Anand Janefalkar, Founder & CEO of UJET provides some suggestions for Digital Journal readers in terms of developing the business and keeping the customer in mind. UJET is an innovation leader in cloud contact center software.
The suggestions take the form of five steps:
Make it Personal
Continuous product rollouts and enhancements combined with an overly saturated market has made it more challenging than ever for brands to distinguish themselves solely based on their functionality and capabilities. Customers today don’t just look for cutting-edge features, they want to feel like the brands they love not only value their business, but value them as an individual.
Make sure you have a support system that can seamlessly integrate into existing tools such as a CRM platform, WFM solutions, reporting and analytics, and more. This not only will increase operational efficiencies, but will make it easy to securely surface key customer information and contextual data to support agents in real-time so they can deliver a more personalized touch when interacting with customers.
Go the Extra Mile
As advancements in areas such as cloud computing, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning, continue, the ability to gather and surface contextual awareness in real-time to support teams will become key aspects of delivering a VIP-like style of customer support.
Imagine an experience where support teams not only help resolve any outstanding issues that you may have, but with the ability to safely access customer profile data such as account information, purchase history, product settings, and more, can proactively provide suggestions or recommendations in order to help customers get the most out of their products and experiences.
Be Responsive
Having customers sit in queues or being placed on hold and rerouted to different support teams or agents is not only incredibly frustrating for customers, but it can substantially impact a contact center’s bottom line.
In order to properly staff support teams and reduce wait times, make sure to not only account for peak hours and busy seasons, but channel-specific staffing as well. For example, customers reaching out via SMS, a web chat, or through social media should have the same experience and response time as those who are calling in.
Meet Them Where They Are
Part of showing your customers that you care involves making it easy for them to reach you, and the easiest way to do this is to meet them where they are. Customers shouldn’t have to maneuver between channels to find the support they need. Instead, brands should make support easily accessible across all channels, platforms, and devices.
Whether a customer is within an app, on the web, or using one or more social media channels, meeting customers where they are creates an experience where brands are going out of their way to connect with the customer, not the other way around.
Let Customers Be Themselves
Think about how you communicate with friends and family? You make calls, send texts, photos, videos, and more. In many cases, numerous multimedia capabilities are used within the same interaction. Yet while the way customers interact with one another has evolved, the way customers interact with brands has remained stagnant.
Create an experience that allows customers to communicate with you in the same way that they communicate with each other. Real-time multimedia sharing and connecting across multiple channels can help create a more natural flow of communication and interaction between brands and customers and helps deliver a one-of-a-kind customer experience that goes above and beyond the competition and makes customers feel unique and special.
