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Cloud-based contact centre solutions are the key to delivering intimate customer experience at enterprise scale.
For many businesses today the key to driving performance is customer experience, making the contact centre more important than ever - especially as customers expect to be able to access services, quickly, easily, and via all possible channels.
Cloud-based contact centre solutions are streamlining operations across locations and empowering frontline staff to personalise customer service.
Enter the cloud
Cloud-based contact management platforms enable organisations to redirect customers between geographically diverse contact centres. They use artificial intelligence (AI) to handle routine interactions and quickly deliver relevant customer information to operatives. Such solutions are easy for businesses to set up, use and manage, requiring minimal capital outlay and integrating with most phone systems.
Personalising customer experience
Personalisation is the cornerstone of modern customer experience and cloud contact centre solutions empower frontline staff with the data they need to ensure every interaction with a customer is the best it can be.
“The solutions we provide allow our customers to provide a memorable, but more importantly, personal customer experience. It allows our customers’ employees to feel better empowered to provide that customer experience too,” says Jeff Wise, Telstra’s Portfolio Manager for Customer Engagement (Contact Solutions).
“If we can capture information from every interaction about the way that customers interact with our clients then those clients learn more about their customers. They can recognise them, understand what their desires are, allowing their customers to interact when and how it suits them,” he says.
“Taking data and turning it into valuable insights to really drive wonderful customer experience – is going to have a massive impact on the way our customers serve their customers.”
Jeff Wise, Portfolio Manager for Customer Engagement (Contact Solutions), Telstra
The future of customer engagement
According to Wise, analytics is the key innovation in customer engagement but businesses are only now taking it seriously.
“Taking data and turning it into valuable insights to really drive a wonderful customer experience – is going to have a massive impact on the way our customers serve their customers,” Wise says.
“Customer engagement is changing at a rapid pace. Social media, the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility are all changing the dynamics of how we serve our customers. The big change that I see happening in the future is really allowing a customer to consume a product or service how they want to, when they want to, and for them to be understood in a way that is personal and relevant to them.”
Multi-modal communication channels
To meet the “explosion” of contact channels, multi-modal communication is fast becoming a vital requirement for customer contact solutions, says Vaughan Klein, Director of Collaboration at Cisco. Across voice, email, SMS and website communication the relevant customer journey data needs to travel alongside the user.
“Regardless of how a consumer wants to communicate, we can seamlessly connect them with the right person with the right skills to administer that query in the form it’s been delivered to the business,” Klein says.
Closing the customer gap
Klein says organisations have been deploying and refining on premise automatic call distribution (ACD) for many years. An unwanted side effect of this can be increasingly limited interaction with their customers on a personal level – efficient for business perhaps, but far from ideal if you’re the customer on the line.
“Now we’re seeing a trend of savvy organisations looking to close that distance and develop more intimate customer relationships. A cloud-based solution with multi-modal capability can enhance and adapt to each individual customer’s journey.”
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