Customer Engagement
Boosting Customer Experiences, Bolstering the Customer Journey
Customers are the sole purpose of any business and the level of service an organization offers its customers can therefore literally make or break business success. In today's hyper-competitive business environment customers are more educated, better informed, more value conscious and their expectations of the companies they buy from are ever increasing.
CX rocks
Businesses using technology in traditional ways cannot respond to the rising expectations of customers for shorter response times and higher service levels. That’s why smart enterprises embrace digital transformation and adopt digital workplace strategies to create rich and connected Customer Experiences (CX), through anywhere and anytime frictionless, personalized and meaningful interaction.
Customer contact centers have been around for a long while, connecting callers to the right person, reducing waiting times and ensuring well-informed call handling and personalized, qualified responses to customer enquiries. As incoming call volumes increased, interactive voice response (IVR) systems emerged as the primary way of handling growing traffic within the contact center, but recently major technological innovations are fuelling their capabilities to address today’s mobile connected customer.
Technological Innovation
Corporate websites have also undergone a shift. Initially positioned as a marketing platform, websites have evolved to become another customer touch point, providing additional communication channels to interact with the business, such as click-to-call, web chat or connecting the customer with a live agent.
NEC’s UNIVERGE Business ConneCT is a comprehensive omni-channel contact center that includes all the benefits of Unified Communications and has embraced latest technical innovations including AI to become a true Customer Engagement Platform.
Supporting multiple customer touch points, the rich multi-channel environment handles email, live web chat, WhatsApp and voice via a single interface to provide a rich, frictionless and engaging experience to customers. Voice calls, emails and webchats are routed to the best suited agent, reducing waiting time and improving staff motivation, while integration of applications in support of voice response and self-service are easily deployed.
Omni channel - Building effortless customer journeys
Starting point for most consumers these days is the website or a mobile app. This is where the customer journey begins and most consumers will only call in to a contact center as last resort. With an Omni-channel approach and by incorporating latest solutions, organizations own their customers’ journeys. They can design journeys, make them actionable, and monitor them using orchestrated routing across web chat, email, SMS, social and messaging apps. They can unify inbound and outbound digital communications to deliver consistent, contextual insights.
The effective handling of incoming mobile messaging through automated self-service requires solutions that can leverage several advanced technologies. Combining automated and agent-assisted interactive dialogs bring the benefits of interactive messaging into customer service, sales and marketing operations. And when messages require special handling, they can be easily escalated to the best-available live agent.
Webchat is very cost effective as your agents can chat with several people at a time. Typically one webchat agent talks with 10 times more people than a phone agent. And with a full page view history for each visitor, you’ll be up to speed by the time your customers click ‘Chat’. No surprise that when it comes to sales, web chatters are 4 times more likely to convert than a regular website visitor and average order values are typically 25% higher.
Enhanced Customer Loyalty through WhatsApp integration
Over 5 billion global consumers use messaging apps daily. Practically all of these would prefer to message businesses with their enquiries rather than by other means. Integrating the commonly used WhatsApp messaging is therefore a major enhancement to any organization’s customer service desk. Business ConneCT Social media integrates with a WhatsApp service provider to allow customers to communicate in real time with agents using WhatsApp, similar to Webchat. Attachments can be received and viewed by the agent, while emoticons are supported as well.
Combining Webchat and Live chat – cost effective and highly productive
Losing customers due to unanswered questions has become a sin for any organization. To avoid this, it is important to get in touch with visitors to your website and start a conversation that matters. Engage with your website visitors, creating a more personal connection, pointing them in the right direction and increasing sales and customer satisfaction. With Business ConneCT’s live chat interface customers can be served at the moment they are ready for business or at the point where they are in need of support.
Today’s consumer expects a business to know about their “journey”—what they have experienced, to anticipate what they want, and to guide them through upcoming process steps. The agent must be aware or be able to immediately find the history. In Business ConneCT’s agent’s chat conversation window, the date of the message is included and social media chats including received attachments are stored in the database. Both voice and social media chats (WhatsApp) are combined in the customer history, so that when a customer contacts the Contact Center, the agent will see the complete customer’s history, including WhatsApp and attachments.
The Power of AI - for Effortless Self-Service
Creating a seamless digital customer experience requires AI-powered automation for quick handling of common, repetitive tasks, blended with human agents who engage at exactly the right moment The desired automation service will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide automatic responses to messages, capture information from a message, perform directed dialogs, and classify the language and intent of a message.
Empower agents with AI-driven guidance that includes relevant content, suggested next-actions, and real-time coaching to stay ahead of the customer engagement. Leverage advanced machine learning models to pair the best agent with each customer interaction.
Machine learning – put it to work to drive optimal outcomes
The combination of chatbot and live agent contact for escalations and specifics is a major breakthrough. It boosts efficiency of available staff and delivers a frictionless customer experience.
Supported by Natural Language Processing the syntax and grammar of text-based communications is fully understood and can be acted upon. More simplified language analysis can utilize pattern matching capabilities to identify specific types of data in a text message such as web addresses. Once the language of a message has been identified, the solution can look at how live agents have previously provided an appropriate response to similar messages. The automated service learns from thousands of previous messages that were answered by live agents.
A further development is automated Voice Recognition. This brings Voice back as favourite and easy medium, particularly for people on the go. Machine supported voice control, recognition and response is expected to surge in coming years as applications develop, live and learn.
Important enhancements in Business ConneCT have now enabled the integration of these AI technologies into the customer engagement process.
UNIVERGE Integration Platform – unlocking a universe of API’s
For enterprises to get their diverse systems – such as Contact Center and CRM, Data Analytics, ERP and IoT – to work together and flexibly integrate with innovative applications that accommodate for new business models, requires an open, secure, interoperable platform that provides integration at all levels. And this is where NEC’s UNIVERGE Integration Platform comes in, that seamlessly interacts with Business ConneCT and all other applications to provide a centrally managed application network. It enables to dynamically design, manage and streamline customized workflows across an organization.
At server level it retrieves the relevant data from e.g. a CRM system and integrates it with an agent’s workflow. The application level adapters interface through modern APIs with latest applications and at the integration level it enables design of meaningful workflows in a swift and flexible manner.
By partnering with leading technology and solution developers, and by co-creating with these partners, NEC adds a whole array of state-of-the-art applications that support and enhance its Business ConneCT delivery platform. The UNIVERGE Integration Platform takes care of adapters that provide the API’s to flexibly include these.
Examples of these applications are Social media integration including WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, Salesforce integration, flexible intelligent real-time wallboards, redundancy solutions ensuring high availability, browsing support and co-browsing applications and agent/team collaboration.
Smart Workstream Design
Deploying UNIVERGE Business ConneCT in combination with UNIVERGE Integration Platform enables an organization to become best in class in serving its customers. It enables to easily design and guide omni-channel customer journeys, off-load live agents by integrating webchat, chatbots and AI and gets the most out of live agents by integrating their skill set in the different call flows and providing them timely with all details of the customer’s history.
Agents are provided with a personalized dashboard through which they can access all vital data and applications and work from any location, empowered for efficient, powerful and consistent customer interaction. A very enjoyable journey for all parties.