The world has come a long way in terms of customer service. Personalization has become the most effective way to ensure maximum customer retention and loyalty. A vast majority of companies are investing in personalization efforts to build a better customer experience that can pay them off with serious rewards. In this age and time of technology, companies that fail to revamp personalization efforts or do not prioritize creating a tailored customer experience run the risk of being left behind.
According to Accenture, customers are more likely to stick with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.
If we talk about the contact center industry, customer services have come a long way from phone calls and emails to AI, cloud, and omnichannel services with changing customer expectations. As successful contact centers emphasized speed, it became important for agents to manage customer conversation promptly. This led contact center industries to adopt new-age technological solutions that solved issues of data silos and inefficient architecture.
This blog highlights some of the pain points in the industry and how digital contact center solutions like Omnichannel are addressing them
Are your Agents at par with personalization standards?
Personalization is an umbrella term that helps an agent understand customer journeys, analyze their behavior and cater to them in the best possible manner.
A report by Salesforce highlights that “84% of customers say, being treated like a customer and not a number is very important to winning business”
There are, however, some roadblocks that hinder the effective delivery of CX personalization. Some of these are:
| Also Read | Why Personalization is the Key CX Parameter |
Wasted time
Did you know that an average agent spends 15% of their time searching for customer information across disparate systems to respond to their queries?
Imagine yourself waiting for your agent to gather information about you while making you respond to questions that you have answered multiple times!
This is tantamount to bleeding agent productivity and assures high chances of the customers never returning back.
Unnecessary Costs
Research by ContactBabel suggests that 96% of agents have to manage multiple screens and applications within a call – and 38% need to access four or more. This all leads to longer calls, costing an estimated £4.33 billion in lost productivity across the industry.
If your agents are toggling with screens, you are probably losing more, not just in terms of money but also in reputation and standards of customer service.
Disjointed Channels
Disjoint customer journey is a curse for an organization. Compared to previous years, communication channels have diversified. Now customers have several options to communicate with agents, call, email, text, chat, etc. A majority of call centers end up being understaffed on one or multiple such channels. This leads to poor customer service and a loss of revenue.
Some contact centers create dedicated teams for each channel, but most channels are often underused on days and lead to waste of agent use.
Poor Resolution Rates
According to a Forrester report, 66% of customers feel that acknowledging customers’ time is the most important thing a business can do.
This means that customers value first-call resolutions. And do not want to wait in lengthy queues or call back multiple times to get their issues resolved. Every time the customer calls back, he loses interest in the brand and may eventually move out.
Manual Processes
A recent report on agent productivity by ContactBabel highlights the importance of automation in call centers by reporting that manual identity verification by agents adds 34 seconds to call times.
Today, when customers want the ability to find their information 24X7 without needing to call or email an agent, eliminating manual processes has become a necessity.
Unified Communication & Its Benefits
The global unified communications market size is expected to reach $167.1 billion by 2025.
Businesses connect with their customers through different communication channels – Telephone, video, chat, etc. The core challenges in this scenario is communicating efficiently on separately existing channels, and accessing customer data from different channels. Here, unified communication comes into play. Unified Communication integrates all your business communication done from telephone, video, chat, and other collaboration tools into one intuitive interface.
The many benefits of unified communications include:
1. Enabling Personalized and Frustration-free Interactions with Customers
The Unified communications systems integrate with most CRM packages. This means that when a customer gets in touch, the agent can easily identify who the customer is, what products they have purchased in the past, the issues they faced during the last interaction, etc. All this means that customers don’t have to get frustrated when dealing with a call center agent and don’t have to repeatedly explain their issues to multiple agents. Personal interaction with customers helps you to increase your customer engagement and boost CX.
2. Empower Agents to Communicate with Customers as Per their Preferences
In this age of choice aided by digitalization, different customers have varied communication preferences. Even the same customer might want to get in touch with agents through different channels at different times. An omnichannel approach through unified communications places the customer in the driving seat giving them the widest possible choice of communication channels. This ensures that each customer receives an excellent and seamless customer experience.
3. Paves way for Speedier Internal Communications
The speed with which a team can communicate with each other determines the efficiency of customer service they offer. A unified communications solution enables people to deal with queries more speedily and makes way for better collaboration with colleagues. The single UC interface also updates the availability of colleagues to handle customer queries.
How Unified Communication Simplifying Communication Process for Agents
Being a single integrated communication platform, Unified Communication ensures effective collaboration to deliver an exceptional customer experience. While communicating with customers, speed is a considering factor that determines the quality of your customer service. Be it current or prospective customers, all expect quick responses to their queries. Thus, this simplified communication process through unified communication reduces customer effort and boosts customer satisfaction.
- Unified Communications helps agents to respond to customers’ queries without looking into different applications or switching multiple screens as it integrates fragmented customers’ data from different channels to a single screen.
- Unified Communications have various in-built features that improves agent’s productivity. One among them is automatic call distribution. This feature automatically routed the customer call to the right agent or department so that they solve the queries quickly.
- It facilitates real-time monitoring that allows supervisors to analyze and understand various aspects of agent performance. With unified communications, supervisors can have access to agents’ live calls without interrupting them.
- Unified communication assures speech recognition through advanced interactive voice response (IVR).
Unified Communication Facilitated by Agent Desktops
A Unified Agent Desktop is an agent interface that displays an integrated knowledge base in order to help agents to deal with customer queries in an efficient and seamless manner without routing the call to another agent or to keep the customer waiting for long times while the agent discusses queries with another agent or supervisor.
It is not always possible to reduce the number of systems that agents use. However, it is possible to unify them all by bringing them together on a single screen or desktop. This aids in faster and easier access to all the information that customers need. Along with providing a single comprehensive view of the customer, they are interacting with- exactly what the agent desktop does.
The unified agent desktop connects all the disparate data sources and makes it easier for the agent to navigate under a single ‘pane’ with all integrated information. It captures the full customer interaction history across all communication channels- be it a visit to a website, engagement with an email campaign, or a call to customer service.
With unified agent desktops, it becomes easier to deliver consistent customer support and give customers a true choice of channel. Once a customer inquiry reaches the desktop, agents can see all the information on the customer by drawing customer data from the CRM and presenting it on a single interface alongside all other contact channels.
An optimized agent desktop, the Genesys Agent Desktop offers agents all relevant customer data in one place and saves them the hassle of switching across multiple screens. To do this, agent technology needs to be integrated with multiple data sources like Salesforce while also providing data to legacy data sources.
Here are Some Noted Benefits of a Unified Agent Desktop:
1. Seamless Customer Experience
Want to double your customer service experience more than your expectations? Aberdeen says you need to include unified communications in your contact center strategy.
Over the years, customer experience has risen as an important competitive differentiator. With an effective agent desktop solution, customers can get quick remedies to their queries and would also have the choice of channel for communication.
2. Agent efficiency
When your agents don’t have to switch continuously between ten different applications and have access to all customer information consolidated in a single place, it is bound to enhance their efficiency. Also, since there is a seamless communication channel between team members, the problem of silos and disparate information gets eliminated. Any notes added by a previous agent when talking to the customer are accessible to the agent and would enable him to pick up only relevant information while saving time for both parties.
3. Personalization of Services
How many agents have you come across that address their customers on a first-name basis? Yes, you guessed it right, not many. But did you know that 80% of customers in a survey revealed that they would be encouraged to engage with a brand if they were addressed on a first-name basis. With optimized agent desktops, this method of personalization is facilitated owing to a single integrated view of all customer information from customer interaction journey to name, product preferences, and so on. With agent desktops, in particular, agents need not copy/paste data to collect customer information and can quickly validate customer details which are readily available to them via integration.
Conclusion
Unified agent desktops like the Genesys agent desktop integrate seamlessly with third-party applications and display customer-relevant information on a single screen. This saves agent’s their crucial time lost in switching screens to fetch required customer information. The agent desktop arms the agents to handle calls across different communication channels, thus paving the way for multiple channel interactions. The unified agent desktop enables agents to offer personalized CX while reducing call handling times, thus simplifying the lives of both agents and customers.
