What is Digital Engagement in Cloud-Based Customer Service?

Cloud technology has transformed call centers, and it has produced some better results. The flexible cloud model has made it a lot easier for the call centers to introduce new ways to interact with the customers leading to higher productivity. They have become a digital platform with new-age solutions that have taken customer experience to a new high.

Cloud-based call centers are also called virtual call centers. Virtual call centers are coming to mainstream utilizing human skills as well as the cloud infrastructure to its best possibility. And in addition to this, virtual call centers are also making purposeful customer engagement that is taking a form of digital engagement now.

And lately, with the support of cloud technology, digital engagement has shifted its focus to a more holistic picture by covering various touchpoints spread across different channels such as voice, video, text, and social media. Such digital transformation has also led call centers to focus more on analytics and introduce new technologies like voice assist and bots.

Ideally, the innovations and changes in the call center environment have taken a digital route to help its customers. However, there are certain prerequisites for it. Some essential steps that are necessary for making a digital transformation.

• Planning for the growth of customer interaction methods.
• Measuring the efficiency of the current call center activities and take notice of how new trends can enhance it in a better way.
• Understanding the untapped capabilities of the cloud and introduce them to call centers.
• Customer data analytics and performance management to evaluate the productivity and bring in the necessary changes

Digitization and Customer Touchpoints

Customer touchpoints are those points of contact that customers go to from the very start to finish. Now, with every handheld device is equipped with high-speed internet, and this scenario has made the customer contact ratio much easier, steady, and frequent.

By definition, a touchpoint is any time a potential customer comes in contact with your brand. It includes the time span between the decision making to post-purchase services. Now with the passage of time and growth of new technologies, call centers have not remained the only point of contact for the customers now.

Various other touchpoints are making the current scenario more result-oriented and focused on improving the customer experience. Most of the businesses are using chat and multi-level IVRs to interact with the customers and provide them with some immediate solution.

The ways of businesses interacting with customers have changed completely, and so has the volume of customers who seek online assistance. Customer expectations have risen too. A gap in the demand and supply of support leads to a higher dissatisfaction level among customers.

A report suggests that impatience among the customers has only grown with time and, it has led the customers towards immediacy and a tendency of using various options to get the intended results.

According to this article from Mckinsey & Co., certain actions are critical to managing the customer experience journey. And these actions equally comply with the new era of digital transformation. One should ensure these points before proceeding.

• Putting oneself into the customer's shoes and try to understand their customer journey.
• Understand how customers navigate through the touchpoints as they move through the journey.
• Understand their needs in every part of the journey.
• Strike off those efforts that are not delivering results.
• Set the priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.
• Understand the issues and redesign the journey for a better end to end experience.

Designing a Customer Journey

A customer journey involves every interaction with the company, product, or services. In this customer journey, every single experience counts because it creates the overall perception of the customer.

Designing a customer journey is equally important as it is all about a well-designed series of touchpoints that customers follow to resolve common issues. In the contemporary scenario, it is essential to understand how customers are using various channels to find the right solution in less time.

While designing a customer journey, call centers have an important role to play as the customer service takes part in the customer journey with a powerful impact. Customers talk about their issues, needs, and what they are looking for while contacting the call centers.

Call centers provide some invaluable insights for defining the customer journey, identify their pain points, and start collaboration across different processes to provide them with a seamless experience.

The touchpoints vary, individually, but data suggests that there could be some points where customer care falls behind in delivering the right service at the right time. And that calls for transformation, the introduction of some changes that address this situation well and efficiently.

Wave of Transformation

Gone are the days when call centers were just meant to connect with the customers for inbound and outbound activities such as product pitch or customer support. Now, with cloud technology, the call centers are used for customer engagement and make products or services more accessible to the customers.

But considering today’s scenario, it has become far more essential to give the customer interaction methodology a boost by making it easier and reliable on mobiles with the help of various applications.

In addition to this, the evolution of call centers has also taken care of new and emerging channels such as social media, chat, messaging, and many more. Because customers are available on these channels 24x7 and seek a response, register complaints and, provide feedback on the product or service, they are currently using.

The Boston Consulting Group experimented with different technologies in the call centers for 18 months and has produced a result that suggests that after introducing new techniques that reduced call time to a substantial level.

Some of these technologies are as follows,

Voice Biometric Authentication

In this technology, a computer program verifies the customer voice to ensure customer identity. So, when the call connects, the agent doesn’t need to spend any time to take the customers through verification scripts. It also ensures security because the customer doesn’t have to speak the password or any personal data to the agent over the phone.

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing is a comparatively new technology in the call centers. It is used to immediately understand the intent or motive of the customer. This information is used to improve the customer experience by helping the customers with the exact solution what they are looking for. NLP measures the sense of urgency behind the customer query as well.

Smart Routing

It gets the right customers connected to the right set of agents and helps in resolving the issues by customer attributes and the type of query. Once the customers are assigned to the right agents, satisfaction is guaranteed.

Robotic Process Automation

RPA saves time in every call up to 10 to 30 seconds. With the help of such automation, the details related to the customers have filled in automatically, and it saves the time of agents to focus on the customer service only.

According to an analysis done by BCG, once these technologies were followed for 18 months perpetually then, it reduced the call time by 35%. The above picture depicts that new processes reduced the time involved earlier in the same process to a substantial level.

Cloud is The Key

All the telephony infrastructure, including call routing and CRM, stays on the cloud. Once a process is on the cloud, its accessibility and scalability become unquestionable. Cloud is equally helpful in making the contemporary business scenarios where the interactions between customers and agents take place economic, reliable, and efficient. And it has led to more adoption of cloud technology by organizations.

According to this report from IDG, 73% of the organizations have at least one application on cloud and the rest 17% are planning to do the switch in the next 12 months.

For businesses, every customer is unique, and that’s why the role of analytics and performance management is quite essential. They help in evaluating the entire customer journey to identify the issues that cause some friction in it.

All in all, every idea converges to the data and its deduction to some meaningful results. These deduced insights help in understanding customer behavior and lead to designing solutions that address a particular customer need with a perfect solution.

Similarly, digital engagement has influenced the customer support environment today, and that’s how omnichannel platforms came into existence to provide the best solutions with the perfect utilization of the available resources.

In an omnichannel world, the role of call centers has emerged to be very crucial because it has brought all the channels into one to make it effortless and seamless for the customers.

Higher Customer Expectations with Digitization

Customer expectations have risen because of the increasing number of touchpoints and their wide usage. Fulfilling these expectations lead to higher customer satisfaction. Most of the companies today have come to this conclusion that customer satisfaction level is a key indicator while measuring the overall business success.

An intense focus on a channel or a specific touchpoint results in speedy progress to match up with the changing customer landscape.

Here, it is necessary to mention that a digital way of working is open for experimentation. And one can design a completely new customer journey that no one has ever taken.

The possibility of introducing a completely new customer journeys makes digitization more unique in terms of understanding customers and tapping a solid customer base.

In the coming future, a higher number of companies across various industries will have interactions through different digital channels. These channels are also making the customers more inclined towards self-help ideas such as multi-level IVRs, and bots.

It is also true that some earlier call center processes have lost their relevance because of the digital engagement, but by doing so, they have prepared themselves better for the contemporary as well as challenges in the future.