Gone are the days when businesses could get away with poor customer service. In the not-so-distant past, customer service was largely a cost center. A cost of doing business that didn’t add much value to the brand. In fact, it was often neglected – understaffed, underinvested in, and offshored – to the detriment of the brand’s reputation. But the impact of a bad customer service experience was mitigated by the fact that bad experiences couldn’t easily be widely shared. Not like they can now with the ubiquity of the internet and social media.
It’s a whole new world now, and enterprises have learned that a negative interaction with their brand can spread quickly and virally. But more than that, they’ve learned that a great interaction can also spread quickly and virally, and turn their customers into brand advocates and ambassadors. Early adopters of this new paradigm, like Zappos, pioneered customer service as a strategic differentiator.
In this brave new world of rapidly accelerating technology, enterprises of all sizes can architect a customer experience (CX) that pleases their customers, makes them stand out from the competition, and increases brand loyalty, equity, and value. That technology, CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service), keeps them connected to their customers, provides a flexible platform, and gives them insight into their performance benchmarks.
Here are a few tips we’ve learned about how CCaaS can be leveraged to improve your CX:
- Meet your customers where they are: The consumerization of cloud technology coupled with the availability of cost effective broadband and mobile connectivity has changed the way people connect with each other. Users want enterprises to adopt these same communications patterns, letting them communicate with customer service through new channels like SMS, chat, and email. They want to pick and choose the channels they want to use, but they want continuity of the conversation. The power of omnichannel CCaaS platforms is that they let the user choose how and when they engage, and that yields a much better experience.
- Make information more accessible: CCaaS and the advent of AI-based chatbots and interactive virtual assistants makes it possible for an enterprise to give customers quick access to the answers to commonly asked questions. And the integration of customer information databases like CRMs and other LoB (line of Business) applications with customer data with Caller ID and omnichannel communication channels make it possible for that information to be personalized and specific to the user that is looking for information. By making this more accessible, users get what they need faster, and businesses using this technology can minimize the strain on resources for issues that can be handled without a live person.
- Improve performance with empirical benchmarks: Much like we say about Baseline IT, our technology inventory and management tool, what gets measured gets managed and what gets managed gets optimized. CCaaS platforms give enterprises actionable intelligence about how their customers are trying to reach them, why, and how their teams and technology stack are performing in their mission to support those inquiries. This data is invaluable in resource planning and allocation, workflow architecture, and future-planning for their technology investment.
We’re just scratching the surface about CX and how technology can enable the kind of interaction that a customer will praise and share. If you’d like to learn more about CX, CCaaS, and how the two complement each other to propel your brand’s value and advantage in the marketplace, contact Amplix today!
