In our last article (found here), we identified three areas of function within contact centers which any or all could cause a “disconnected experience” for the customer. Let’s examine the first of these: Disconnected Interactions. This type of disconnect happens within omnichannel customer engagement.
Consumers want to contact businesses from their channel of choice. Whether this is voice, email, webchat, social media direct messaging or message board posts, consumers expect the ability to move across different channels, and between self-service and live support transparently. Unfortunately, research shows less than 10% of companies deliver a seamless omnichannel experience in real-time.
Yet with the technology available today, how is it that the other 90+% of companies are still struggling to provide basic interaction data and insights to agents across all channels?
Interactions at multiple touchpoints
Today’s digital customers use more devices and channels than ever before. The average number of touchpoints with a business is three, with nearly 50% of customers reaching four or more touchpoints. In terms of channels, HubSpot Research states 62% of customers want to communicate with companies via email for customer service, while 48% want to use the phone, 42% live chat, and 36% via "Contact Us" forms.
For contact centers, it is more than simply being able to communicate on the customers’ channel of choice, it’s about learning from the interactions throughout the customer journey to meet perceived customer expectations. An example of this is the consumer first looks at a website for the information they require. Next they interact with a chatbot that offers them self-service options. The chat escalates to a live support chat agent, then moves to a voice call to further discuss the issue at hand.
In this simple example, there are four touchpoints by the customer with three interactions with customer service. At each interaction, valuable data on the customer and their inquiry has been collected and must be utilized by the contact center. Therefore, when the customer gets to the live voice call, he/she expects that the agent will have a complete overview of the interactions, including basic information of the customer. If, and unfortunately when, the customer has to repeat themselves on any of the interactions that took place, the customer becomes frustrated. This disconnect of interaction data between agents, ultimately, didn’t meet the customer’s desired expectation.
Bringing interactions together
Luckily, today’s CCaaS technology enables businesses to communicate with customers on their preferred medium of choice, by seamlessly integrating within web, mobile, and social channels. Most also provide self-service, skills-based routing, reporting and analytics, call recording, and all the other tools needed to run a high-performance, omnichannel cloud-based contact center.
However, many platforms leave customer data siloed within the specific channel of interaction. Therefore, when customers contact a business by a different method, agents servicing these other mediums must engage the customer again without having any past interaction history. For companies to improve the customer experience, they must first remove any interaction disconnect by utilizing technology solutions, such as Leap Connect, that harvest data across all interactions and provide this valuable insight on the customer journey to any agent in any channel in real-time…all within a single platform.
Our next post will look at understanding the second disconnect: Disconnected Data throughout an organization. In the meantime, please contact us at ccaas@leap.tel to learn how Leap’s Connect CCaaS solution solves the Disconnected Interactions obstacle.