How Customer Service Can Get Onboard with Digital Transformation

We live in the age of the always-on consumer. A wealth of information, resources, and services are now available with just a few taps on a keyboard or touchscreen. So customers – whether they’re shopping for business or pleasure – have become more demanding.

That means businesses need to deliver better solutions and services, and do that faster. That’s no easy feat. The good news is that businesses can put software and connected technology to work for them as well.

As you probably already know, that’s what digital transformation is all about. Depending on the company and department, DX means different things to different people. But it’s all about delivering better business and customer outcomes.

And for call center, contact center, and other customer service operations, artificial intelligence, the cloud, omnichannel communications, and workforce management are key enabling technologies.

AI can be used in a variety of ways. It can help support chatbots so businesses don’t have to spend as much on human help and customers can get answers more quickly and efficiently.

Artificial intelligence can also come into play to enable businesses to predict what customers will do next, so those businesses can institute procedures to stem customer churn, deliver upsell offers at the ideal time in the customer lifecycle, and ensure they have the products and services ready for customers when they want and need them.

The cloud, meanwhile, can enable call centers to be more distributed. That way, people can work from home or other remote locations. And that gives businesses the ability to select from a broader and potentially more experienced pool of agent candidates.

Plus the cloud allows for better business continuity and disaster recovery, because it creates the potential for agents to work from remote locations if they can’t come in to the call center due to weather, traffic, or other factors.

With the rise of connected technologies and the widespread use of smartphones, many people are now used to communicating via non-voice channels such as email, social media, and texting. Omnichannel contact center solutions and strategies now enable businesses to interact with customers and prospects via these various channels based on customer preference and other factors.

Workforce management solutions can also go a long way in helping call centers and contact centers be more efficient, more responsive to their customers, and more open to employee needs. WFM helps these environments more effectively gauge expected call volumes and schedule the agents (with the appropriate skills) to address that demand. And it also can allow agents to make their own scheduling changes and requests, help measure and address adherence, and provide other measurements and capabilities.

Edited by Ken Briodagh