How Can Service Providers Deliver More Contextual Options?

How can service providers deliver more contextual options for consumers?
Patrick Joggerst, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Ribbon Communications

Traditional contact centres are being transformed into modern customer engagement platforms as consumers’ behaviours move more and more to mobile, social, web and cloud. But what does this mean?

Well for many Communications Service Providers (CSPs), traditional toll-free calls to their call centres are the backbone of their business. But many CSPs are now also realising they need their call centre agents to do more than just manage customer experiences through voice calls.

Consumers are happier when their experiences are intuitive, engaging, contextual, simple and more immediate. For example, consider a scenario where a customer buys a new Smart TV but has problems setting it up such as pairing a Bluetooth headset or adding it to their home WiFi network. They will appreciate a means to reach an expert to help troubleshoot much more than having to read through dense set-up procedures.

Wouldn’t it be great therefore if the manufacturer or retailer could offer instant connectivity to an experience centre where any customer questions were routed to an expert and resolved instantly? This is where CSPs have substantial new opportunities to bring better customer experience platforms to their enterprise customers by offering omnichannel, cloud-based, mobile-native, and web-friendly real time experience platforms to market.

These contextual services can now be delivered over the web, including connecting experts in health insurance to consumers with questions regarding their benefits. For example, when a consumer goes to their insurance company’s website to check on a benefit before scheduling a procedure, rather than having to spend time searching and even guessing, with one click on the relevant content section, they can initiate a chat, a voice call or even a video session.

Another example would include medical assistants who can also interact with insurance companies to get their questions answered (on behalf of their patients) in seconds or minutes, versus the slow and complicated back-and-forth associated with emails and other more traditional methods of communications. In real time, multi-party calls can be set up and documents shared to quickly get to the root of the issue and ensure everyone is looking at the same document.

While some may argue that the future of service is self-service, we believe the future of service is delivering tiered services where the consumer has the option of opting for more personal, interactive experiences. Brands understand this, as it is their goal – whether they are selling products or services – to bond consumers to their brands. This includes providing well-trained and well-equipped expert customer service personnel to not only solve problems, but sell more services and simply make the customer’s experience better.

In addition to more satisfied customers, the increased focus on DCX can also enhance the brand and streamline the contextual interactions process. Enterprises can leverage the data collected during the engagement to conduct ‘pattern analysis’. By understanding the reasons behind particular or common problems, it allows for faster responses to these issues and provides companies the ability to identify areas in which design changes or instruction changes need to be implemented to lessen or eliminate the issue.

With real time communications capabilities, including messaging, voice, video, screen sharing, co-browsing and more, CSPs are working with brands and the contact centre business process outsourcing providers to create amazing experiences. This includes embedding Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide instant assistance to agents, making it easier for them to serve customers, provide routing and reporting, all while addressing increasingly complex regulatory requirements. However, compliance in industries where private information is shared or financial transactions are processed is growing, and so having a fully secure set of real time communications solutions is also key.

With DCX being a major focus for companies moving forward, customer experiences in the future will almost certainly improve too. The complexity of these solutions will be hidden from consumers, with sophisticated and intelligent software platforms running in the background, which inform brands on how they can build better products, services, businesses and ultimately better experiences for their customers – all built on loyalty and enabling companies to compete more aggressively by being more engaging.

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