hard for today’s contact center to keep up.
Given technology advancements, millennial trends or a number of other factors, a stellar customer experience is absolutely required in order for companies to either compete or go the way of the dinosaurs. But as the world of customer experience continues to rapidly evolve, we have seen more than a few challenges in traditional customer engagement which are completely avoidable. These include:
- Siloed Communication – Moving from channel to channel was often not seamless. Customers who started their communication via Twitter might be escalated to a phone call. The problem is that the agent responsible for social was often not the agent in the call center – leaving the customer needing to explain their question or issue over again.
- Inefficient Use of Channels – Simple questions, like a password reset for example, can generally be best answered through lower touch channels like an FAQ or Live Chat, but often higher touch channels like phone are being used for these simple questions. While those channels will certainly get the question answered, it is likely not the most efficient for the customer and more expensive for the company.
- Disjointed Customer Information – In traditional multi-channel situations, information about a customer is housed in a variety of different repositories requiring agents to toggle between various locations to understand the full scope of the customer query and resulting in incomplete information and longer time to resolution.
If you can remove these barriers, you can begin to take back and own the customer experience. This is where an omni-channel approach to customer experience is emerging. One that provides the right channel to the right customer for the right situation.
We’ve been talking about the merits of an omni-channel experience to help our customers move beyond these challenges for a while and today we announced a brand new version of BoldChat that continues our mission to provide a market-leading live chat and omni-channel customer engagement solutions which gives businesses the control and flexibility to distinguish themselves in the marketplace. The latest BoldChat adds new channels including video chat and auto answers – ensuring that whether the customer query requires a high-touch interaction, a self-service question, or anything in between, BoldChat can meet those needs. We also added a new UI that provides agents a consolidated view of all customer communications and relevant information in order to provide a more personal experience with faster resolution times.
We’ve all been in situations where customer service has made or broken our relationship with a brand. We remember those times, we tell our friends and families about those experiences. Today’s announcement takes customer service to the next level. By providing a seamless omni-channel experience for customers on the front end and all the tools agents need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively on the backend, companies can elevate and personalize the customer experience to a level that will make them stand out against competitors, boost sales and increase customer loyalty. Making a strong relationship between the customer and brand, not breaking it.
