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From Smart to Genius: Six Technologies to Make Your Contact Center Brilliant

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When it comes to determining the difference between a smart contact center and a genius one, the distinction is simple—intelligent contact centers use customer data to make their brands psychic. These organizations translate the physical and digital signals that customers send and respond to with personalized interactions that anticipate individual needs, enabling associates to build relationships and cultivate loyalty. Here are six technologies to help you deliver mastermind experiences and psychic service for each unique customer.

1. Multichannel Service Delivery Platforms for Everywhere Customers

Contact centers were traditionally built around telephone technologies, but today customer-facing employees need to interact with customers across all communication channels. Multichannel service delivery platforms offer the most integrated portfolio of customer service technologies in a single application, allowing service employees to continually serve customers without navigating across different technology systems—even when the customer switches communication channels. Ideally, these systems will integrate your company’s customer phone call routing platform, CRM software, customer data systems, and knowledge sources into one infrastructure that offers a single, comprehensive view of the customer through an easy-to-use interface.

2. Web Self-Service Technologies for Those DIY Customers

Today’s customers prefer to find answers online, so companies are investing in self-service Web technologies. These question-to-answer matching technologies go beyond static FAQ pages and deliver much more than reams of search results. They recognize and accept natural query language and deliver a single correct answer even when a question is worded in many different ways. Plus, they allow users to ask questions in conversational language, “seeing through” human grammatical and spelling mistakes to match questions with answers. Some even work with texting language and abbreviations. Such systems should provide a consistent answer message across all primary interaction points. 

3. Mobile Service Applications for Today’s Digital Customers

A recent Harris Interactive survey report stated that 68 percent of respondents think companies that only offer 1-800-number customer support seem outdated, and 86 percent expect brands to offer multiple customer service options. Furthermore, 70 percent of adults say that mobile apps are important for companies to offer. It’s clear: Companies that offer flexible service, and make it easy for digital customers to access service from a mobile application, will stand out from the pack. Work to incorporate mobile apps that simplify the customer experience alongside the employee and enterprise experience in order to establish one cohesive approach.

4. Customer Feedback Technologies that Listen to Those Who Matter Most

Voice of the customer technologies deploy social media listening tools and customer satisfaction surveys to capture customer thoughts, expectations, likes, and dislikes. These tools aggregate customer feedback from multiple communication channels including phone calls, websites, mobile applications, and social media channels. Then, they consolidate the input and use it to segment brand promoters and detractors, and help analyze the drivers of customer loyalty and dissatisfaction. Effective voice of the customer programs close the loop by helping companies act on the feedback they collect, revealing customer sentiment and trends, while also boosting organizational responsiveness.

5. Customer Data Analytics for Smarter Sales and Marketing 

Business intelligence tools analyze customer data to interpret buying behavior patterns for specific customer segments, which empowers companies to provide more personalized and relevant sales and marketing interactions. Einstein-smart sales and marketing engines use data to determine each customer’s activity, intent, financial value, and preferred communication channel. Then, the technology dynamically generates content and custom-tailored campaigns based on each other’s profile. As it executes marketing campaigns, more and more customer data is collected and analyzed, thus improving your strategy over time. Those determined to build their own solution must look to a partner that will effectively bridge analytical gaps so you may go to market quickly and act on opportunities.

6. Social Learning Tools Leverage Collective Intelligence for Service Employees

Many contact centers are replacing their multi-tier service structures with collaborative work environments that allow service employees to tap into co-workers’ and collective intelligence to solve a wider variety of customer problems. The central player in this type of contact center is a social collaboration platform that unites learning philosophies, training, and support resources—all in a cloud technology solution. Contact center learning technologies should encourage collaboration and empower users to rate content and offer feedback. Such systems should also support real-time updates to training and knowledge materials, including the game-based, video, and mobile training solutions that make learning truly engaging and accessible.