Customer Engagement

Customer Service in 2013 and Beyond

A new, powerful channel, such as the video-phone, might be useful in a successful market segmentation strategy, where your top customers have video access. It’s also not hard to imagine that company Web sites in 2013 may begin to look like today’s Second Life, where return site visitors use avatars and walk around the company Web site looking for useful information and having cyber-meetings with customer service reps.

Over the next several years, the role of an agent in the world of social media communications could shift dramatically — which, in turn, could change the composite of the types of staff organizations hire.

As multichannel communications grow, businesses also must consider the issues of integration and coordination. What if one channel is down — will that put greater strain on another? What are the contingency plans? Tight integration, both technically and from a management perspective, among the multiple communication channels will become even more essential. Consumers are interested in a seamless experience. They simply don’t care that your Web site is temporarily offline, or that your live agents are only available until 5 p.m. Processes must be in place that can nearly seamlessly move the customer from one channel to another — giving them the options they want at the time they need them.

5. The Power and Impact Inherent in Analytics

Regardless of which channel customers choose to do business, a key technology impacting the contact center now and into the future is analytics. Interactions with the contact center are recorded, and a percentage of those recordings are monitored and reviewed for quality assurance.

All of this data can be correlated to create a single view of a customer or customer segment. Analytics that mine call recordings and other customer service interactions can reveal emerging trends, consumer complaints, key topics of discussion among an organization’s customer base, competitive insights and so much more. Businesses can find out which customers are calling, emailing, chatting or visiting a store, along with how many of those inquiries are related to problems and basic customer service issues, for example.

While knowing what is happening is important, finding out why it’s happening so corrective action can be taken is vital to the life blood of the organization. Workforce optimization solutions that include speech analytics, data analytics and customer surveys are well positioned to play an increasingly strategic role now and into the future.

Taken further, by connecting existing business intelligence systems that monitor consumer buying patterns and demand levels with intelligence gathered through customer interactions, organizations can gain new insights with a 360-degree, holistic view.

That’s powerful information that companies can use to hyper-target and market to specific segments based on their collective needs, drive research and development efforts based on customer wants, and develop business practices that are driven by and aligned to direct customer input. This potential sharing of data and integration between contact center analytics with Web analytics and business intelligence tools has the potential to fundamentally change the ways that companies do business and interact with their customers.

Bill Durr is the Principal Global Solutions Consultant for Verint Witness Actionable Solutions.  William.Durr@verint.com

– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, www.contactcenterpipeline.com

 

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