High-quality customer service is becoming the most important business metric – and it starts in the contact centre
Recent trends have shown that 64% of people find customer experience to be more important than price when making a purchase. Customer experience covers every touchpoint a customer has with your organization, but increasingly it is within the contact centre that real opportunities to engage and satisfy customers have emerged.
Where companies used to control when and how customers could interact with their organization, the increase in omni-channel surfaces means that the modern consumer now expects organizations to be responsive on a 24/7 basis. In a poll of enterprise contact centres, 73% of customers view the ease of interaction as the most important attributes of a quality customer experience. Yet, nearly 80% of contact centres say their current customer service systems won’t meet their future needs.
This is primarily because designing a scalable contact centre, managing widely varying contact volumes and providing consistent customer support service can be particularly challenging for companies dealing with large volumes of unstructured demand in their contact centres.
Providing a consistent experience across multiple distinct sites, using multiple distinct technologies and with different capacity to manage the deluge of digital channels such as social media, can be extremely challenging, especially when high-value agents can be unevenly distributed across several locations.
To meet these demands, companies are increasingly looking towards cloud-based contact centre and customer engagement technologies. These combine the inherent scale on-demand attributes of cloud, enabling organisations to respond to any unexpected peaks in demand with the flexibility to manage digital channels and work in conjunction with external information systems.
Cloud platforms can also more easily interoperate with other supporting technologies, including the emerging potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a method to intelligently mass-automate contacts. AI in turn lays the foundations for advanced behavioural analysis and prediction of customer activities, which will enable organisations to anticipate and proactively delight their client base.
